On Nov. 14, Kate Elkins presented a talk on her work “What is Digital Humanities 3.0?” Seventeen faculty, staff and community members were in attendance. The talk was based on her work designing and offering her course “Programming Humanity,” which she co-taught with Visiting Instructor of Humanities Jon Chun. In the course, students paired their understanding of key concepts like data, probabilistic programming and artificial intelligence with lively debate surrounding social issues such as biased data, predictive policing and unemployment.
Elkins presented a view of the historical stages of the digital humanities, from a 1.0 version heavily based on digitizing analog materials, to a 2.0 version which concentrated on distributing, sharing, and curating that material, through a 2.5 version which introduced interactive experiences with digital information, including visualizations and mapping, to her vision of a digital humanities 3.0 for the liberal arts, in which an integrative, interdisciplinary approach prepares students to solve complex problems of the day.
Elkins addressed some of the critiques of the digital humanities, generally finding them valid but arguing that they can and should be successfully addressed in the liberal arts context. For example, it is true that “tools are not a discipline”, but that only underscores the need for students to learn both the humanistic analytic skills to ask meaningful questions, and a variety of technical skills to approach those questions from different angles.
Elkins has received Kenyon’s National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship to establish a digital humanities initiative at Kenyon, and we look forward to continuing to partner with her on these efforts.