BEYOND THE TALE OF THE 'TWO CULTURES': FILLING THE GAP BETWEEN ALGORITHMS AND INTERPRETATION BEYOND THE TALE OF THE 'TWO CULTURES': FILLING THE GAP BETWEEN ALGORITHMS AND INTERPRETATION
BEYOND THE TALE OF THE 'TWO CULTURES': FILLING THE GAP BETWEEN ALGORITHMS AND INTERPRETATION

Summary/Abstract: In the late 1940s, Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest, conceived a computer tool allowing researchers to navigate within the massive corpus of Aquinas's works. The project, called Index Thomisticus, was the setting out of a very fruitful application of digital technologies in linguistics and literary analysis, generating a considerable epistemological optimism that catalyzed the formation of a broad epistemic field, today known as the field of Digital Humanities. However, recent findings show that Digital Humanities are still far from being a unified field, able to harbor new insights into human culture. Of course, digital tools have penetrated nearly all humanists’ research phases, but there are still strong incongruences between these two areas. One of the most common explanations of this mismatch points to the so called mutual opacity between the humanistic disciplines and the realm of technoscience, a line of division already outlined in the late nineteenth century and made famous by Charles P. Snow in his highly influential talk, subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the scientific Revolution (1959).Our intervention aims to move beyond this apparent antithesis. The core argument is that the division between humanities and technoscience has to be broken down into two distinct levels. The first one concerns the exclusionary structure of the digital field, while the second encompasses the circulation and the institutional valuation of knowledge in Humanities. The talk will be organized in 3 major steps. First, as already discussed, we will deal with the constitution of the epistemic field of Digital Humanities, mainly after 1990, trying to understand who is in and who is out. The second step will try to find out what are the institutional obstacles in digitalizing the humanistic research. Finally, the paper will end with some concrete suggestions in order to overcome the hindrances between the Humanities and the digital techniques.

• Details
• Contents