Humanities News

Quantifying Digital Humanities

Melissa Terras, Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for the Digital Humanities and 4Humanities coordinator, has gathered some statistics about the digital humanities and turned them into an infographic, which can be found at the UCLDH Flickr account and blog. The infographic shows the present extent of the Digital Humanities, measured according to a variety […]

Choose Humanities

Britain’s New College of the Humanities has recently published research showing that 60% of the UK’s leaders have humanities, arts, or social science degrees, according to the Guardian. The study, entitled Choose Humanities, reviewed leaders across a broad range of fields in the UK, including FTSE 100 CEOs, MPs, vice chancellors of Russell Group universities, […]

New Approach to Defending the Value of the Humanities

In a recent piece in Inside Higher Ed, professors Paul Jay and Gerald Graff review some of the most recent contributions to the conventional wisdom on the current crisis in the humanities, outlining the divide between “traditionalists” and “revisionists,” both of which argue that “the humanities should resist our culture’s increasing fixation on a practical, […]

Danish Business Academy’s Report on the Social Sciences and the Humanities

In September of this year, the Danish Business Academy (DEA) wrote a position paper on improving the integration of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in the European Commission’s future framework for research and innovation (Horizon 2020). This framework emphasizes the Grand Societal Challenges – which include global warming, energy, an aging population, and public […]

Whither the Humanities? Three articles on the humanities today

The latest issue of Oxford Today features three different perspectives on the global humanities crisis. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in an interview with Richard Lofthouse entitled “Not for profit,” weighs in on the importance of the American liberal arts tradition. Nussbaum claims that this tradition’s combination of public and private funding, a robust tradition of academic […]

Steve Jobs on the Humanities

With the tragic passing of Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary co-founder, the humanities have lost one of its most articulate advocates. Jobs often ended presentations standing in front of a slide displaying two street signs: “Liberal arts” and “Technology.”  “We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he would explain,” to be […]