Humanities & Social Science
Dear Humanities and the Social Sciences,
We invite you to attend the Visual Literacy & Effective Display of Quantitative Data seminar, April 7, 2010, Nielson Browsing Room, 4:00-5:30 p.m. If you are tempted to say that quantitative data is of no interest to you then, please, consider our research inside your disciplines:
We use numbers to study ourselves no matter the discipline. We claim to have control over numbers. We like to extrapolate meaning from patterns in the numbers we study. And yet there are patterns being employed to do such studies, which implies a lack of control on our part. A symbiotic relationship? There are researchers throughout the academy who say that their research suggests that numbers and our use of them give us a look at a deeper consciousness within ourselves. [1]
"In learning how to abstract, we learn that all information is potentially expressible in numbers."[2] That might be so. A poet/artist/computer programmer has for many years used a computer program that turns texts into images to create poster art. [3] In 2006, the program simply assigned a number to every letter of the alphabet. Imagine your poem re-invented as a set of swirls on a page relating to other poem/swirls.
Computers are being used in other ways to examine vast amounts of source data. The National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2009, gave a grant to the Perseus Digital Library Project. "No human being could read every source on Plato, but given the tools we have for searching (a supercomputer), we can now start to design an environment where you could ask who is talking about Plato and summarize what they say across ten different languages."[4] Researchers plan to "branch beyond Greek and Latin works and start providing the same services (cataloguing) for Arabic texts."
A possible love/hate relationship with numbers plays out in the English department (everywhere). An English professor, Franco Moretti, is pursuing a quantitative method for studying literature, "a text-free literary scholarship."[5]
Philosophers and anthropologists ask why most cultures have a counting system based on 10 while a few others have a system based on 2? What exactly is being given primacy either way, that is, after we give a nod to biology?
Shakespeare didn't invent numeric symbolism but he may have sealed our fate in that we are focused on his three witches in MacBeth, "Loves her by the foot . . . He may not by the yard . . ." from Love's Labor's Lost, eight kings from MacBeth again, or the idea that a cat has nine lives from Romeo and Juliet, and more in our present day thinking.
Would someone, please, tell me why there are Three Wise Men in the Bible or Ten Commandments, five nails in the Cross orfour rivers in the Garden of Eden?
Do you know a single scholar who hasn't had to learn to number tables and figures, format tables and figures, ask how to refer to tables and figures in the text of their manuscript, or seek consultation on when to use a table versus a figure to show a result? And, is it okay to begin a sentence with a numeral? No!
We are interested, too, in numbers that tell us about popular attitudes toward literature: "For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts." The overall rate rose by seven percent.[6]
The Humanities and the Social Sciences have benefited greatly from information that came to each discipline in non-text forms like pie charts, graphs, bars, and lots of figures. And in return, every time, the world benefits from the fact that each discipline has given us interpretations of numbers---interpretations of human behavior and of the environment as a whole---that could only come from historians, philosophers, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, religion and government scholars, and professors of literature.
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Sincerely, Educational Technology Services, Smith College |
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