There’s a certain allure to the elegance of mathematics, the precision of the hard sciences. That much is undeniable. But does the appeal mean that quantitative approaches are always germane? Hardly—and I doubt anyone would argue the contrary. Yet, over and over, with alarming frequency, researchers and scholars have felt the need to take clear-cut, scientific-seeming approaches to disciplines that have, until recent memory, been far from any notions of precise quantifiability. And the trend is an alarming one. —Maria Konnikova, “Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one.” Counterpoint: the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities is packed with interesting reads that dig deeper than the cherry-picked examples offered by Konnikova.
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There’s a certain allure to the elegance of mathematics, the precision of the hard sciences. That much is undeniable. But does the appeal mean that quantitative approaches are always germane? Hardly—and I doubt anyone would argue the contrary. Yet, over and over, with alarming frequency, researchers and scholars have felt the need to take clear-cut, scientific-seeming approaches to disciplines that have, until recent memory, been far from any notions of precise quantifiability. And the trend is an alarming one.

—Maria Konnikova, “Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one.”

Counterpoint: the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities is packed with interesting reads that dig deeper than the cherry-picked examples offered by Konnikova.

Source: wp.me