On the Design of the Humanities

摘要

The work of the humanities can be difficult to discern. To the uninitiated, its product may seem like a featureless and opaque wall of text. But understanding the humanities means recognizing that words are its chief tools, activities, and output. Whereas bench scientists might conduct experiments in a laboratory, engineers might test structures or systems on computers, and interaction designers might study the behavior of users and write up the results, humanists perform their practice with words from beginning to end. Humanistic scholars ask questions like their counterparts in other disciplines, but they do not seek to answer them in the everyday sense. Instead, someone might raise a question to ask other questions, to frame various ways in which the question might be investigated by others in the future, or to demonstrate that we really should be asking a different question. Similarly, problems are not identified to be solved, but rather to help organize and clarify the investigation of a particular constellation of details, relationships, and historical conditions. Influenced by a principle of inspiration rather than reproducibility or repeatability, scholars in the humanities deploy strategies such as metaphor, analogy, contradiction, silence, and seduction to provoke their audiences. The success of these tactics is consequently difficult to gauge with the metrics of productivity that have been developed for the scientific disciplines. Indeed, how might metaphor be measured? Who benefits from conversation, and where is its deliverable? What is the timeline for inspiration or transformation? The stakes here are great: If humanistic research cannot be registered as eventful by the prevailing infrastructures of assessment, it runs the risk of being marginalized or even erased as inconsequential.