Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
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Helle Porsdam
Helle Porsdam is Professor of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where she teaches American history as well as the culture and history of human rights. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University, has been a Liberal Arts Fellow twice at the Harvard Law School, an Arcadia Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study, Munich. Among her books:Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999),From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009),Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity and Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations: Connecting People Across Cultures and Traditions , which she edited for Edward Elgar in 2006 and 2012 respectively. She is the project leader of a HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area, ESF) project on copyright, creativity and cultural heritage institutions (2010–2013).
Abstract
In contemporary debates about the pros and cons of digital humanities (DH), there are certain interesting echoes of the famous ``two cultures debate'' – the one started by C.P. Snow in a lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, and followed up by another Cambridge lecture in 1962 by F.R. Leavis. Persons with a background in the arts had, Snow argued, a negative attitude toward the natural/technological sciences which made them unwilling to believe in the good of scientific and technological progress. Countering Snow's lecture, F.R. Leavis claimed that Snow's technological enthusiasm left no room for the more contemplative values that characterize the humanities. The ``two cultures'' debate has been with us ever since. In its current form, the ``two cultures'' controversy concerns relations between digital media and changing cultural interactions. Making it possible to bridge the gap between the ``two cultures'' by integrating quantitative methods into core humanities research, the new media influence both intellectual frameworks for humanities scholarship, and practices of translation, interpretation and mediatisation in relation to cultural encounters. In this article, I hope, by means of revisiting this old debate, to clarify some of the underlying issues.
About the author
Helle Porsdam is Professor of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where she teaches American history as well as the culture and history of human rights. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University, has been a Liberal Arts Fellow twice at the Harvard Law School, an Arcadia Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study, Munich. Among her books: Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009), Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity and Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations: Connecting People Across Cultures and Traditions, which she edited for Edward Elgar in 2006 and 2012 respectively. She is the project leader of a HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area, ESF) project on copyright, creativity and cultural heritage institutions (2010–2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
