Monday, October 24, 2011

Universities Link Humanities With Science and Technology

By Daleim Nust


They're getting free iPads. Students who participate in a new honors program in digital cultures and creativity at a university in Maryland this fall have been promised the tablet computers as part of the program's launch. This same institution also offers courses in electronic literature and new media that covers such areas as online books and electronic book readers.

"People go into humanities because they don't like technology, but today you really can't separate them," Program Director Matthew Kirschenbaum was quoted as saying in a July edition of the university's student newspaper, DiamondbackOnline. At this same institution, an institute for technology in the humanities works to create and preserve electronic literature, digital games and virtual worlds. The institute claims its home to an international group devoted to writing, publishing and reading electronic literature. With the computer science and English departments, the institute has provided Book 2.0 students a prototype of an electronic reading device. Its audio archives include discussions related to the project as well as to mobile apps that support children's storytelling and a Smithsonian Art Museum alternate reality game. Organizations on and off college and university campuses, in fact, tie the humanities with technology as well as areas such as science.

The humanities are a part of the liberal arts. The website for a university in Utah reports that liberal arts students overall tend to have more difficulty and less success in their job search than others. Often, that's because liberal arts students don't articulate their career goals, the university's website notes.

Earning a humanities degree or majoring in a foreign language can actually help with an array of careers, information on the Utah university website report. Most humanities degree recipients at this institution in 2007 actually went into business and finance and education at the K-12 level, followed by the legal profession. Most Asian and Near Eastern Languages majors there entered business and finance fields, followed by management and the legal profession.

"The humanities elicit and exercise ways of thinking that help us navigate the world we live in", National Humanities Center President and Director Geoffrey Galt Harphan wrote in a 2009 edition of The Chronicle. Harphan suggested that studies in the humanities could have helped predict human behavior as it related to lenders, borrowers, the stock market and more that got the country into an economic crisis. "When we read a novel, watch a play or a film, listen to a concerto or read a historical novel, we're not just attending to the moment, but forming expectations about what will come next", he wrote.

Degrees in the humanities, many agree, help students develop skills in communication, problem solving, research and analysis. An English professor who serves on a Council for the Humanities board in an Inside Higher Education opinion piece suggested that graduate studies in humanities train students for work beyond teaching and research assistance. He proposed that humanities departments, some of which offer courses in ethics, values and aesthetics, consider the value of having professional "humanists" in government, non-profit associations, business or even the military.

An engineering college at a Connecticut university this fall plans to launch a bachelor's degree in sustainability that includes studies in the humanities, according to a recent article in the Connecticut Business News Journal. The degree offering takes a holistic approach, its website suggests. Classes are to include global solutions to sustainability, research methods in sustainability and contemporary issues of art and the environment, the Business News Journal noted.




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