On Method: Patterns and Interpretations in the Humanities
The Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS), Humanomics Research Center and the Center for Computing and Communication (CCC) would like to invite you to a talk given by: Professor Rens Bod Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam.
How empirical are the humanities? For over a century, empiricism has almost exclusively been attributed to the sciences. The sciences search for patterns and laws, while the humanities aim at understanding unique events. The sciences try to explain the world, while the humanities aim at interpreting it. These oppositions are much older than C.P. Snow’s well-known two cultures debate; they can be traced back to Antiquity.
From at least the third century BC onwards, there have been two kinds of practices in philology, historiography, poetics, linguistics, the study of art, and the study of music. On the one hand people searched for patterns and regularities, while on the other hand they searched for interpretations and the exceptional. Neither approach has disappeared from the humanities since then.
In my talk I will sketch the longue durée of the pattern-seeking tradition in the humanities and argue that interpretations are not in opposition to pattern-seeking but are often constructed on the patterns found. The common wisdom that the humanities are moving towards science when they search for patterns is mistaken. Instead, the search for patterns has been a continuous line in the humanities from Antiquity onwards.
About
Rens Bod is professor of Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He investigates the humanities from both computational and historical perspectives. His historical work focuses on the comparative history of the humanities from a world-wide perspective, and his most recent monograph is A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Read more
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