How can you establish the relevance of studying humanities for today and also for future?

While talking about the profoundness of humanities, we must not close our eyes to the fast changing as well omnipresent scientific and technological renaissance around every corner of this globe. No one denounces these scientific and technological developments. Everyone knows that today’s world is digitized. Digitization is not a fancy, it is a need. But if the human culture is also digitized, an intrinsic problem, in the context of its complexity and scale, will loom large on our society. Human culture is, as on record, historically specific, multilingual, highly ambiguous and geographically dispersed, which all together make digitization of human culture impossible, if not also expensive.

However, study of humanities is so pervasive that a critical analysis of information needs to be understood, both contextually and specifically in its artifacts. A huge amount of multimedia content is needed for paying due regards to this. Many research laboratories are brooding over the massive multimedia contents like audios, visuals, moving images, text and still images. Here is the need of the contributions from the scholars of humanities for creating the meaning, establishing the communication, manipulating and perceiving the context.

The search engines and the information world

It will be childish if you need to be taught about “efficiency of key word” for your search engines. It will not be wrong to anticipate that even a child in the womb knows it today. Now-a-days a web designer spends a substantial amount of his time in incorporating the appropriate key word for his client’s website-----who supplements his gesture?-----It is the linguist who knows the applicability of the word. Here the linguists supplies the most needed ingredient to the web designer and makes the importance of the effectiveness of the website in the ranking of the search engine. See the difference of viewing the situation in this juncture, the search engine will enlist as much as possible about the information related to the key word punched. The scholar of humanities will see how many people around the world fancies or patronizes the concept he is searching for!!!

If you can’t ignore the ambience of science and technology, you can’t ignore the invariableness of humanities

If you study philosophy, history and literature, you will come to know the influence of science to have impacted on the lives of human beings. To know the magnanimity of science you need to study humanities because shaping the society either negatively or positively is not the solo actions of science and technology; it is obviously the acceptance and implementation on humanity. No scientist will ignore or boycott the social factors pervading human needs.

Further more, there are some ambiguities that humanities deal with the values while science not only deals with the facts, it begets the facts too. To refer to Robert Young, “Medicines, Technology and Science are never value neutral, they are undoubtedly the embodiments of values of different programs, procedures, artifacts, therapies, things and theories.” He furthered to say that “science is the part of culture; while culture gets emancipated by humanities.” But one caution, the term “humanities” should not be mistaken as ‘humanism’, which of course means a particular philosophical belief, nor should it be diluted with the term “humanitarianism”, because it means social reform or charitable works.

To sum it up, if we study humanities, we can foster the in-depth understanding of varied ethnicity, gender, class and race.  Nobody in this world can ignore the lights of these burning candles.

Today’s civilization needs the confluence of each and every gamut of these constituents of civilization. The world is taking interests on digital humanities.

The concept is growing day by day. The Digital Humanities Conferences are the annual features since 1989. The universities are being funded massively for various researches on this profound stream or faculties of humanities. MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities had celebrated the successive tenth anniversary in the same year 2009, when IATH (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) celebrated their 17th anniversary.

Many other well known universities are upbeat with their academic researches in the studies of digital humanities. The institutes are King’s College, StanfordCollege, DukeCollege and UCLACollege in London. The funding institutions are also realizing the importance of further studies on the subject and that is why Arts & Humanities Research Council, National Endowment for the Humanities, Council on Library and Information Resources and Mellon Foundations are funding abundantly in the studies related to humanities. All these funding agencies and institutions encourage the universities to build up their tools, infrastructures and services to support the studies of humanities in this world of digital environments. A sad part, like all the burning candles have their darkness at the bottom---digital scholarships are still a far cry in the studies of humanities. That is why all the conferences highlight about the promotions, tenure and publications of the research findings of digital humanities scholars.

Yet, let us be optimistic and believe that the toil of the scholars will never be wasted. Studying and learning humanities cannot remain within the universities, it is undoubtedly true that the next 100 years will see the above citation to be relevant and meaningful.