empathy

“The world is on fire,” is, by now, a familiar phrase. It is often used when we feel overwhelmed about escalations in geopolitics or in response to the catastrophic effects of climate change. Humanists are human, including the “digital humanists”, and the weight of crises is a reminder to making our scholarly work “count”. In Jo Guldi’s recent visit to the Sawyer Seminar, this desire to do meaningful work was a consistent topic of conversation. We have touched upon questions of making archives public in other visits, such as that of Richard Marciano in the Fall. During this most recent visit however, we spent more time discussing what it means to “democratize” information. For example, how making records “public” relates to the goal of making information more “democratic.” Personal and Professional One argument against treating publically available records as a solution to the problem of democratizing information is the fact that even available information is not guaranteed to reach the “public” or be legible to most. Fortunately, contextualizing and creating a narrative from dispersed evidence across a variety of records is a skill with which humanists are well prepared. What role does activism play in the articulation research stakes within scholarly endeavors? While scholars may also identify as activists, there is a tension between the role of an activist and that of the researcher — concerns about how enthusiasm might affect the quality of one’s work. Scholarly rigor and passion can seem at odds, particularly valuing dispassionate rationality over emotionally grounded arguments. Nevertheless, extended scholarly engagement Read More