On Wednesday, 20 November 2024, Prof. Dr. Ossi Naukkarinen (Helsinki) gave a guest lecture on the topic “Slow humanities and computerized sciolism”.
The humanities are slow. This is caused by several factors at their core. The humanities often focus on big and complicated themes of history, truth, art and beauty, as well as questions of ethics which requires deep and broad cultural understanding that cannot be achieved quickly; Humanists typically operate with several natural languages they have studied for years; They build very thorough arguments covering numerous points of view; Very practically, reading and producing long texts (monographs are still common) is time-consuming and so is archive work, travelling to original sites and works, and many other practices typical for humanists.
Digital tools, in turn, are fast. Like others, humanists have adopted more and more digital tools and systems since the first steps of Roberto Busa’s Index Thomisticus in the 1940s to the latest versions of large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard. They can process masses of information in a flash and their capacities are still improving. When used wisely, they are very useful and beneficial.
The talk focused on the question of how the unavoidable and positive slowness of the humanities can be preserved and even strengthened in the age of digital technologies. Ossi Naukkarinen argued that if we don’t do that, there is a risk of increasing computerized sciolism, i. e., superficial show of learning. There are already plenty of examples of that. Increasing sciolism means that we learn to process more and more information quicker and quicker with computational tools, do it in a way that looks academically correct, but weaken our own human abilities to produce and assess knowledge needed for a civilized life. Much-needed human abilities can be acquired by learning traditional humanistic skills which require time. We should have the skills and patience to use fast tools slowly. Both academic humanistic education and research as well as memory institutions such as museums and archives play a crucial role in this.
Prof. Dr. Ossi Naukkarinen is Professor for Aesthetics at Aalto University Helsinki (Finnland). He specializes in questions of everyday aesthetics, environmental aesthetics and the nature of aesthetics. Currently he is interested in the possibilities offered by digital humanities. Naukkarinen has published widely in English and Finnish, and his works have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Slovenian.