So not a historian, so take this fwiw, but...history as one of the social sciences? who came up with this shit? D: okay, so I'm biased because I'm in media studies, but a decent argument can be made that history *is* media studies (what are we studying but people *as mediated* through their sources? [as opposed to archeology/w. artefacts]?)
Idk, but I'm a bit iffy at the inherent devaluing of the humanities here. Humanities, to me, are about the art of interpretation -- and it's always interpretation -- and what is history but taking a cacophony of voices and trying to manufacture sense out of it for our contemporary minds? So I am SO with you on narratives. That is what history does -- interpreting media/sources can't be an exact science. At its heart history is about narrative approximations, to me (yes, using the methods of social sciences, but that doesn't make it one.) Idk *helpless hands* and that's valuable. That's necessary. I wish people would stop dismissing the humanities because they're not ~hard science~ :(
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ahorbinski's journal
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Date: 2011-01-19 10:41 (UTC)Idk, but I'm a bit iffy at the inherent devaluing of the humanities here. Humanities, to me, are about the art of interpretation -- and it's always interpretation -- and what is history but taking a cacophony of voices and trying to manufacture sense out of it for our contemporary minds? So I am SO with you on narratives. That is what history does -- interpreting media/sources can't be an exact science. At its heart history is about narrative approximations, to me (yes, using the methods of social sciences, but that doesn't make it one.) Idk *helpless hands* and that's valuable. That's necessary. I wish people would stop dismissing the humanities because they're not ~hard science~ :(