CaSTA: the closing.
Whew, that was grand. Just one thing about the closing panel discussion, while it’s fresh in my mind.
This year’s CaSTA was billed as “a joint computer science and humanities computing conference.” And it was! And [we saw that] it was good. Of the five keynote speakers, three were humanists and two – computer scientists. The final discussion was called “Humanities Computing Science??”.
William Arms, in his remarks during the panel, said that during the conference a word was frequently used that isn’t generally used in his usual [computer-science] circles. That word – knowledge. He, and just about everyone at the panel, said that what they primarily want from the “other side” is dialogue.
In light of that, what I’d like to see in this continuing dialogue is a bit of discussion of the word science. As it’s been used lately (in the last, what, 200 years?), it implies “HARD.” Humanities implies “soft.” That’s a major point of contention.
But given that “science” pretty much means “knowledge,” should we revisit our use of the word?