Humanities Jokes: Digital Humanities in the 21st century

Back in 2012, while reading a really useful book How to find a career with your Humanities degree in 126 days, written by James from selloutyoursoul.com , and "composing" our list of New Year's Resolutions, we discovered a place in London specialising in humanities for business: SHM ltd. A little more transparency, please. We might actually like you. Any Careers page?

 

 

http://www.shm-ltd.co.uk/index.html

So, the jokes.

1. Humanities for Business / Humanities or Business ?

at the University ** Grant Challenge ... sorry, University ** Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction... yeah, right, we get it, another specimen of highfalutin jargon representing the Happy Valley of Higher Education.

The UCL Humanities for Business programme works on various levels... UCL specialists in arts and humanities – lecturers and professors of philosophy, of language and literature, of history, and of the fine arts – bring ground-breaking ways of thinking with real relevance to contemporary commercial and organizational challenges... managing change, creativity and innovation, dehumanization in society and business, and international security. Sessions range in format from seminar groups to lectures(...)

マジ、マジ、 MAJI-desu-ka?

2. Humanities Matter, do they not?

We expected a little more from these guys. Members of the Campaign for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, most of you from University ** , perhaps it is time to update your website, it would be unfair to assume that big fat paychecks landed in your pigeonholes and all of a sudden, nothing else matters... Ooops, the website is gone...

3. Digital Humanities

Oh, we love this. Digital Humanities, a new form of money laundering in the 21st century. Are you a poor graduate? Maybe you should not read this.

Where shall we start from? Here are just a few examples. They all have one thing in common: you just do not know what they are doing.

So, we have got entries from the UK:

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities
Oxford Digital Humanites
Cambridge Digital Humanities
King's College London Digital Humanities

Europe trying to catch up with:

Digital Humanities Deutschland conference 2012
Supporting Digital Humanities conference in Copenhagen 2011

then of course the United States:

Stanford Digital Humanities
Yale Digital Humanities
The Digital Humanities Initiative at Harvard

In Japan there is no other way of winning a grant: whatever you do, good or bad, it has got to be a digital humanities project.

MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) likes to invest. The reports MEXT reads are never independently written, therefore they never really know.

Is it worth investing, who is cashing in, how many insane PhDs and postdocs work for nothing? Which member on the list of project associates is not friends with the project-leader and not in the same age-range? How much does the personal profit of academics increase in times of deep recession for intelligent grads? How many arse-licking PhDs and postdocs are still being illegally sent to the UK and elsewhere for academics to justify the grants they get?

 

Sent even after the British Embassy and the Home Office rejected their visa application, Professor **?

 

What about the global door-in-the-face phenomenon acknowledged by so many young talents, what about the Japanese ever-so-common sexual, academic, and power harassement accepted by young people as the do-shiyo-mo-nai forget-about-it c'est-la-vie one-and-only way to succeed in university? Does MEXT know how much value is wasted, and how much non-value it is unfortunately protecting?

Let us consider some examples of digital humanities mania in Japan (oh, please, do not take it personally !) :

University ** in Kyoto caught the big fish with its grant proposal "Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures" in collaboration with the University of London. Hello, MEXT, anyone, you have not heard yet that there is no such thing as the University of London? Right, so we do not know exactly who is involved, but we are very glad that they are all friends.

University **  Winning Grant Proposal

JSPS & MEXT Digital Humanities COE

MEXT Global COE Program

Digital Humanities @ University ** in Kyoto , Japan

 (official website)

Books are being published. How many Japanese Cultures are there, anyway?

Book: New Directions in Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures

Workshops are being organised.

Digital Humanities Workshop @ University ** (in Japanese)

 

(unavailable in English)

We are so very grateful Digital Humanities is such an active faculty-centred field, a global phenomenon so powerful and so very shy, too shy to ever get involved with anything that really matters, or with anyone who might actually have something to say...

 

4. phdcomics

 

Now seriously, because nobody is taking you seriously if you are in any way involved with the humanities, have a real laugh with Jorge Cham and the famous PHDCOMICS series.

 

© Jorge Cham

http://academia.edu/Academica/Great-Tweets-of-Science



 

© Jorge Cham

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

We hope you had a laugh, humour is an essential tool for survival. Not sure you find it in the academia, though...We do believe Humanities matter. However, we see little progress being made towards those whose bums do not fit between the big bums already seated in the academic Colosseum, and too many of them thrown to the leopards. And oh, dear, how much delight they can take in all those enslaved PhDs and postdocs with no money nor career prospects who just want to teach philosophy but somehow ended up in the hypogeum...