The adaptation of humanistic studies to Industry 4.0 and the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) environment that determines the twenty-first century societies constitutes a major epistemological and heuristic challenge. The redefinition of work patterns in humanities is understood in this article in terms of research and social impact, and in particular with regard to the educational system. This article explores the possibilities of innovation ecosystems in the humanities and analyzes the experience of the Living UniLab project developed and conducted at the Complutense University of Madrid between 2015 and 2017. This was a pioneering initiative in the Spanish university as it applies the ecosystem innovation idea to the Geography and History curricula.
Shakespeare scholars have deployed immense resources and inventiveness to use Shakespeare as the messiah for human freedom and inclusiveness of every kind. These all-pervasive genteel academic exertions are deeply problematic because they discourage the study of the taboo sites of literary exclusions. If the humanities are to regain an intellectually rigorous engagement with literary works, then they must make new forays into the study of literary exclusion. One way to think of exclusion in early modern literature is to acknowledge that racial and religious exclusion during that time was not a simple act of “discrimination”-rather, these ostracisms were practiced sincerely for the public good. Following Anne Lake Prescott's work, I propose another interesting approach to study exclusion in Shakespeare's works: literary “slime” that induces laughter in community-reinforcing ways. When Shakespeare's Portia refers to Morocco's “complexion of a devil,” she juxtaposes it with the ideal white European skin. When Benedick says, “If I do not love her [Beatrice], I am a Jew,” he wills to act as a loving Christian as opposed to what the Elizabethan culture perceived as heartless Jews. In the last section, I submit why the study of literature and its culture's exclusionary representations and politics should be the exciting new direction for the humanities.
The Listening Experience Database (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/LED) is the first project to collate and interrogate a mass of historical personal experiences of listening to music. Such accounts have previously received only isolated attention because they are challenging to locate and gather en masse. An extensive body of data about the responses of “ordinary listeners” (as opposed to professional critics) thus offers new ways of approaching music-related research. The underlying information system relies on linked data, including a knowledge base that is itself a linked dataset. The data management workflow supports both systematic contributions from the project team and crowdsourced input where knowledgeability and completeness of information can be expected to vary widely. The database demonstrates the potential of a mass of data as a robust evidential base for our understanding of how music functions in society. It also contributes a large body of structured data to the global machine-readable portion of the Web that is the Linked Data Cloud. Through crowdsourcing, it taps into knowledge that exists beyond the academic world. The project not only contributes directly to the global linked data knowledge base, but also prompts new directions for anyone investigating the reception of music, including performers, teachers, social historians, musicologists, psychologists and those working in the creative industries.
In his Rome speech entitled Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis delivered at the University of Rome in September 1953, Jacques Lacan refers to the dhvani theory of Sanskrit that, he thinks, explains the psychoanalytic technique of linguistic interpretation. More than this, Lacan considers the dhvani theory of Sanskrit as the of the Freudian corpus, i.e., if Freud would construe any poetics, then it would be something like the dhvani theory of Sanskrit poetics. The present essay examines this important observation of Lacan carefully, and argues that the Sanskrit dhvani theory is incompatible with his proposed poetics of the Freudian corpus.
