I have been working in a course on the New Humanities and have posted some of my writing on this topic on a blog dedicated to that class. In my first blog posting I discussed the fact that many of the defenses of the humanities that I have read generally move seamlessly into defenses of the university and higher education as a whole.

After recognizing the connection between saving the humanities and saving higher education, I discuss the public humanities movement as a potential way to save the humanities as a whole. http://newhumanities5850.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/saving-higher-education-through-public-humanities/

My next blog posting built on another student’s discussion of humanities camps. In our class, we had been talking about the fact that the sciences have science camps that do not actually replicate research done in the field, but do get children (and their parents) excited about science. These camps help to promote science research both as an academic field and as an area of research that should be supported publicly. We asked the question: why don’t we have humanities camps? In reality, we do have humanities camps but they are not named as such, therefore, humanists do not get the same public support afforded scientists. http://newhumanities5850.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/a-short-discussion-on-humanities-camps/ Most recently, I blogged about data visualization and its usefulness for literary research. While these two areas may seem too different to coexist, they can in fact, be quite complimentary. Data visualization offers humanities scholars new ways of researching and dealing with large amounts of data, as well as offering new ways of organizing and displaying results. http://newhumanities5850.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/ways-of-seeing-and-reading-the-use-of-data-visualization-in-literary-studies/