Giambattista Vico, in his foundational treatise The New Science, argued that humans can only truly know that which we have made ourselves. Language, art, literature, religion — these cultural elements are how humanity best understands itself. Writing in 1725, Vico refuted the scientific thinkers of the time — René Descartes, foremost — who argued that knowledge derives from rational deduction.
Now, four centuries later, a cross-disciplinary group of mathematicians, computer scientists, and humanists are flipping the script on Vico’s full-throated defense of the humanities, or at least splitting the difference. Cheekily titled “The New New Science,” an SFI working group scheduled September 15–18 will address what it means to view the humanities as subjects described by — and understood through — mathematical and computational concepts. The meeting will explore how digital representations of knowledge offer new ways of thinking about the humanities.
“Vico titled it The New Science because he saw it as a new way to approach the study of history,” says SFI External Professor Daniel Rockmore (Dartmouth College), one of the meeting’s co-organizers. “We are working broadly from the same impulse: to create a new approach that brings mathematics to bear on non-mathematical subjects.”
Although much of that which we call “the humanities” are intrinsically non-mathematical, as they are converted into digital forms, they take on numerical profiles that can be interrogated mathematically.
For instance, a recent paper by co-organizer Barak Sober, a Senior Lecturer of Statistics and Data Science and Digital Humanities at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explored the social dynamics of the Hebrew Kingdoms during the Iron Age II by statistically analyzing ancient names recorded in archaeological excavations.
In another study, Rockmore developed a computational technique to authenticate works of art from digital scans of the original works.
The working group will convene scholars from both the sciences and humanities. Each day will feature a “Math 101” session — for example, a look at probability and statistical inference — and time for a humanist response to the lesson. The meeting structure is designed to introduce fundamentals of math and computer science into the humanities.
Rockmore and Sober, along with fellow co-organizer Renana Keydar, Associate Professor of Law and Digital Humanities at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, hope the working group is the first in a series of several meetings on the topic. Other desired outcomes from the meeting include a collected volume of essays featuring contributions from meeting participants, a white paper, and a journal article in an interdisciplinary journal.
“Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude transform words into vectors with hundreds, thousands of dimensions,” says Rockmore. “A book, transformed into a data cloud, turns into something with geometric meaning. How can we ask new questions of culture in these new forms?”