‘Software and Scholarship’ — Editorial

The thematic focus of this issue is to examine what happens where software and scholarship meet, with particular reference to digital work in the humanities. Despite the some seven decades of its existence, Digital Humanities continues to struggle with the implications, in the academic ecosystem, of its position between engineering and art. The parallel drawn here between software and engineering on the one hand will be less controversial than the one between scholarship and art on the other — to what extent should these really be cast as parallel? Mathematicians are scholars, and physicists; so too are philosophers, theologians, biologists, and historians. Each of these fields tends to evoke a very different perception of the balance between logic and intuition, however; some are perceived as pursuing a form of unambiguous truth within the systems they inhabit, others as pursuing a more pluralistic understanding. Although the lines between disciplines are so often more arbitrary than real, and it is difficult to draw a firm distinction that will satisfy both the mathematicians and the philosophers, the label of ‘scholar’ seems to be something that scientists are keen to avoid. For indeed the divide between ‘science’ and ‘humanities’ is not as sharp as is often assumed in discussion. The supposed clarity of difference is exacerbated in the Anglophone world where vocabulary sharpens the division, and both words are needed, in opposition to each other, to translate the sense of the German ‘Wissenschaft’ and its cognates in other languages. Perhaps due to the feeling — endemic among scholars in the humanities — that their disciplines are often compared against the sciences and found to be wanting, or the pronounced focus of policymakers on ‘STEM’ subjects that bring with them an apparent devaluing of humanities subjects, or simply a sense that scientific truth is not a thing that ought to be sought after in English departments, quite a bit of reflection has occurred throughout the humanities about the proper function of what is now usually termed ‘digital humanities’ with respect to the wider humanities, and in particular whether the adoption of the quantitative and somewhat empirically natured digital methods will bring more of the STEM-like respect that is perceived to be lacking among policymakers and the public. And yet this sort of soul-searching in the humanities tends to elide the issues, discussion, and debates that have indeed cropped up in fields considered by most to be ‘pure science’, such as physics and biology, and it leaves aside a discussion of why and how computation has been adopted in such an evidently smooth trajectory by fields that belong unarguably to humanities departments, such as INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 40 No.4, December 2015, 342–348