Sven Birkerts

"We need to distinguish between kinds of knowledge and kinds of study. Pertinent here is German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey's distinction between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), which seek to explain physical events by subsuming them under causal laws, and the so-called sciences of culture (Geisteswissenschaften), which can only understand events in terms of the intentions and meanings that individuals attach to them.

"To the former, it would seem, belong the areas of study more hospitable to the new video and computer procedures. 

"Expanded databases and interactive programs can be viewed as tools, pure and simple. They give access to more information, foster cross-referentiality, and by reducing time and labor allow for greater focus on the essentials of a problem. 

"Indeed, any discipline where knowledge is sought for its application rather than for itself could only profit from the implementation of these technologies. To the natural sciences one might add the fields of language study and law.

"But there is a danger with these sexy new options —and the rapture with which believers speak warrants the adjective —that we will simply assume that their uses and potentials extend across the educational spectrum into realms where different kinds of knowledge, and hence learning, are at issue. The realms, that is, of Geisteswissenschaften, which have at their center the humanities.

"In the humanities, knowledge is a means, yes, but it is a means less to instrumental application than to something more nebulous: understanding. 

"We study history or literature or classics in order to compose and refine a narrative, or a set of narratives about what the human world used to be like, about how the world came to be as it is, and about what we have been —and are —like as psychological or spiritual creatures. The data —the facts, connections, the texts themselves —matter insofar as they help us to deepen and extend that narrative. 

"In these disciplines the process of study may be as vital to the understanding as are the materials studied."