The Digital Humanism Project


The Digital Humanism Project is devoted to using the preservation and democratization of old knowledge as a means of determining the future that we want to build.

In practice, we display randomly selected pages from old computer magazines (right now, just old Macintosh magazines). Reload the site to get a new image. And feel free to set it as the URL you see when you open a new tab in your browser (for Chrome users).

But what is Digital Humanism?

As per Tim Carmody, digital humanism is the modern version of the task of the Renaissance Humanists:

Digital humanism is a belief in the idea that persistence of knowledge and ideas requires maintaining them in new ways and in new technologies. But not only that, persistence is not enough. Knowledge can only build on what has come before it if we build the mechanisms to do this well. For example, science can no longer be burdened by outdated publication models, ones first developed in the Seventeenth Century. Digital humanism blends of the potential of new technologies with the knowledge of the old.

Therefore, part of digital humanism is making it possible to explore, share, remix, correct, and build upon old knowledge.

Right now, the Digital Humanism Project promotes digital humanism in two simple ways: by pointing folks to useful resources, as well as displaying randomly chosen old pages from computer magazines from the Internet Archive. May they inspire you.

Are There Other Digital Humanism Resources?

Yes! There are so many digital humanism projects and tools. Inspired by and based on the list of Tim Carmody, some of these are below (I'm involved with some of them):

Digital Humanism Projects

Digital Humanism Tools

Want to see something else here? Please let us know.

Who Made This?

This was built by me, Samuel Arbesman. I'm a writer and scientist playing at the intersection of venture capital and complexity science. To follow my projects, please feel free to sign up for my newsletter.

Contact

Want to get involved in the Digital Humanism Project or just reach out and learn more? Please email me.


The Digital Humanism Project. 2020.