Geesteswetenschappen

The art expert is the fulcrum of all value and significance in the museum and auction world. Could AI supplant them?

- by Noah Charney

Read on Aeon

A mind-bending trip into the cosmos aboard a speculative (yet theoretically possible) spacecraft near the speed of light

- by Aeon Video

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How did law firms and other professional workplaces become places of such crushing and soulless work?

- by Dylan Gottlieb

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From poetry to politics, this radio show asked listeners to speak their minds. Decades later, their words still resonate

- by Aeon Video

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Our culture valorises the big, coherent self: reading Robert Musil helps me embrace the beauty of my no-self existence

- by Mette Leonard Høeg

Read on Aeon

Recently, artists’ interest in the ecology of energies has dramatically increased as they investigate scientific discoveries and work with their findings to produce engaging artworks. Sunjoo Lee’s Electric Garden belongs to these practices, using microbial fuel cells, which generate power →

2CD – Gruenrekorder

This is a two-CD release, the first features twenty-one tracks from sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Sergio Armaroli who is active in the free form and experimental scene, the second contains thirty songs from Steve Piccolo. Two distinct →

University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-1517919320, English, 274 pages, 2025, USA

It should by now be universally understood that the entire technology underlying AI is based on the computation of language, as everything must have →

What if we were to build an effective AI-based Luddite chatbot to provide consultation on work matters? AI-Ludd, the simulation presented by the IoCose group in a video, subverts the concept of industrial software. This radical narrative shift is not →

LP – Corvo

L’Makina by Gilles Aubry takes the title of a song from the 1930s by the famous musician L’Haj Belaid, dedicated to one of the new media forms of that time: the phonograph. As often happens in the →

Open letter urges Labor to reverse JRG scheme, introduced by Coalition in 2021, as cost of humanities degrees reaches more than $50,000

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Tim Winton knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”.

It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career.

The future of public knowledge rests on building open-access LLMs driven by ethics rather than profit, writes Prof Dr Matteo Valleriani

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly entered the landscape of historical research. Their capacity to process, annotate and generate texts is transforming scholarly workflows. Yet historians are uniquely positioned to ask a deeper question – who owns the tools that shape our understanding of the past?

Most powerful LLMs today are developed by private companies. While their investments are significant, their goals – focused on profit, platform growth or intellectual property control – rarely align with the values of historical scholarship: transparency, reproducibility, accessibility and cultural diversity.

Jim Endersby recalls how maths teachers responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s and likens it to current fears of AI use by university students

I agree with Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson (Letters, 2 March) that cheap and easy‐to‐use AI tools create problems for universities, but the reactions of many academics to these new developments remind me of the way some people responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s.

Reports of the imminent death of maths teaching in schools proved exaggerated. Maths teachers had to adapt, not least to teach students the longstanding rule “garbage in, garbage out”; if students had no idea of the fundamental principles and ideas behind maths, they would not realise their answer was meaningless. Today’s humanities teachers are going to have to adapt in similar ways.

Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley, and Dr Ronan McLaverty-Head and another letter writer comment on cuts at Cardiff and another Russell Group university

In response to the shocking news predicting up to 10,000 imminent job losses across the UK higher education sector (Quarter of leading UK universities cutting staff due to budget shortfalls, 1 February), we write to flag up a fact that the article largely misses: the degree to which arts and humanities subjects are bearing the brunt of these cuts.

While the article singles out the loss of nursing courses at Cardiff University and the closure of chemistry courses across the country, it mentions the humanities just once in passing. Last week it was ancient history, modern languages, music, religion and theology at Cardiff University. Not so long ago, it was subjects including English, history, music and theatre at Goldsmiths, and art history, music, philosophy and religious studies at the University of Kent, to name just two. And with each passing week more arts and humanities courses and departments are cut.

With degrees disappearing and reading rates plummeting, the arts face a critical moment in education and culture

The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?

Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.