What Are the Humanities and Social Sciences?

One definition of the humanities is provided in the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act 1of 1965:

The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.

The social sciences, as they are understood in this report, are actually more difficult to define. The American Council of Learned Societies represents “interpretive” social sciences, that is, social sciences that are more qualitative than quantitative in their methods. But the Commission is not interested in staking out territory, nor does it seem necessary that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between disciplines and commissions or their reports: indeed, the twenty-seven reports on cyberinfrastructure currently listed on the NSF Web page devoted to “Cyberinfrastructure and Its Impacts” 2make clear that the blurring of these boundaries is one of the characteristics of cyberinfrastructure. If the emerging cyberinfrastructure is to support creativity, inquiry, and the broadest increase of knowledge, it must include the contributions of the humanities and the interpretive social sciences.