Digital approaches within the humanities education system: integration challenges

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the process of integration of digital approaches in teaching humanities as one of the most important educational challenges faced by contemporary university. Materials and methods. Since this paper is interdisciplinary in character, its methodological research base relies on integrative conceptual approach allowing us to bring together general theoretical methods (analysis, synthesis, generalization) with cultural, historical, contextual and competence-based research methods. Such an approach provides ample opportunities to introduce existing theoretical and methodological toolkit developed by the humanities in order to understand problems and specific features of digital society and digital culture. Both in this methodology and in content, the concept of digital culture as a research object does not contradict practices established within humanities, but rather can be interpreted as a new area of study. Results. The results of our research demonstrate that digitalization of society led to the emergence of new themes in the humanities and within the education system: criticism of the “black box” character of contemporary digital infrastructure; issues of inequality and discrimination created or supported by digital tools; social effects of digitalization (including its impact on children and young adults); data-related problems: who, how and under what conditions creates, distributes and uses data in contemporary culture and society; anthropological approach that studies interactions between humans and digital technologies; cultural representations of digital technologies: images and narratives that circulate in society and are used to visualize and describe digital phenomena in film, literature, internet, social media etc. Conclusions. The authors conclude that the situation surrounding digitalization of humanities presents a field both of new problems and new opportunities. However, despite the existing issues, humanities research and education constantly produce new models and methods of interaction with the digital reality, which can and should be confidently introduced in education constantly experimenting with the new approaches.