Meet Our Team - Doğan

Hi there folks, it's Doğan. I’ve just become a Digital Fellow at the DHIL this fall and I’m already enjoying our work here. I’m currently doing my masters in the Philosophy Department at SFU, working on a project about how dreaming is not so much as we conceive it to be, but in general I’m into anything about consciousness. While I immensely enjoy digging the puzzles of mind though, I have a ‘meta-philosophical’ interest in the way we operate in philosophy, which, at some point, introduced me to digital humanities.

Ever had a debate where you end up in a position that you no longer remember how you got there? That was usually my situation after the debates we hold at the Philosophy Society I’ve ran during my undergraduate. My thought was that there should be a way of tracking the evolution of the discussion, if the discussion is hoped to be anything fruitful. And there was: with the help of an incomplete degree in computer science and some friends we came up with a ‘primitive’ way of visualizing the evolution of discourse using argument mapping techniques. That was fun.

Then it occurred to me: there should be way to do the same for the general philosophical practice in 21st century. Why? Well, up until the last century, philosophy progressed through major books on big problems. With the linguistic turn in 20th century however, modern analytic (and naturalistic) philosophy proceeds primarily through analyzing highly specialized technical problems through individual articles rather than whole books. These articles can be conceived as individual answers to those questions. Specialization is the key for furthering knowledge in science. But philosophy does not create knowledge; it increases understanding. Therefore the prospect of losing the sight of the forest for the trees is particularly problematic for its future.

Admittedly, philosophy today is lagging behind other humanity disciplines when it comes to  the use of digital tools. This is strange (and sad), since philosophy was among the first to embrace the digital just a decade ago or so. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for instance, is a dynamic online hypertext of scholarly work which came out even earlier than Wikipedia. Likewise, Philpapers is a major index of philosophical research, while Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project is a digital ontology of ideas, thinkers and journals that anyone can use to draw meaningful insights about philosophical practice. These are big and somewhat dated projects. Yet in terms of recent, organic engagement from individual researchers the situation is not so bright. Why is that? I don’t quite know. I’m hoping to contribute for my part.

My job at the lab is technical development. This entails developing and testing our software applications, documenting how-to-use guides and sharing technical skills with others. There is so much to learn for me still, but helping to our principals with realizing their projects is lots of fun. And hopefully one day, I will be able to use these valuable skills I acquire here with the purpose of establishing a stronger engagement between philosophy and digital humanities.

Many thanks to Rebecca and Michael for their guidance, and to my digital fellows Kim and Kandice with their help so far. It’s good to be here.