Disciplinary/Digital Debates and the Urban Phenomenon

Abstract

Chapter 2: Disciplinary/Digital Debates and the Urban Phenomenon shifts from a focus on defining of the city toward seeing how intellectual knowledge has become fragmented across particular disciplinary frameworks. Attention is given to the increasing interdisciplinarity of humanities and social science research in general, before addressing the interdisciplinary challenges facing digital work throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The challenges of integrating disciplines can be understood by looking at two particular moments: first, the Snow-Leavis controversy of the early 1960s and, second, the origins of the digital humanities and their contemporary evolution. The final section of this chapter returns to the work of Henri Lefebvre as a way of bringing humanities, social sciences and digital sciences together.