Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In the age of data-driven decision-making, predictive modeling, and AI-authoring, it behooves the humanist to understand the mathematician as much as it does the mathematician to grasp the ethical, social, and cultural impact of their work. This paper contrasts the rhetorical and stylistic choices made in the most commonly assigned statistic textbooks in the United States alongside a run of mass market, best-selling books by mathematicians such as Hannah Fry, Cathy O’Neil, and Ben Orlin to pinpoint how and why mathematics and quantitative literacy is cast as potentially “inhuman” or “human.” Obscuring the concerns and desires of humans in how we teach and write about mathematics has a significant negative impact on our wellbeing in a world increasingly filtered and interpreted by algorithms and humanists adept at textual and discourse analysis have much to offer. A textual analysis through a close reading of differing ways mathematics, particularly statistics and probability, are presented will prove attractive to digital humanists interested in quantitative methods of inquiry, data or math ethicists, rhetoricians, and educators. Results will include observations on the reliance on mathematics to illustrate a concept, the use of narrative or figurative elements (especially tone, humor, and perspective), and how the texts grapple with interpretive challenges on the meaning of the results. While ultimately increased quantitative literacy across the board will continue to grow in importance as we consider ethics in the digital world, it may benefit from the attention to language typically relegated to the writer rather than the mathematician.