Digital Knowledge Integration (DKI): When Transhumanism (H+) Meets Digital Humanities (DH)

Abstract

To a large extent, the world has come to embrace digitalization which currently permeates all human endeavors and life. However, the process of digitalizing human beings themselves, making them Transhuman and allowing the integration of the digital into every aspect of our daily life has made life both paradoxically appreciative and problematic as it increases the global nature of humanity and its endeavors, posing threats as well as benefits. Merging Transhumanism (H+) with the Digital Humanities (DH) may minimize those threats but the dual evolving human-technological thoughts have been hoofing at a distance to each other for decades whereas innately they share the same perceptions on the future of the digitalization and human beings. This paper is channeled towards breaking the barriers between the two through the help of the critical comparative lens from the conceptual theoretical framework called Digital Knowledge Integration (DKI) using hypothetic-deductive method of reading two e-literatures: Digital_Humanities by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner & Jeffrey Schnapp published in 2012 and The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science. Technology, and Philosophy of Human Future edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More in 2013 including other literatures as we need them. This research is also aimed at integrating knowledge into singular model and raising scholarly debates on the new development.