Dr. Aimee Kendall Roundtree is the associate dean for research in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas State University. As an undergraduate, she was an English and philosophy double major who later went onto study rhetoric of science and computers at the doctoral level.
Dr. Roundtree’s research and profession puts her at the intersection of technology and writing. She believes that her background in the liberal arts has helped her to complete various projects. One such project was creating a bot to help facilitate conversation between her republican and democrat friends.
During the Gore-Bush election there was contention between Dr. Roundtree’s friends from both sides of the political aisle. She created a bot during a her doctoral research that simulated political discourse between people in the democratic and republican parties. Dr. Roundtree said that the programming language was hard to learn, but the harder part was deciding what to parse when determining that would encapsulate the problems and barriers that her friends had while talking to one another.
From projects like this and various others, Dr. Roundtree has realized that tools are pointless unless they are serving the humanistic purposes that people decide. She said the liberal arts and humanities are at the core of these “purposes.”
“The tools that humans use are important, but it’s the harder part to determine in the world what kind of human you are going to be. And you do that by the stories you tell and the stories you tell about yourself and the stories you hear about others. That helps you reflect on the kind of human you are going to be,” said Dr. Roundtree.
Being able to receive the education that cultivates these purposes is one of the reasons why Dr. Roundtree disagrees with having students specialize early in their education. She said the studies she has come across state that companies are in need of more well rounded workers. She believes this early specialization is creating silos of workers who are short sighted and who are not thinking long and thinking creatively about the problems that their technologies might create for people. She said it is important for students to receive a well-rounded liberal arts education in order to fix this problem.
“When they [students] come here, part of what they are doing is learning and growing as humans … They’re learning how to be humans here, so what we do in the humanities is integral to that. It is so important to give students the space to think like a human and weigh ideas from different people, different contexts and different cultures.”
A lot of advancements in science have a lot to do with right time, right place. For Dr. Roundtree, this makes it even more important for those creating new technologies to develop persuasive, humanistic arguments in order to ease the acceptance of their new developments. Even more importantly, in this current political climate, it is getting harder for scientists to have their work accepted and funded. In order to communicate with those holding the purse strings, scientists need to have a political consciousness and rhetorical savvy— both of which are developed in the humanities.
“It’s just as important to have a persuasive argument as it is a true argument,” said Dr. Roundtree. “There were people before Darwin that had similar ideas, but it was only because Darwin used appeals to religion that he was able to have larger traction, have a larger acception of his argument about the origin of species.”
