Feb
06

Digital Humanities: A Multiple Choice Test

Digital Humanities 101: The Final Exam

Which of the following is “doing” Digital Humanities?

a) a cross-campus, international team of scholars, supported by an NEH grant, who are encoding, organizing, and publishing a corpus of illuminated manuscripts via a customization of Omeka;

b) a professor preparing a manuscript (collecting screenshots, embedding video clips, inserting hyperlinks, tagging, etc.) on picaresque narratives in blaxploitation films of the 70s for submission to an electronic, open, peer-reviewed online journal;

c) an adjunct professor of English setting up a Blackboard site hours before the semester begins and hours after she’s been assigned a section of freshman composition;

d) a somewhat scarred veteran of the culture wars sending out an email to colleagues, trying to organize a group statement on shared governance at his local institution of higher learning.

If you’ve been following the buzz about Digital Humanities at the MLA, in the NY Times, and in the blogosphere, you’d naturally pick choice number one.  Large, grant-funded, text-based, archival, data-driven, and scholarly projects – – like the awesome Mapping the Republic of Letters project – – have garnered the high-wattage limelight, as digital humanities emerges onto the public stage.

Several of the more programmatic statements of digital humanities might seem to support your choice.  For instance, the Humanities 2.0 manifesto evokes and celebrates digital humanities as “an array of convergent practices” focused on “the building of bigger pictures out of the tesserae of expert knowledge,” “large scale, distributed models of scholarship,” “expanded, global . . . research communities,” co-creation, “iterative, cumulative, and collaborative” “wikinomic scholarship,” performed by “the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar” within a new “topography” of disciplines.  Invoking its roots within humanities computing, Matthew Kirschenbaum says digital humanities is about new forms of “publicity” for scholarship, a scholarship and pedagogy more deeply and explicitly “bound up with infrastructure,” and more collaborative practices of scholarship and pedagogy.

A quick scan of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities pages adds further weight to your choice.  Funded projects cluster around key terms like: library, archive, artifacts, manuscripts, database, text encoding, etc.  In the NEH’s representation, digital humanities is often figured as part of the resource extraction industry: funded scholars are “digging into data,” “digging into the Enlightenment,” “harvesting speech datasets,”  etc.  It’s enough to make a poor country boy hum “Sixteen Tons” and hang a poster of John L. Lewis on his office wall!

Obviously, a very exciting and powerful model of digital humanities is being installed at the center of a new debate about the relationship among the humanities, technology, and the profession.  (Identifying all the players, motives, and interests behind this emerging consensus is also an important task.)  Yet, before anything like a “field” of digital humanities gets seriously institutionalized, we might linger for a minute or two over our multiple choices.

All of the answers to the exam question involve faculty in the humanities doing something digital.  In each case (archive, manuscript, Blackboard, and email), faculty use digital media to accomplish a professional goal.  And, in each case, as faculty use the “digital,” the digital reshapes this work and the roles (scholar, teacher, full-time and precarious faculty) associated with it.  If “digital humanities” is indeed an “array of convergent practices,” then using Blackboard to teach a course in humanities is also doing “digital humanities.”

So, how is it that some of these digital practices are taking center stage and others are not?  First, despite its claims to novelty, the digital humanities seems to repeat the hierarchies that already structure the humanities and academia in general, e.g. scholarship over teaching, text versus reading, profession (as “invisible college“) over institution.

Second, history has always been the enemy of the avant garde.  Although emerging paradigms of digital humanities imply a particular history (rooted in humanities computing), the absence of any explicit engagement with the history of the digital’s intersection with the humanities tilts the paradigm away from some professional practices (teaching, for instance) and toward others (for instance, a very, very conservative notion of humanities “scholarship”).  The absence of names like Randy Bass and Roy Rosenzweig from current discussion of digital humanities is, at the least, ironic (given the emphasis on “scholarship”).

And finally, and to me most problematically, the emerging sense of “digital humanities” reproduces and maintains the class structure of academia.  Digital humanities resources are collecting around the usual suspects – – private and public research universities.  Institutions, like state universities and community colleges, defined by that other academic labor – – teaching – – are being pushed to the margins. Likewise, “digital humanities” doesn’t seem very visible in institutions dominated by those other academic laborers – – precarious or contingent faculty.  And, there seems little attention or effort to think about “digital humanities” at institutions dominated by working-class or non-elite students.

We are all doing digital humanities – – Blackboard users, emailers, EBSCO users, etc.  Arguably, these more pedestrian and less lustrous uses of the digital are doing more to reshape the humanities than any NEH-funded API to navigate Jeremy Bentham’s manuscripts.  Perhaps, by yoking the humanities to neo-liberalism’s technological fetish, “digital humanities” is a last-ditch effort to preserve something of the humanities in perilous times.  If so, we need to be sure that digital humanities doesn’t become an instrument of social and cultural triage.  Embracing a broader vision of digital humanities, one that includes the full range of institutions, academic labor, and practices, means leveraging the “digital” to change the whole world of humanities.

E.g. what would it mean to add an option “e” to our multiple choice exam?  Yep, you guessed it: “all of the above.”

 

Jan
11

TSA Unveils New “Soul Scanning” Technology

(inspired by Jim Groom’s open, online Digital Storytelling course)

As reported by the New York Times several days ago, last April, U.S. Representative Duncan Hunter succinctly re-defined U.S. citizenship (and just as blithely tossed the 14th Amendment out the window).  “We’re just saying,” Hunter told a Tea Party rally, “it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.”  That’s right folks: citizenship isn’t about legal forms, nor about where or how you were born.  Being a U.S. Citizen is really about the state of your soul!

Representative Hunter’s new definition of citizenship sparked a world-wide scramble to find a quick, efficient way to ascertain the status of U.S. residents.  Just yesterday, Volksgemeinschaft Industries, LLC, unveiled it’s new “soul scanning” technology.  Company spokesman, William D. Pelley, told reporters gathered at a news conference: “We leave behind the era of the auto de fe and the strappado.  We have entered a new era of technology.  Instant software upgrades provided by Volksgemeinschaft allow current imaging machines to scan souls at every airport security gate.”  Pounding the lectern, Pelley underscored that the “SoulScanner upgrade patch will prevent any repetition of the unfortunate ‘Monsters on Maple Street’ incident!”

Pelley then provided examples of recent SoulScanner results, included below.

American citizen (possibly resident of Arizona)

American citizen (SoulScanner technician currently under investigation for unsanctioned imaging practices)

Non-American citizen

Citizen of unknown, but potentially threatening origin

Pelley closed the press conference by noting that  “”Representative Hunter has not yet made an appointment to be imaged by SoulScanner.  We look forward to his future cooperation!”

 

Jan
05

Hacking the textbook

According to U.S. PIRG, the average college student spends about $900 a year on his or her textbooks, and the price of new editions of college textbooks is rising at twice the rate of inflation.  In the time of waning physical books (e.g. recent news that Borders is turning the page to Chapter 11), textbooks represent a huge and stable market, estimated at around $10.2 billion.   As in most other sectors of the culture industry, the textbook market is increasingly oligopolistic (i.e. dominated by a few players): five companies (Thomson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley, Houghton-Mifflin, and Pearson) dominate textbook production; four wholesalers dominate college textbook distribution (including Follett and Barnes and Noble).  You don’t need an economics degree from the University of Chicago to understand what this means for the end-users of college textbooks: students represent a “captive market” for the textbook industry, subject to inelastic pricing and limited choice.

Long before tech transfer and business incubators and intellectual property flipping, the old-fashioned college textbook has been a trusty, remunerative vehicle for the commodification of knowledge within higher education.

There is, however, a strange paradox at the heart of the college textbook: textbooks – – by definition – – lay out the basic, conventional knowledge within a discipline, field, or topic; yet, this common knowledge  – – what every biologist or historian of ancient Rome or multimedia author should know – – is also the most highly profitable knowledge for publishers and booksellers.  If textbooks spin gold out of dross – – where does the surplus value come from?

First, textbooks codify and standardize knowledge.  When five million students purchase the 10th edition of “Marketing Principles for Budding Entrepreneurs,” business professors can rest assured that – – regardless of the local contexts of institution, curriculum, and professor – – these five million student have access to the common sense of a discipline and field.  Corollary: these five million students will also have access to a common pedagogy.  Every textbook implies a pedagogy – -through the way it organizes knowledge and instruction via chapters, text, pages, etc.  A literature anthology organized by “periods,” for instance, encourages teachers to “teach” literature as part of a particular narrative and implies much about the meaning of fundamental critical categories like the “author,” the “text,” genre, form, etc.

Second, textbooks make academic labor more “efficient.” Textbooks help to structure and organize syllabi.  They save professors the time and work of collecting and presenting texts, ideas, and problems.  They optimize control of knowledge, e.g. if I assign an essay from a textbook, I know that all of the students are working with the same version of that text, down to a common pagination.  Corollary: textbooks help us to make the work of teaching and learning less visible.  By using textbooks to handle tasks like organizing, representing, and controlling information, we avoid having to deal with some very basic questions, questions like: is the “periodic” structure of literary history  really the best way to teach literary texts? or even to teach “literary history”?

In short, textbooks turn dross into gold by routinizing, standardizing, and alienating (in the sense of objectifying) our pedagogical and academic labor.  Publishers create surplus value by exploiting academic labor.

If we resent publishers’ exploitation of students, and we feel a bit uneasy about oligopolies and captive markets, and we have an intuitive sense that what is common should be what is free, what can we do about textbooks?

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about how digital textbooks are going to wipe out the physical textbook.  Established publishers like Macmillan are  moving aggressively into the new digital media.  And, a new bunch of startups – – like Inkling, CourseSmart, and Flatworld – – are trying to “appify” the college textbook.  States like California are launching “digital textbook initiatives” to encourage the availability and use of digital textbooks.  All of these efforts approach the textbook from a corporate and administrative perspective: the goal is to lower the cost of textbook production.  The “digital textbook” buzz operates under the two-word mantra that always seems to herald the diffusion of new technologies: cheaper and better.  (In education, neither word has proven accurate.)

The problem so far with digital textbooks is that they merely imitate the physical textbook.  If you take a look at some of the very limited number of “enhanced titles” put out by Inkling, what you’ll find is your basic, text-centered book gussied up with some animation and annotation tools.  The Inkling “books” are a good example of stalled “remediation” – – the partial overhaul of an existing form by new media forms.  Like conventional textbooks, they continue to routinize pedagogy and mystify academic labor.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4232212558646621307&hl=en#

Given the really fundamental and exciting ways in which new media are redefining reading, writing, and creativity, can digital textbooks do more than imitate the traditional textbook?  They can – – but only if we approach the problem of the textbook not from the profit perspective, but from the perspective of academic labor.  In other words, the death of the textbook depends not on technology, per se, but more fundamentally on rethinking pedagogy and labor.

The day grows long, the fingers grow weary.  So, a few basic guidelines to euthanizing the textbook:

1) what is common is free.  Much of the knowledge represented by textbooks is already freely available – – whether through open source sites like Merlot, Connexions, and others, or simply through public domain copyright (for literature and texts published before 1923).

2) submerge textbook publication in remix culture. “Content” is readily available.  What teachers need now to remake the textbook are platforms that allow them to remix texts, ideas, problems, and any and all other elements of common knowledge.  Open source platforms like Omeka and MediaWiki are good starting points, but we need to develop better and more flexible tools for teachers and students to assemble, re-assemble, elaborate, and annotate the materials of common knowledge.  Teachers and students can and should be able to “author” their own textbooks.

3) disrupt the relationship between textbooks and pedagogy.  The new generation of “digital textbooks” repeats the pedagogical model of the old textbook: students learn content by imitating.  New media proposes that people learn by doing and creating.  Digital textbooks will remake education when they abandon the textbook as a collection of information plus apparatus (e.g. a book of essays with some discussion questions and author biography).  Thinking of the textbook as a learning environment – – a space of knowledge-making, rather than knowledge-aping – – means that teachers have to be more, not less, self-reflexive and that students learn to “own” knowledge rather than just renting it.

All of this by way of saying: I’m not using a textbook this semester.  Instead, my students and I will be creating our own textbook.