Monthly Archives: April 2012

Dispatches from the Digital Revolution

I know right now that I am partly subject to the enthusiasm of the new convert in seeing my object of adoration everywhere I turn, but truly, it seems that everywhere I turn these days I see the landslide toward a total digitalization of the world of the humanities. Like a landslide, it may have looked a long ways off at first, but its upon us now, and rumble has become a roar. As I said in this previous post, I think we’re a long way past a print plus world and we better figure out how digital tools, either simple things like e-books or complex tools and methodologies associated with digitalization, are going to change what we are doing with ourselves and our students. A few rumblings:

1. Robert Darnton announces that the Digital Public Library of America will be up and running by 2013. Darnton, an advocate of public digitalization efforts that will prevent private entities like Google from controlling access to information, has spearheaded the effort to bring together the digitalization efforts of libraries around the globe. According to the DPLA’s website, the purpose of the the DPLA is focused in the following ways:

Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials that could be brought together under the frame of the DPLA, but these digital collections often exist in silos. Compounding this problem are disparate technical standards, disorganized and incomplete metadata, and a host of legal issues. No project has yet succeeded in bringing these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together with leading technical experts and the best of private industry to find solutions to these complex challenges. Users have neither coherent access to these materials nor tools to use them in new and exciting ways, and institutions have no clear blueprint for creating a shared infrastructure to serve the public good. The time is right to launch an ambitious project to realize the great promise of the Internet for the advancement of sharing information and of using technology to enable new knowledge and discoveries in the United States.

2. Appearance of the Journal of Digital Humanities: I already mentioned this yesterday, but I’ll go ahead and do it again. It seems to me that Digital Humanities is coalescing in to a force in academe–rather than a marginalized crew on the ragtag end–not unlike the massive changes that occurred in humanistic studies after 1966 and the advent of deconstruction and its step-children. In my estimation the change may be even more massive–and perhaps more painful and more exciting–than those earlier changes since deconstruction did not essentially change the tools of the trade–we still read books (and gradually included film, pop-culture, and other media) and we still wrote papers about them. While deconstruction may have been a more sophisticated and nifty looking hammer, it was still basically a hammer. Digital Humanities is changing humanistic work at the level of the tool, creating houses without hammers.

3.People Who read e-books read more books than those who do not--A new Pew Research Center study suggests the following:

a survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that e-book consumers in the U.S. are reading over a third more books than their print-only customers. According to the report, titled “The Rise of E-Reading,” the average reader of e-books says he or she has read 24 books in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by non–e-book consumers.

Overall, Pew found that the number of American adults who say they have read an e-book rose to 21%, compared to 17% reported just a few months ago in December 2011. That jump comes following a holiday season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and dedicated e-readers.

I admit that I want to cavil a bit about this news. It’s also been demonstrated that e-readers so far are overwhelmingly dominated by pulp fiction romances and mysteries, the kind of thing you can read easily in a day. On the other hand, book selling and reading in general has ALWAYS been dominated by the romance and mystery genres, so that’s nothing new.

The same Publishers Weekly article points to a study saying that e-readers are poised to take off with a massive global spike. We’ve heard this before, but….Well, I asked my boss the other day if I could purchase a Kindle so I could experiment with the Kindle library program. I am over the edge and into the dark side of the abyss.

4. The New York Public Library opened up an amazing new database tool for the 19040 census–itself an amazing database just released by the U.S. government. I haven’t totally figured out how to use it yet, but your can search for persons in the census, tag their location in GIS based maps of New York City and do multilayered searching of NYC based on the crowd-sourced effort at developing a digital social history of New York City. According to this article in the Gothamist,

Kate Stober at the NYPL tells us it’s “more than just a research tool, we’ll be helping New Yorkers create a social history map of buildings and neighborhoods in the five boroughs. When you find an address, the tool pins it to both a 1940 map and a contemporary map, so you can see how the area has changed. You’re then invited to leave a note attached to the pin—memories, info about who lived there, what the neighborhood was like, questions… As people use the site, we’ll build a cultural map of New York in 1940 that will assist both professional historians and laypeople alike.” And that’s pretty amazing.

I’m especially fond of this article because it goes on to point out that famous recluse, J.D. Salinger was indeed living in plain site on Park Avenue in New York City in 1940. You just had to know his first name was Jerome and have faith that there couldn’t be more than one Jerome D. Salinger’s in Manhattan. I think the question for humanist scholars will be what responsible teacher of the culture, art, history, and politics, etcetera of America in the 1940s would not want to use this tool and insist that their students use it to.

It’s more than a rumble.

In Spite of That, We Call This Friday Good

Journal of the Digital Humanities: The Community as Gatekeeper

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Earlier today I posted on ongoing sense of mild disorientation making my way through the thickets of Digital Humanities, noting with complaint that roads and pathways toward destinations were none too clearly marked, and that gateways “in” seemed obscured by a resistance to the notion that there were insiders and outsiders to begin with. It’s probably a good thing I posted this morning, since this evening I was pleasantly surprised by the arrival of a roadmap and a gateway on my iPad screen in the form of the newly minted Journal of Digital Humanities. Not only does it look like a really fantastic read, with articles ranging from theory to the problems related with specific projects and tools to the question of the privileging of racial and gender stereotypes in DH discourse, it actually has an article written just for me and my fellow “noobs” whom I evoked in my post earlier today: Lisa Spiro’s “Getting Started in the Digital Humanities”. It’s really a little bit more of a catalogue than an article, and I would have kind of liked a little more reflective or evaluative analysis, serving perhaps as a form of a bibliographic essay of sorts. The very large number of possibilities and the fact that they are all existing on a more or less equal plane still leaves one groping just a bit. But still, mostly I found it really informative. I also found it comforting because I recognized a lot of the resources and felt like I and my group here at Messiah College had been pursuing the right things, consulting the right sources, looking in the right places, the feeling a little like one who has been wandering around in the woods for several hours and crests a hill to discover she’d been going the right way all along.

Perhaps more than that article, however, the fact of the journal struck me as a kind of beacon–although I know there are other journals related to DH and I’ve looked some of them. Perhaps I felt this way because of its unique editorial and publishing agenda, embodying an open-review ethos and practice. From the editors introduction to the journal:

Nothing herein has been submitted to the Journal of Digital Humanities. Instead, as is now common in this emerging discipline, works were posted on the open web. They were then discovered and found worthy of merit by the community and by our team of editors.

The works in this issue were first highlighted on the Digital Humanities Now site and its related feeds. Besides taking the daily pulse of the digital humanities community—important news and views that people are discussing—Digital Humanities Now serves, as newspapers do for history, as a rough draft of theJournal of Digital Humanities. Meritorious new works were linked to from Digital Humanities Now, thus receiving the attention and constructive criticism of the large and growing digital humanities audience—approaching a remarkable 4,000 subscribers as we write this. Through a variety of systems we continue to refine, we have been able to spot articles, blog posts, presentations, new sites and software, and other works that deserve a broader audience and commensurate credit.

Once highlighted as an “Editors’ Choice” on Digital Humanities Now, works were eligible for inclusion in the Journal of Digital History. By looking at a range of qualitative and quantitative measures of quality, from the kinds of responses a work engendered, to the breadth of the community who felt it was worth their time to examine a work, to close reading and analyses of merit by the editorial board and others, we were able to produce the final list of works. For the inaugural issue, more than 15,000 items published or shared by the digital humanities community last quarter were reviewed for Digital Humanities Now. Of these, 85 were selected as Editors’ Choices, and from these 85 the ones that most influenced the community, as measured by interest, transmission, and response, have been selected for formal publication in the Journal. The digital humanities community participated further in the review process through open peer review of the pieces selected for the Journal. Authors selected for inclusion were given time to revise their work to answer criticisms and suggestions from the community and editors, prior to a round of careful editing to avoid typographical errors and other minor mistakes.

This strikes me as ingenious since it combines a high standard of quality control with a community based ethos. Theoretically, this produces a work that is neither the idiosyncratic preference of an editor, nor is it simply a scattershot random collection of the individual preferences of readers or writers. It really is in some ways the embodiment of the values of a particular academic community, demonstrating and enacting the standards by which membership/participation in that community is determined. In my post earlier today I discussed the importance of gatekeepers as a “way in” even though the presence of gatekeepers can feel exclusionary or hierarchical. This kind of approach to an academic journal strikes me as a way of embodying the community as gatekeeper, something that comes closer to embodying the kind of egalitarian ideals that DH folks obviously hold dear.

In any case, kudos to the editors and the community that built this journal. I’m looking forward to the read.

Literacy in the Digital Humanities: Or, a clueless “noob” in digital academe

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Today my faculty group focused on the Digital Humanities here at Messiah College had a great session with Ryan Cordell from St. Norbert’s College. Ryan blogs regularly for ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and holds down the Digital Humanities fort (or perhaps leads the insurgency) at St. Norbert’s. He’s also especially done some work advising liberal arts colleges on projects in the Digital Humanities, so I thought he’d be a good choice for consulting. I’m happy with the choice: Ryan was practical and down-to-earth, while also pointing to really challenging and exciting places we could take some of our nascent ideas. I think we came away with some good possibilities for next steps that will lead to some concrete action in the next year. I highly recommend Ryan if your looking for a consultant for starting or managing digital humanities projects in a smaller school setting.

Earlier in the day I had had the good luck to look in on a massive twitter debate that was, unbeknownst to the participants, about or at least precipitated by me and a brief conversation I’d had with Ryan. I’d told Ryan that one of my biggest concerns was professional development for faculty and getting them over some of the immediate humps of alienation that traditional humanistic scholars feel when confronted with what amounts to an alien DH world. I mentioned the fact that I and one of my colleagues, David Pettegrew--who is himself much more versed in technical know-how than I am–went to a THATCamp and spent the first two or three hours feeling completely lost and at sea, unable to fully comprehend half the language that was being used or the tasks that we were being asked to implement. I mentioned to Ryan that I felt that I probably needed to have had a half of a semester of a coding class before I would have gotten everything out of the THATCamp that I should have gotten. Although that improved as things went along and we got in to concrete projects, and I also found everyone very gracious and the atmosphere enthusiastic, I was worried that my faculty who were only interested in investigating (and perhaps then only after my pleading) would be discouraged or uninterested in engaging with DH if a THATCamp was their first experience.

Ryan mentioned this in a tweet yesterday.

All-twitter-hell broke loose.

Well, not really. In fact it was a really fascinating and intellectually complex conversation–one I wouldn’t have thought could happen via Twitter. I won’t try to completely replicate that conversation here. You could go to Ryan’s twitter feed and find the essentials for yourself. It was clear, though, that Ryan’s tweet had touched what amounted to a raw digital nerve. Some twitterers were flabbergasted that anyone would find a THATCamp too daunting or that it could ever be alienating. Others assumed that the problem definitely must have been with me, that I was too shy to ask for help. Ultimately the conversation turned to a pretty serious engagement with the question of whether there were genuinely insider and exclusive groups and hierarchies within DH.

As a “noob”–which I discovered in the course of the twitter conversation yesterday is what I am–I am here to say without a hint of condemnation, “Yes, yes, yes there are.”

For me, this is not a moral or even a political statement, though it was very clear to me that for many people in the conversation this was a moral or political concern. To admit to hierarchies and exclusivity was a betrayal of the collaborative and radically democratic spirit that many feel is at the heart of DH work. I will say that these collaborative aspects are part of what most attracts me to what’s going on in DH–as little as I actually do know; I see it as a superb fit for some of the commitments my school has to the public humanities and to public service more generally, besides moving students in to more collaborative learning environments that will be useful to them in the world they are entering.

However, any academic discourse that is imaginable, maybe any discourse that is imaginable at all, operates by exclusion and inclusion simply given the facts that there are those who know the language and those who do not, there are those who are literate in the language and those who are not, there are those who are fluent in the language and those who are not, and there are those who are creators in with and of the language and there are those who are not. It is impossible for me to imagine how this could be otherwise.

The reason DH can be difficult and alienating for beginners like me is because we don’t know enough of the language to even know what to ask for. I will say I mused over the question of whether I had just been too shy to ask for help at the THATCamp. Being a fainting violet is not really a quality that will get you terribly far in administration, so I doubt it, but it may be that I could have asked for more help. The problem was, I felt so lost that I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of help to ask for. This is a basic function of discourse, to understand the parameters of the language games you are playing, to know what questions to ask, what moves to make and when, and where to go for the vocabulary you need. Its why you need consultants like Ryan, or teachers who are in the know. Its the rationale for the title of my post referencing Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe. DH is obviously a part of academe, even in its alt-academic forms, and it is increasingly central to academic work in the humanities, and there are an awful lot of people who are clueless about where to begin.

There is nothing morally or politically wrong with this or with being a part of an in group. To say there is would be to say there is something morally or politically wrong with being alive. Hyper-Calvinists aside, I don’t think this is a tenable position.

The problem, however, from an administrators point of view–and I speak in to this conversation primarily as an administrator who is trying to facilitate the work of others and promote the well-being of our students–is the pathways toward accessing the language and practices of this world aren’t always terribly clear. Indeed, ironically, I think some of the laudable democratic ethos in DH work and culture may contribute to this obscurity. Because a THATCamp–and so much other DH work–is so democratically organized, it means that one experience, conference or workshop may in fact really work well for rank beginners, while another may really require attendees to be a little more versed in the basics before attending.

For me as a person and as a thinker, that’s fine. I actually look forward to going to another THATCamp someday, even if I am just as lost as I was the first time around. My tenure no longer depends upon it–which gives me a freedom my junior faculty do not have.

However, as an administrator, that democratic quality is a disaster as I consider what kinds of professional development efforts to try to support with my faculty. I would not be able to tell whether a particular experience would be appropriate for a rank beginner who is hesitantly interested or at least willing to give this a try. Alternatively, I wouldn’t be able to know ahead of time whether a particular experience would be appropriate for a more advanced colleague who might go and get an iteration of the basics she already knows. My ability to manage my budgets in a responsible fashion is hampered by my inability to gauge what kinds of professional development experiences I should pursue or promote with my colleagues who are at very different places in their experience of and expertise in DH methodologies and practices.

The traditional life of a humanist academic is elitist in its own obvious ways with its own arcana and exclusionary practices. But the pathway toward access to its languages is fairly well marked, even if it is now increasingly travelled successfully by the very lucky very few. I could tell junior faculty members 10 years ago that if they wanted to succeed at my college they needed to do three or four things, and I could outline how they should go about doing them. I don’t sense that kind of pathway to DH work, yet, so while I am wanting mightily to get my faculty more involved with some of these efforts, I’m also aware that without a clearer path for their own professional development, I may be as likely to facilitate confusion as I am to promote professional development.

This problem may simply disappear as DH becomes more and more central to the humanist enterprise, but I suspect as it does become more and more central that the pathways to access will have to become more and more clearly marked. This means the development of disciplinary (or quasi-disciplinary–I am aware of the angst over thinking of DH as a discipline) protocols and expectations, and as importantly the expected means by which those elements of professional life are effectively accessed by beginners.

This means the recognition of certain gateways and the appointment of their gatekeepers, which all smacks a little bit of hierarchy and exclusion. However, while it’s true that roadmaps undemocratically dominate a landscape, they also get you where you need to go. And while gateways mark a boundary, they also let you in.

Anthropodermic Bibliopegy: Books in a pound of flesh

What College Should Be: Andrew Delbanco’s Errand in to the Wilderness

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I finished up Andrew Delbanco’s College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be last night, swiping to the last location on my Kindle app just as I was finishing up my nightly effort to subdue the flesh on an exercise bike at the Y. As you know, I’ve blogged a bit about about Delbanco and his investigations of college life a couple of times recently, here, and here, and here. Last one, I promise, but since I have actually finished the book I thought I ought to at least make a couple of summary comments.

First, Delbanco is very good on analyzing and representing the ideal values of the college education as it existed in the past. Especially, Delbano points out that our current discursive emphasis on an education for jobs–a rhetorical and imaginative virus that affects our president and our Tea Partiers alike–is a new phenomenon. Or rather, what is new is that a concern with jobs and economic well-being was always leavened by and even tertiary to other values. Colleges existed to create and shape a certain kind of person, not a certain kind of employee, and so their function was essentially moral and ethical. Colleges further existed to create public servants, not individual entrepreneurs, people whose goals was fundamentally the service of the public good rather than pursuit of private enterprise.

For Delbanco, these emphases within College life have been all but excised , at least in the rhetoric of their public rationale. I think he’s right about this in large degree. My own experience at such colleges gives me some hope that all is not lost: Messiah College where I work defines its mission as educating men and women toward maturity of intellect character and Christian faith for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society. That is the robust language of human transformation and public service that Delbanco eulogizes, and I think by and large we put our money where our mouth in our programming. At the same time, here as everywhere, prospective students and their parents often choose between us and other colleges on the basis of what they learn from our career center, and students have certainly been choosing majors primarily on the basis of their perceived job prospects rather than on the perception that college life is about the kinds of transformation that can occur. It is much the same at most faith based institutions that I know of, and Delbanco does a good job of showing how the rhetoric of economic gain rather than public service or personal transformation has come to dominate even our elite national liberal arts institutions.

Secondly, I think Delbanco does a good job of showing how the actual life of institutions–as opposed to their rhetoric–has never been one of realized pastoral ideals. In relation to the conflict between the quest for economic gain and the search for personal transformation, Delbanco points out that this has been a long standing conflict in American higher education.

One way of coming at this question was suggested around a century ago by Max Weber, who, not long before Sinclair Lewis invented “Winnemac,” proposed a distinction between two “polar opposites of types of education.” The types he had in mind correspond closely to the terms “college” and “university” as I have been using them. The first, associated with religion, is “to aid the novice to acquire a ‘new soul’ . . . and hence, to be reborn.” The second, associated with the bureaucratic structures of modern life, is to impart the kind of “specialized expert training” required for “administrative purposes— in the organization of public authorities, business offices, workshops, scientific or industrial laboratories,” as well as “disciplined armies.” 1 Many other serviceable terms could be substituted for Weber’s— knowledge versus skill; inspiration versus discipline; insight versus information; learning for its own sake versus learning for the sake of utility— but whatever terms we prefer, a good educational institution strives for both. “The two types do not stand opposed,” as Weber put it, “with no connections or transitions between them.” They coexist— or at least they should— in a dynamic relation.

Delbanco, Andrew (2012-03-22). College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Kindle Locations 1635-1645). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

This particular passage encouraged me to some degree, if only because I feel this tension continuously as a dean of Humanities at a small school. We are constantly asked to justify ourselves on the basis of the jobs or the security that we can provide and there seems to be no real room anymore for talking about the kinds of dramatic intellectual and moral transformation that occurs with some regularity as a student engages the great philosophical, literary, religious, and historical texts of the past, how much they have done for me in helping me overcome my own prejudices and ill-considered judgements, how they have helped to make me a better person than I would have been without them. On the other hand, while I think the language of economic self-interest is ascendant and at the moment tipping the scales against the balance that Weber thought important, it is good to know that the tension between these tendencies has always been there, and that purity on either end would probably be unhealthy. My own college defines itself as a college of the liberal and applied arts and sciences, building that tension in to its self-definition. Where and how to find that balance is always the question.

I came away in the end being uncertain whether Delbanco’s book actually helped me answer this last question. Delbanco’s book is best in answering the question of what college was. As he gets in to an analysis of what college is he is better at showing anecdotally the kinds of things that are happening than providing and analysis of the massive social forces that have brought us to this point. When it gets to the question of what college should be, I don’t think Delbanco provides a satisfactory answer. Its clear that he believes we have lost the ethical and public service imperatives of an earlier rhetoric, however imperfectly those ideals were realized. And to that degree it seems clear that he thinks we ought to return to those ideals. However, there is no real road map forward , no real plan for how to achieve the values he desires, other than a few random allusions toward things like humanities programs that serve prison populations, or college policies that emphasize degree completion for the common person. He calls for more collaboration with secondary schools. All things I too would applaud or call for.

These are laudable instances, but hardly a plan for the kinds of problems that are facing institutions or facing the system of higher education as it exists in the present. I felt in the end that Delbanco was more than a little like the Puritans whose educational ideals he admires. The Puritans called for an errand in to the wilderness, but mostly clung pretty close to the coast, seeing the wilderness as dangerous and forbidding. For Delbanco, the world of higher education is such a wilderness, a place roaring and full of devils, a place for the lost. I didn’t see a plan here for emptying the forest of its demons, or sufficient directions for how and where to clear a path in the underbrush.

Is the decline of the Humanities responsible for Wall Street Corruption?

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Andrew Delbanco’s view in a recent Huffington Post essay is “Yes”, at least to some indeterminate degree, though I admit that the title of his post “A Modest Proposal” gave me some pause given its Swiftian connotations:

What I do know is that at the elite universities from which investment firms such as Goldman Sachs recruit much of their talent, most students are no longer seeking a broad liberal education. They want, above all, marketable skills in growth fields such as information technology. They study science, where the intellectual action is. They sign up for economics and business majors as avenues to the kind of lucrative career Mr. Smith enjoyed. Much is to be gained from these choices, for both individuals and society. But something is also at risk. Students are losing a sense of how human beings grappled in the past with moral issues that challenge us in the present and will persist into the future. This is the shrinking province of what we call “the humanities.”

For the past twenty years, the percentage of students choosing to major in the humanities — in literature, philosophy, history, and the arts — has been declining at virtually all elite universities. This means, for instance, that fewer students encounter the concept of honor in Homer’s Iliad, or Kant’s idea of the “categorical imperative” — the principle that Mr. Smith thinks is out of favor at Goldman: that we must treat other people as ends in themselves rather than as means to our own satisfaction. Mr. Smith was careful to say that he was not aware of anything illegal going on. But few students these days read Herman Melville’s great novella, Billy Budd, about the difficult distinction between law and justice.

Correlation is not cause, and it’s impossible to prove a causal relation between what students study in college and how they behave in their post-college lives. But many of us who still teach the humanities believe that a liberal education can strengthen one’s sense of solidarity with other human beings — a prerequisite for living generously toward others. One of the striking discoveries to be gained from an education that includes some knowledge of the past is that certain fundamental questions persist over time and require every generation to answer them for itself.

via Andrew Delbanco: A Modest Proposal.

This is consonant with Delbanco’s thesis–expressed in his book College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be–that education in college used to be about the education of the whole person but has gradually been emptied of the moral content of its originally religious more broadly civic vision, and the preprofessional and pecuniary imagination has become the dominant if not the sole rationale for pursuing an education. I am viscerally attracted to this kind of argument, so I offer a little critique rather than cheerleading. First, while I do think its the case that an education firmly rooted in the humanities can provide for the kinds of deep moral reflection that forestalls a purely instrumentalist view of our fellow citizens–or should I say consumers–it’s also very evidently the case that people with a deep commitment to the arts and humanities descend into moral corruption as easily as anyone else. The deeply felt anti-semitism of the dominant modernists would be one example, and the genteel and not so genteel racism of the Southern Agrarians would be another. When Adorno said that there was no poetry after Auschwitz, he was only partly suggesting that the crimes of the 20th century were beyond the redemption of literature; he also meant more broadly that the dream that literature and culture could save us was itself a symptom of our illness, not a solution to it. Delbanco might be too subject to this particular dream, I think.

Secondly, I think that this analysis runs close to blaming college students for not majoring in or studying more in the humanities and is a little bit akin to blaming the victim–these young people have inherited the world we’ve given them, and we would do well to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask what kind of culture we’ve put in place that would make the frantic pursuit of economic gain in the putative name of economic security a sine qua non in the moral and imaginative lives of our children.

That having been said. Yes, I do think the world–including the world of Wall Street–would be better if students took the time to read Billy Budd or Beloved, wedging it in somewhere between the work study jobs, appointments with debt counselors, and multiple extracurriculars and leadership conferences that are now a prerequisite for a job after college.

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