Category Archives: Books

Why digital humanities is already a basic skill, not just a specialist niche–Matthew Kirschenbaum

Sometimes I think we humanists “of a certain age,” to put the issue politely, imagine digital humanities as an optional activity that will be filled by an interesting niche of young professors who take their place in the academy as yet another niche sub-discipline, something that research universities hire for and small colleges struggle hopelessly to replicate. It may be indeed that small colleges will struggle to integrate digital humanities in to their own infrastructures, but I think the general picture of Digital Humanities as an optional sub-discipline will simply be unsustainable. The argument smells a little of the idea that e-books are a nice sub-genre of texts, but not something the average humanist has to worry that much about. I think, to the contrary, that digital humanities and the multitude of techniques that it entails, will become deeply integrated in a fundament way with the basic methodologies of how we go about doing business, akin to knowing how to do close reading or how to maneuver our way through libraries.

Although pointing out this fact is not his main point, Matthew Kirschenbaum–already a Digital Humanities patron saint in many respects–has an essay in The Chronicle that points to this fact. Kirschenbaum is currently interested in how we preserve digital material, and the problems are just as complex if not moreso than the general question of how and when to save print materials. Moreso to the degree that we cannot be sure that the current forms in which we place our digital intelligence will actually be usable five years from now. The consequences for humanities research and writing are profound and must be considered. From Kirschenbaum:

Digital preservation is the sort of problem we like to assume others are thinking about. Surely someone, somewhere, is on the job. And, in lots of ways, that is true. Dire warnings of an approaching “digital dark ages” appear periodically in the media: Comparisons are often made to the early years of cinema—roughly half of the films made before 1950 have been lost because of neglect.

But the fact is that enormous resources—government, industry, and academic—are being marshaled to attack the problem. In the United States, for example, the Library of Congress has been proactive through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Archivists of all stripes now routinely receive training in not only appraisal and conservation of digital materials but also metadata (documentation and description) and even digital forensics, through which we can stabilize and authenticate electronic records. (I now help teach such a course at the University of Virginia’s renowned Rare Book School.) Because of the skills of digital archivists, you can read former presidents’ e-mail messages and examine at Emory University Libraries a virtual recreation of Salman Rushdie’s first computer. Jason Scott’s Archive Team, meanwhile, working without institutional support, leaps into action to download and redistribute imperiled Web content.

What this suggests is that Rushdie’s biographers will have to not so much know how to sift through piles of letters, but how to recreate digital archives that authors themselves may not be interested in preserving. Biographers of the present and surely the future, will have to be Digital technicians, as well as close readers of the digital archives they are able to recover.

Kirschenbaum goes on to suggest that most of us must do this work on our own, and must do this work for ourselves, in preserving our own archives.

But despite those heroic efforts, most individuals must still be their own digital caretakers. You and I must take responsibility for our own personal digital legacy. There are no drive-through windows (like the old photo kiosks) where you can drop off your old floppies and pick up fresh files a day or two later. What commercial services are available tend to assume data are being recovered from more recent technology (like hard drives), and these also can be prohibitively expensive for average consumers. (Organizations like the Library of Congress occasionally sponsor public-information sessions and workshops to teach people how to retrieve data from old machines, but those are obviously catch as catch can.)

Research shows that many of us just put our old disks, CD’s, and whatnot into shoeboxes and hope that if we need them again, we’ll figure out how to retrieve the data they contain when the time comes. (In fact, researchers such as Cathy Marshall, at Microsoft Research, have found that some people are not averse to data loss—that the mishaps of digital life provide arbitrary and not entirely unwelcome opportunities for starting over with clean slates.)

This last, of course, is an interesting problem. Authors have often been notoriously averse to having their mail probed and prodded for signs of the conflicts and confessions, preferring that the “work” stand on its own. Stories of authors burning their letters and manuscripts are legion, nightmarishly so for the literary scholar. Such literary self-immolations are both harder and easier in a digital world. My drafts and emails can disappear at the touch of a button. On the other hand, I am told that a hard drive is never actually erased for those who are really in the know. Then again, the task of scholar who sees a writers computer as his archive is in some ways vastly more difficult than that of the writer who was an assiduous collector of his type-written drafts. Does every deletion and spell correct count as a revision. What should we trace as an important change, and what should we disregard as detritus. These are, of course, the standard archival questions, but it seems to me they are exponentially more complicated in a digital archive where a text may change a multitude of times in a single sitting, something not so possible in a typewritten world.

Well, these are the kinds of things Kirschenbaum takes up. And having the tools to apply to such questions will be the task for every humanist in the future, not a narrow coterie.

Mark Sandel–The commodification of everything

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I’ve enjoyed listening occasionally to Mark Sandel’s lectures in philosophy via iTunes. He has an interesting new article in the April Atlantic focusing on the ways in which nearly everything in American life, at least, has been reduced to a market value. Despite the admonition that money can’t buy me love, we are pretty sure that it can buy everything else, and that we are willing to sell just about anything, including body parts and personal dignity, for whatever the market will bear.

Sandel somewhat peculiarly to my mind traces this to a post-Cold War phenomenon.

WE LIVE IN A TIME when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.

As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.

The last gasp Marxists I studied with at Duke had a word for what Sandel sees and descries, commodification, and it didn’t mysterious just come upon us in the 1980s. Commodification, the rendering of every bit of life as a commodity that can bought and sold, is the central thrust of capitalist economies in the 20th century, perhaps the central feature of capitalism per se. The essential act of commodification is at the center of Marx’s understanding that the worker in some very real sense sells him or herself through selling his or her labor power. Thus, human beings were commodified well before people became willing to sell tattoos on their foreheads to advertise products. So Sandel’s perplexity and astonishment at this state of affairs in our contemporary economy strikes me as the perplexity of someone who has only recently awakened from a dream.

On the other hand, I do think Sandel is on to something. It is the case that despite this thrust of capitalist economies (and, to be frank, I’m not sure that Marxist economies were all that different), there have been sectors of culture and their accompanying institutions that resisted their own commodification. The edifice of modernism in the arts and literature is built on the notion that the arts could be a transcendent world apart from degradations of the social world, including perhaps especially its markets. The difficulty and density of modern art and literature was built in part out of a desire that it not be marketable in any typical sense. Modern art was sometimes ugly precisely to draw attention to the difficulty and difference of its aesthetic and intellectual properties. It was meant not to sell, or at least not to sell too well. Remember that the next time a Picasso sells for millions. Similarly, the church and in a different way educational institutions retained a relative independence form the marketplace, or at least resisted the notion that they could be reduced to market forces. Whether claiming to provide access to the sacred or to enduring human values, religious institutions and educational institutions served–even when they were corrupt or banal–to remind the culture that there was a world apart, something that called us to be better than ourselves, or at least reminded us that our present values were not all the values that there were.

Sandel rightly notes that that residue has all but disappeared, and the result has been an hollowing out of our public life, and a debasement of our humanity.

In hopes of avoiding sectarian strife, we often insist that citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions behind when they enter the public square. But the reluctance to admit arguments about the good life into politics has had an unanticipated consequence. It has helped prepare the way for market triumphalism, and for the continuing hold of market reasoning.

In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is “How much?” Markets don’t wag fingers. They don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones. Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged.

This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.

Sandel wonders about a way to connect to some kind of moral discourse to inform public life, something that will reach beyond the reach of markets, but he clearly despairs that such a connection can be found. I think there’s good reason. Rapidly our educational institutions have become factories that shamelessly advertise themselves as places where people can make themselves in to better commodities than they were before, and which build programs designed to sell themselves to the highest number of student-customers possible. Our religious institutions are floundering. Only today I read in Time magazine that the rise of so-called “nones”–people who claim to have no religious affiliation–is one of the most notable developments in our spiritual culture. Such people often seek to be spiritual but not religious on the grounds that religions are dogmatic and inflexible. I have come to wonder whether that dogmatism and inflexibility points to the hard won truth that it is not good enough to just go along to get along.

One wonders, in fact, whether a spirituality based on getting along really provides a hard point of resistance to the tendency to see everything in life–whether my beliefs or my ethics–as an investment that must pay off if it is to be worth keeping. I wonder, too, whether our educational systems and institutions are up to the task of providing an education that isn’t just another instance of the market. As for art, writing, and literature. Well, who knows? Modernism was not always commodified, though it very quickly became so. I do find it intriguing that this point of hyper-commodification is also a time when there has been an explosion of free or relatively free writing and music on the internet. There is a small return to the notion of the artist as a community voice, with musician and poets producing work for free on the internet, and making their living through performance or through other jobs–escaping or at least partially escaping the notion that we produce work primarily to sell it. This is a small resistance, but worth thinking about.

I wonder if there are other ways our culture is equipped to resist in a larger collective fashion, the turning of our lives in to the image of a can of soup?

Living in an e-plus world: Students now prefer digital texts when given a choice

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A recent blog by Nick DeSantis in the Chronicle points to a survey by the Pearson Foundation that suggests Tablet ownership is on the rise. That’s not surprising, but more significant is the fact that among tablet users there’s a clear preference for digital texts over the traditional paper codex, something we haven’t seen before even among college students of this wired generation:

One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years—a 15 percent increase over last year’s survey. More than a third said they intended to buy a tablet sometime in the next six months.

This year’s poll also found that the respondents preferred digital books over printed ones. It’s a reversal of last year’s results and goes against findings of other recent studies, which concluded that students tend to choose printed textbooks. The new survey found that nearly six in 10 students preferred digital books when reading for class, compared with one-third who said they preferred printed textbooks.

I find this unsurprising as it matches up pretty well with my own experience. 5 years ago I could never imagine doing any significant reading on a tablet. Now I do all my reading of scholarly journals and long form journalism–i.e The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, The Chronicle Review–on my iPad. And while I still tend to prefer the codex for the reading of novels and other book length works, the truth is that preference is slowly eroding as well. As I become more familiar with the forms of e-reading, the notions of its inherent inferiority, like the notions of any unreflective prejudice, gradually fade in the face of familiarity.

And yet I greet the news of this survey with a certain level of panic, not panic that it should happen at all, but panic that the pace of change is quickening and we are hardly prepared, by we I mean we in the humanities here in small colleges and elsewhere. I’ve blogged on more than one occasion about my doubts about e-books and yet my sense of their inevitable ascendancy. For instance here on the question of whether e-books are being foisted on students by a cabal of publishers and administrators like myself out to save a buck (or make a buck as the case may be), and here on the nostalgic but still real feeling that I have that print codex forms of books have an irreplaceable individuality and physicality that the mere presence of text in a myriad of e-forms does not suffice to replace.

But though I’ve felt the ascendancy of e-books was inevitable, I think I imagined a 15 or 20 year time span in which print and e-books would mostly live side by side. Our own librarians here at Messiah College talk about a “print-plus” model for libraries, as if e-book will remain primarily an add on for some time to come. I wonder. Just as computing power increases exponentially, it seems to me that the half-life of print books is rapidly diminishing. I now wonder whether we will have five years before students will expect their books to be in print–all their books, not just their hefty tomes for CHEM 101 that can be more nicely illustrated with iBook Author–but also their books for English and History classes as well. This is an “e-plus” world where print will increasingly not be the norm, but the supplement to fill whatever gaps e-books have not yet bridged, whatever textual landscapes have not yet been digitized.

Despite warnings, we aren’t yet ready for an e-plus world. Not only do we not know how to operate the apps that make these books available, we don’t even know how to critically study books in tablet form. Yet learning what forms of critical engagement are possible and necessary will be required. I suspect, frankly, that our current methods developed out of a what was made possible by the forms that texts took, rather than forms following our methodological urgencies. This means that the look of critical study in the classroom will change radically in the next ten years. What will it look like?

Tonguecat by Peter Verhelst

Giving students what they want whether they want it or not

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The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that one study shows that in some cases e-textbooks are saving students the grand total of one greenback per course. Figuring in the costs of hardware, tech support, infrastructure, and etcetera that are adding immensely to the cost of tuition anyway—not to mention the disappearance of a secondary market where they can resell their textbooks–I really wonder whether, so far, e-textbooks might not be costing students money in the short run. Until there is a much larger economy of scale I suspect that cost savings will remain negligible. Even then, it’s not clear. Though general consumption of e-books has skyrocketed in relative terms over the past couple of years, the cost of e-books has actually crept upward such that the difference between the cost of an e-book and the cost of a paperback on Amazon is small, and clearly costs more than a good used paperback available easily through Amazon’s resellers or through good used bookstores like my favorite, Midtown Scholar here in Harrisburg.

In some ways I’m even more interested in the practical and usability costs that students are experiencing. According to the Chronicle, many students struggled to know how to use the technology effectively and lacked the basic computing skills necessary. Professors were called upon to be IT instructors. This flies in the face of our ideological conviction that young people naturally adapt to technology in a way their professors do not. I don’t have a grasp of the details here, but it surely seems that some professors are being required to spend time away from their disciplines in order to get students up to speed on how to use the technology.

The electronic rental model caused a few other headaches for students and professors at the college, according to the study. Some students struggled to use the e-textbooks, thanks to disparities in basic computing skills. Those problems led some professors to spend class time conducting their own in-class tutorials, and even afterward a few said it was unclear who should be providing continuing technical instruction—faculty, campus IT staff, or representatives from the publishers.

And, of course, predictably, there are massive infrastructure issues involved with swift changes to e-books as the basic tool of the university.

Even students who adapted to the technology quickly sometimes struggled to open up the digital course materials during lectures. Wireless networks in classrooms where several students were using e-textbooks at once sometimes became overwhelmed, making access to publishers’ sites inconsistent.

I should probably say that this is not a screed against technology or e-books. I do almost all my own occasional reading on my iPad, and I do read e-books, though I continue to prefer the old codex for anything over about 20 pages long. I do think, though, that we ought to proceed cautiously with the notion that technology is the salvation for better learning at a lower cost. Once we add in the infrastructure necessary to make sure students can use the technology effectively—hardware, software, sufficient bandwidth, tech support and training for students and teachers on a permanent and consistent basis (really 24 hours a day given the way education is heading)–its unclear that students will have really saved anything, because to be sure it will be the students or their parents who are paying for it.

I think, to be frank, that there is a certain inevitability about this transformation to which we will all have to adapt and are already adapting. But we really ought to justify that transformation on the basis of whether students are learning more or not rather than on costs savings that I don’t think are really happening. I just think we need to get clearer on the advantages or e-books to students learning, if they are there, before we give students even more of what they want whether they want it or not.

Libraries of the self: Or, are print books more ephemeral than e-books, and is it a bad thing if they are?

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There’s a remarkable consistency in the way that readers write about their libraries. Tropes of friendship, solace, and refuge abound, as well as metaphors of journey and travel that tell the tale of intellectual sojourn that books can occasion and recall for their readers. Though I cannot recall the details of their first readings, I still treasure my Princeton paperback editions of the work of Soren Kierkegaard, the now ratty Vintage-Random House versions of Faulkner with their stark

Man made of books

white on black covers and yellowing pages, my tattered and now broken copies of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems, and his Selected Essays, held together by a rubber band, the band itself now so old it threatens to crumble into dust. I keep these books now, not so much because of the information they contain. Even the notes I’ve written in them aren’t all that entertaining and hold only a little nostalgic value: I was a much more earnest reader as a younger person, but also duller, less informed, and more predictable, at least to my 51 year old eyes. Still, these books are the talismans of a journey, and I keep them as stones set up to my memory of that journey, of the intellectual and imaginative places I’ve come to inhabit and the doorways I passed through to get here. In that sense, a library represents both time passages and the attendant loss as much or more than they represent the knowledge and the information that has been gained.

Ariel Dorfman has a very nice meditation on the relationship between his library and his intellectual, political, and material journey in the September 23^rd edition of the Chronicle Review. In it Dorfman tells the story of his lost library, a library that he had to leave behind in Chile at the beginning of his exile. The library was partially destroyed in a flood during his absence, and then partially recovered again when he returned to Chile in 1990. As with many memoirs of reading, Dorfman understands the library as a symbol of the self.

Those books, full of scribbled notes in the margins, had been my one luxury in Chile, companions of my intellectual voyages, my best friends in the world. During democratic times, before the military takeover, I had poured any disposable income into that library, augmenting it with hundreds of volumes my doting parents acquired for me. It was a collection that overflowed in every impossible direction, piling up even in the bathroom and the kitchen.

It was a daily comfort, in the midst of our dispossession in exile, to imagine that cosmic biblioteca back home, gathering nothing more lethal than dust. That was my true self, my better self, that was the life of reading and writing I aspired to, the space where I had been at my most creative, penning a prize-winning novel, many short stories, innumerable articles and poems and analyses, in spite of my own doubts as to whether literature had any place at all in a revolution where reality itself was more challenging than my wildest imaginings. To pack the books away once we fled from the country would have been to acknowledge our wandering as everlasting. Even buying a book was proof that we intended to stay away long enough to begin a new library.

But, of course, Dorfman did begin a new library in his many years of exile, and his Chilean library was altered not only by the natural disaster of the flood, but also by the human transience whereby Dorfman himself changed and so changed his relationship with his books. The changing shape of Dorfman’s library becomes an image of historical and personal change that must finally be embraced since it is unavoidable.

Six months later I had left Chile again, this time of my own free will, this time for good. I have puzzled often how I could have spent 17 years trying to go back and then, when I did indeed return, I forced myself to leave. It is still not clear to me if it was the country itself that had changed too much or if I was the one who had been so drastically altered by my exile that I no longer fit in, but whatever the cause, it left me forever divided, aware that my search for purity, simplicity, one country and one language and one set of allegiances was no longer possible.

It also left me with two libraries: the one I had rescued back home and the one that I have built outside Chile over the years and that is already so large that not one more new book fits in the shelves. I have had to start giving hundreds of books away and boxing many others in order to donate them to Duke University, where I teach. But no matter how many I get rid of, it does not look likely that there will ever be space to bring my whole Chilean library over.

And yet, I had already lost it once when I left my country and then regained half when that phone call came in 1982, and rescued what was left yet again in 1990 and can dream therefore that perhaps, one day, I will unite some books from Santiago with the thousands of books bought during my long exile. I can only hope and dream that before I die, a day will come when I will look up from the desk where I write these words, and my whole library, from here and there, from outside and inside Chile, will greet me, I can only hope and dream and pray that I will not remain divided forever.

It’s possible, of course, to lament our losses, and I suppose in some sense the vision of a library of the self is a utopian dream of resurrection wherein all our books, all the intellectual and imaginative doorways that we’ve passed through, will be gathered together in a room without loss. But I also sense in Dorfman’s essay a sense that loss and fragility is one part of the meaningfulness of his books and his library. I know that in some sense I love my books because they are old and fragile, or they will become that way. They are treasured not only for the information they contain, but for the remembered self to which they testify.

I started this post thinking I would focus on the ways we sometimes talk about the ephemera of electronic digital texts. There is something to that, and we’ve discussed that some over at my other group blog on the Digital Humanities. At the same time, there is another sense in which e-texts are not ephemeral enough. They do not grow old, they are always the same, they cannot show me the self I’ve become because that implies a history that e-texts do not embody. While looking at my aging and increasingly dusty library, I feel them as a mirror to the person I’ve become. Looking at my e-books stored on my iPad I see…..texts. Do they mirror me? Perhaps in a way, but they do not embody my memories.

If I give a book away to a student, I always miss it with a certain imaginative ache, knowing that what was once mine is now gone and won’t be retrieved. Somehow I’ve given that student something of my self, and so I don’t give away books lightly or easily. If I give a student a gift card for iTunes….well, perhaps this requires no explanation. And if I delete a book from my iBooks library I can retrieve it any time I want, until the eschaton, one imagines, or at least as long as my iTunes account exists.

Michael Hart and Project Gutenberg

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I felt an unaccountable sense of loss at reading tonight in the Chronicle of Higher Education (paper edition no-less) that the founder of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart, has died at the age of 64. This is a little strange since I had no idea who had founded Project Gutenberg until I read the obituary. But Project Gutenberg I know, and I think I knew immediately when I ran across it that it was already and would continue to be an invaluable resource for readers and scholars, this even though I’ve never been much of a champion of e-books. I guess it felt a bit like I had discovered belatedly the identity of a person who had given me a great gift and never had the chance to thank him.

One aspect of Hart’s vision for Project Gutenberg struck me in relationship to some of the things I’ve been thinking about in relationship to the Digital Humanities. That’s Hart’s decision to go with something that was simple and nearly universal as an interface rather than trying to sexy, with it, and up to date. Says the Chronicle

His early experiences clearly informed his choices regarding Project Gutenberg. He was committed to lo-fi—the lowest reasonable common denominator of textual presentation. That was for utterly pragmatic reasons: He wanted his e-texts to be readable on 99 percent of the existing systems of any era, and so insisted on “Plain-Vanilla ASCII” versions of all the e-texts generated by Project Gutenberg.

That may seem a small—even retro—conceit, but in fact it was huge. From the 80s on, as the Internet slowly became more publicly manifest, there were many temptations to be “up to date”: a file format like WordStar, TeX, or LaTeX in the 1980s, or XyWrite, MS Word, or Adobe Acrobat in the 90s and 2000s, might provide far greater formatting features (italics, bold, tab stops, font selections, extracts, page representations, etc.) than ASCII. But because Mr. Hart had tinkered with technology all his life, he knew that “optimal formats” always change, and that today’s hi-fi format was likely to evolve into some higher-fi format in the next year or two. Today’s ePub version 3.01 was, to Mr. Hart, just another mile marker along the highway. To read an ASCII e-text, via FTP, or via a Web browser, required no change of the presentational software—thereby ensuring the broadest possible readership.

Mr. Hart’s choice meant that the Project Gutenberg corpus—now 36,000 works—would always remain not just available, but readable. What’s more, it has been growing, in every system since.

This is no small thing. The ephemeral character of digital humanities projects bothers me. By ephemeral I don’t mean they are intellectually without substance. I think the intellectual character of the work can be quite profound. However, the forms in which the work is done can disappear or be outdated tomorrow. Hart’s decision to use ASCII is in some sense an effort to replicate the durability of the book. Books, for all the fragility of paper, have a remarkable endurance and stability overall. The basic form doesn’t change and the book used by an ancient in the middle ages is, more or less, still usable by me in the same fashion. By contrast I can’t even open some of my old files in my word processor. I think the work I did was substantial, but the form it was placed in was not enduring. Harts decision makes sense to me, but I’m not sure how it might be extended to other kinds of projects in the digital humanities.

In Praise of Reviews, Reviewing, and Reviewers

Grading the Crowd

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Can the wisdom of crowds apply to grading student papers, or to evaluation of culture more generally? What about the quality of a theological argument, or a decision about foreign policy? We’re taken a lot with the idea of crowds and collaboration lately, and not without good reason. I think there’s a great deal to be said about getting beyond the notion of the isolated individual at work in his study; especially in the humanities I think we need to learn something from our colleagues in the sciences and think through what collaborative engagement as a team of scholars might look like as a norm rather than an exception. At the same time, is there a limit to collective learning and understanding? Can we detect the difference between the wisdom of the crowd and the rather mindless preferences of a clique, or a mob. I found myself thinking about these things again this evening as I read Cathy Davidson’s latest piece in The Chronicle Review, “Please Give Me Your Divided Attention: Transforming Learning for the Digital Age.”

Cathy Davidson, "Now You See It"

I wrote about Davidson a couple of days ago–she’s around a lot lately, as authors tend to be when a new book comes out that a publisher has decided to push—and I feel almost bad at taking up only my crabbiest reactions to her recent work. First, let me say that I briefly crossed paths with Davidson at Duke where she was hired the year I was finished my doctorate in English. She seemed like a breath of fresh and genuine air in a department that could sometime choke on its collective self-importance, and the enthusiasm and generosity and love of teaching that Davidson evinces in this essay was evident then as well, though I never had her for class. And, as this comment suggests, I think there’s a lot in this essay that’s really important to grapple with. First, her suggestions of the ways that she and some of her colleagues at Duke trusted students with an experiment in iPod pedagogy paid off in so many unexpected ways, and we now know a good bit of that was far ahead of its time. Moreover, she paints a wonderful picture of students as collaborative teachers in the learning process in her course on the way neuroscience is changing everything. Still, as with a lot of these things that focus on student-centeredness, I find that promising insights are blinded by what amounts to a kind of ideology that may not be as deeply informed about human action as it really ought to be. I felt this way in Davidson’s discussion of grading.

There are many ways of crowdsourcing, and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading. The blogosphere was convinced that either I or my students would be pulling a fast one if the grading were crowdsourced and students had a role in it. That says to me that we don’t believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will “count on the test.” As an educator, I find that very depressing. As a student of the Internet, I also find it implausible. If you give people the means to self-publish—whether it’s a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others. But much of our emphasis on grading is based on the assumption that learning is like cod-liver oil: It is good for you, even though it tastes horrible going down. And much of our educational emphasis is on getting one answer right on one test—as if that says something about the quality of what you have learned or the likelihood that you will remember it after the test is over.

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Davidson’s last minute veering into ad hominem covers over the fact that she doesn’t provide any actual evidence for the superiority of her method, offers a cultural fact for a substantive good—if this is how things are done in the age of digital thinking, it must be good, you old fogies—seems to crassly assume that any theory of judgment that does not rely on the intuitions of 20 year olds is necessarily anti-democratic and authoritarian, and glibly overlooks the social grounding within which her own experiment was even possible. All of this does sound like a lot of stuff that comes out of graduate departments in English, Duke not least of all, but I wonder if the judgment is really warranted.

An alternate example would be a class I occasionally teach, when I have any time to teach at all any more, on book reviewing. In the spirit of democratizing the classroom, I usually set this course up as a kind of book contest in which students choose books to review and on the basis of those reviews, books proceed through a process of winnowing, until at last, with two books left, we write reviews of the finalists and then vote for our book of the year. The wisdom of the crowd does triumph in some sense because through a process of persuasion students have to convince their classmates what books are worth reading next. The class is partly about the craft of book reviewing, partly about the business of book publishing, and partly about theories of value and evaluation. We spend time not only thinking about how to write effective book reviews for different markets, we discuss how theorists from Kant to Pierre Bourdieu to Barbara Herrnstein Smith discuss the nature of value, all in an effort to think through what we are saying when we finally sit down and say one thing is better than another thing.

The first two times I taught this class, I gave the students different lists of books. One list included books that were short listed for book awards, one list included first time authors, and one list included other books from notable publishers that I had collected during the previous year. I told them that to begin the class they had to choose three books to read and review from the lists that I had provided, and that at least one book had to be from a writer of color (my field of expertise being Ethnic literature of the U.S., I reserved the right). They could also choose one book simply through their own research to substitute for a book on one of my lists. Debates are always spirited, and the reading is always interesting. Students sometimes tell me that this was one of their favorite classes.

The most recent time I taught the class, I decided to take the steps in democratizing one step further by allowing the students to choose three books entirely on their own accord. Before class began I told them how to go about finding books through the use of major industry organs like Publishers Weekly, as well as how to use search engines on Amazon and elsewhere—which, their digital knowledge notwithstanding, students are often surprised at what you can do on a search engine. The only other guidance was students would ultimately have to justify their choices by defending in their reviews why they liked the books and thought they could be described as good works of literature, leaving open what we meant by terms like “good” and “literature” since that was part of the purpose of the course.

The results were probably predictable but left me disheartened nonetheless. Only one book out of fifty some books in the first round was by a writer of color. A predictable problem, but one I had kept my fingers crossed would not occur. More than half the books chosen by my students were from romance, mystery, fantasy lit, and science fiction genres. Strictly speaking I didn’t have a problem with that since I think great works of fiction can be written in all kinds of genres, and most works of what we call literary fiction bear the fingerprints of their less reputable cousins (especially mystery writing, in my view, but that’s another post). I thought there might be a chance that there would be some undiscovered gem in the midst. I do not have the time to read all fifty books, of course, but rely on students to winnow for me and then try to read every book that gets to the round of eight. It’s fair to say that in my personal authoritarian aesthetic, none of the books that fell in to that generic category could have been called a great work of fiction, though several of them were decent enough reads. Still, I was happy to go with this and see where things would take us, relatively sure that as things went on and we had to grapple with what it meant to evaluate prose, we would probably still come out with some pretty good choices.

Most of the works that I would have considered literary were knocked out by the second round, though it is the case that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom made it all the way to the finals, paired against Lisa Unger’s entry from 2010, whose title I can’t even remember now. In the end the class split almost down the middle, but chose Unger’s book as the best book they had read during the course of the semester. Not that I thought it was a terrible book. It was a nice enough read and Unger is a decent enough mystery writer. But being asked to remember the book is a little like being asked to remember my last trip to MacDonalds. One doesn’t go there for memorable dining experience, and one doesn’t read Lisa Unger in order come up with books that we will care to remember several weeks after having set them down. But what was perhaps most intriguing to me was that after an hour long discussion of the two books in which students offered spirited defenses of each writer, I asked them that if they could project themselves in to the year 2020 and had to choose only one book to include on a syllabus in a course on the best books of 2010, which book would it be. Without exception the students voted for Franzen’s book. When I asked the students who changed their votes why this would be, they said “We think that Franzen is more important, we just liked reading Unger more.”

This is the nub. Can the wisdom of crowds decide what is most important? To that, the answer can only be “sometimes”. As often crowds choose what is conveniently at hand, satisfies a sweet tooth, or even the desire for revenge. Is there a distinction between what is important or what is true and what is merely popular? Collaboration can lead us past blindnesses, but it is not clear that the subjectivity of a crowd is anything but blind (in my original draft I typed “bling”, a telling typographical slip and one that may be truer and more interesting than “blind.” It is not clear that they can consistently be relied upon by their intuition to decide what ought to last. This may not be digital thinking, but at least it is thinking, something crowds cannot be always relied upon to do.

If we could really rely on crowds to make our choices, we would discover that there is really very little to choose between almost anything. Going on Amazon, what is amazing is that four stars is the average score for all of the 100,000s of thousands of books that are catalogued. And popularity trumps everything: Lisa Scottoline scores higher in a lot of cases than Jane Austen. Literally everything is above average and worth my time. This is because in the world of the crowd, people mostly choose to be with those crowds that are most like themselves and read those things that are most likely to reinforce the sense they have that they are in the right crowd to begin with. This is true as even elementary studies of internet usage have pointed out. Liberals read other liberals, and delight in their wisdom and the folly of conservatives. Conservatives read other conservatives and do likewise. This too is digital thinking, and in this case it is quite easily seen that crowds can become authoritarian over and against the voice of the marginalized. My students choices to not read students of color unless I tell them to is only one small reminder of that.

Which leads to one last observation. I wonder, indeed, whether it is not the case that this experiment worked so well at Duke because students at Duke already know what it takes to get an A. That is, in some sense Davidson is not really crowdsourcing at all but is relying on the certain educational processes that will deliver students well-attuned to certain forms of cultural excellence, able to create effectively and “challenge” the status quot because they are already deeply embedded within those forms of culture excellence and all the assumptions they entail. That is, as with many pedagogical theories offered by folks at research institutions, Davidson isn’t theorizing from the crowd but from a tiny elite and extremely accomplished sample. As Gerald Graff points out, most of us most want to teach the students that don’t need us, that means most of us want to teach at places where none of the students actually need us. Davidson’s lauding of her students in the fact that they don’t’ really need her to learn may merely be an index of their privilege, not the inherent wisdom of crowds or the superiority of her pedagogical method. Her students have already demonstrated that they know what it takes to get A’s in almost everything because they have them—and massively high test scores besides—or they are unusually gifted in other ways or they wouldn’t be at Duke. These are the students who not only read all their AP reading list the summer before class started, they also read all the books related to the AP reading list and have attended tutoring sessions to learn to write about them besides.

Let me hasten to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with their being accomplished. On some level, I was one of them in having gone to good private colleges and elite graduate programs. But it is a mistake to assume that the well-learned practices of the elite, the cultural context that reinforces those practices, and the habits of mind that enable the kinds of things that Davidson accomplished actual form the basis for a democratizing pedagogy for everyone. Pierre Bourdieu 101.

Tchotchkes R’US: Formerly known as Barnes and Nobles, Booksellers

4 Replies

Like a beaten dog wagging its tail as it returns to the master for one more slap, I keep returning to Barnes and Nobles, hoping for a dry bone or at least a condescending pat on the head. Mostly getting the slap. I’m wondering lately how much longer B&N can hold on to the subtitle of their name with a straight face. I admit that for purists Barnes and Nobles was never much of a bookseller in the first place, the corporate ambiance just a bit too antiseptic for the crowd that prefers their books straight, preferably with the slightest scent of dust and mold. But as a person that has spent the entirety of his life in flyover country, Barnes and Nobles and its recently deceased cousin Borders seemed something like salvation. If the ambiance was corporate, the books were real, and they were many. If there were too few from independent publishers, there were more than enough good books to last any reader a lifetime, and I spent many hours on my own wandering the shelves, feeling that ache that all readers know, the realization that there are too many good books and one lifetime will never be enough.

Barnes and Nobles became a family affair for us. One way I induced the habit of reading in my kids was to promise them I’d take them to B&N anytime they finished a book and buy them another one. The ploy paid off. My kids read voraciously, son and daughter alike, putting the lie to the notion that kids today have to choose between reading and surfing. My kids do both just fine, and I think this is attributable in no small part to the fact our family time together was spent wandering the endless aisles of bookstores, imaging the endless possibilities, what the world would be like if we only had enough time to read them all. Other families go on kayak trips; we read books. I’m not sorry for the tradeoffs.

All that is mostly over, for paper books anyway. My son and I still go over to Barnes and Nobles, but the last three trips we’ve come out saying the same thing to one another without prompting–worthless. Aisle after Aisle of bookshelves in our local store are being replaced by toys and tchotchkes designed to…..do what? It’s not even clear. At least when the place was dominated by books it was clear that this was where you went for books. Now it seems like a vaguely upscale Walmart with a vast toy section. I’m waiting for the clothing section to open up soon.

I don’t think we should underestimate the consequence of these changes for booksellers and bookreaders. Although it is the case that readers will still be able to get books via your local Amazon.com, the place of books is changing in radical ways. The advent of e-books is completely reordering the business of bookselling–and i would say the culture of books as well. An article in the Economist notes that books are following in the sucking vortex that has swallowed the music and newspaper industries all but whole. Among the biggest casualties is the books and mortar bookstore, and this is of no small consequence to the effort to sell books in general:

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.

Confession, I actually enjoy browsing Amazon, and I read book reviews endlessly. But I think this article is right that there is nothing quite like the experience of browsing the shelves at a bookstore, in part because it is a kind of communal event. It is not that there are more choices–there aren’t, there are far more choices online. Nor is it necessarily that things are better organized. I think I have a better chance of finding things relevant to my interests through a search engine than I do by a chance encounter in the stack. And, indeed, The Strand is a book store that leaves me vaguely nauseous and dizzy, both because there is too much choice and there is too little organization. But the physical fact of browsing with one’s companions through the stacks, the chance encounter with a book you had heard about but never seen, the excitement of discovery, the anxious calculations–at least if you are an impoverished graduate student or new parent–as to whether you have enough cash on hand to make the purchase now or take a chance that the book will disappear if you wait. All of these get left behind in the sterility of the online exchange. The bookstore is finally a cultural location, a location of culture, where bookminded people go for buzz they get from being around other book-minded people. I can get my books from Amazon, and I actually don’t mind getting them via e-books, avoiding all the fuss of going down and having a face to face transaction with a seller. But that face to face is part of the point, it seems to me. Even though book-buying has always fundamentally been about an exchange of cash for commodity, the failure to see that it was also more than that is the cultural poverty of a world that amazon creates. With books stores dying a rapid death and libraries close upon their heels, I’m feeling a little like a man without a country, since the country of books is the one to which I’ve always been most loyal.

I am, of course, sounding old and crotchety. The same article in the Economist notes that IKEA is now changing their bookshelf line in the anticipation that people will no longer use them for books.

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

I suspect this may be true. Bookshelves and books alike may become craft items, things produced by those curious folks who do things by hand, items that you can only buy at craft fairs and auctions, something you can’t find at Wal-Mart, or Barnes and Nobles.

Peter Kerry Powers

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