issues and methods in digital humanities

Final Blog: Technology and Reading Habits

            I was especially taken with two of Rachel’s posts, given my own historical interest in the Middle Ages:  “Ordinatio & the Last Whole Earth Catalog” and “Hayles & The Canterbury Tales Project.”

            I was interested in how Rachel links our reading of Hayles “How We Read” with the Canterbury Tales Project.  It is esp. germane I think to understand how our digital turn is affecting reading habits.  Following Hayles, she observes how digital technology may, in fact, degrade our reading comprehension rather than facilitate it, and so it was of noted interest of how The Canterbury Tales Project through these digital means have managed to do just that through an inundation of information, esp. an overwhelming of hyperlinks, whose potential information exceeds even that of a Variorum edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury’s Tales.

            Her point here I find to be an interesting rejoinder to the argument that technology is always for neutral in its effects.  Any positive or deleterious effects we derive from it lay solely in the hands of the human agents that make use of them.  I typically reject this claim and Rachel here (with Hayles) helps to implicate the problem.  The argument assumes that technology is always forever just passive and the human agents that use it always have complete agency here.  Yet, as technology is tool making and tools are always made to serve a particular telos or goal, then it means tools are never passive in their use and as such have the ability to condition the human beings that make use of them.  Any apprentice in a craft-oriented discipline knows this:  if I am taking painting lessons, for example, it isn’t the brush that must adapt to me. Instead, if I am to become a skillful painter, it is I—my hand—that must learn to adapt to the brush—so the brush becomes my teacher in how to use it. (Another more socially relevant instance of this, documented first in the late 1960s is the “weapon effect” where being in possession of a gun can actually embolden the aggression of its bearer).

            So, it is of note what this digital technology, with its particular telos or goals of making information even more widely available and interconnected will shape our reading habits.  It makes sense to me that the more we effect this huge, seeming avalanching quantity of information, simultaneously interconnecting to even more information in the form of hyperlinks, our expected conditioning toward of it, that the technology inculcates would be toward more rapid, glancing and superficial reading—one that could impair, as discussed by Hayles, capacities for sustained attention and comprehension.

            What is of interest with Rachel’s “Medieval Ordinatio & the Last Whole Earth Catalog” is that, by chance, it in fact, through her principal source of Malcolm Parkes (“The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book”)  touches upon the same issue of technological conditioning, esp. in the discussion of how texts esp. scholarly works are organized, and how this came about in the transition between the Early Medieval era to the later one, moving from meditative monastic reading to analytical scholastic reading, with the ordinatio facilitating the ability to reference texts while the compliatio aided in understanding particular lines of argument and exposition.  Hence, how we decided to organize texts for better accessibility and understanding itself helped shape our ability for thinking, for logical reasoning. Of course, the irony here is that this involves print, a technology that cannot quite overwhelm you with information in the same sort of beck and call that our computer technology can do, so offering the capacity for more sustained attentive reading.

            From my own blog posts, I would link the above to my concerns where I discuss the economics of the current technological situation, such as in my “The (Digital) Humanities and the Neoliberal Turn” (Week # 11) and, more obliquely, “Spatial History and Art History” (as I mention geographer David Harvey and his critiques of capitalism).  This capacity for technology to actively shape and condition us will be much influenced by the economic forces at work in the technology’s promotion, the economic choices we make in terms of the type of tools we want to develop and then what priorities they are to serve.  The technology-shaping of text transformation of the later Middle Ages was primarily driven, economically and otherwise, by the Church in its aim to absorb and understand and use newly acquired information (Aristotle’s corpus) and to use this and the transformed texts themselves as a way to better understand God’s creation and purposes.

            Our neoliberal economic paradigm, even if under challenge in our post-Great Recession era, still proves a major force that is far more bottom line and utilitarian (and anti-democratic) in its aims and purposes, where some of the worries noted by Hayles, for example, may be rendered even more deleterious if human beings, using such technologies are seen as little more as being in service to economic goals, rather than those aims being the means to serve people—all the more given neoliberalism’s general antithesis to the humanities, digital or otherwise, raising the question of not just what will authors write, but even more importantly, what will readers want to read, and how?

Lee Konstantinou notes this:

“When the American economy experienced its postwar boom -- across-the-board manufacturing-led growth -- readers sought to "sophisticate" themselves.  Suburbs expanded, cars were purchased; the population was upwardly mobile on a number of fronts, including in the domain of literary consumption.  Sometime around the early seventies, things began to change.  Stagflation hit the economy; manufacturing fractured, and the service economy absorbed formerly high-wage upwardly mobile unionized workers; inequality began to increase, leading to social and educational stratification; an increasingly competitive media environment put downward pressure on the low-profit literary marketplace.  For the "ambitious" literary writer, the University became appealing because it provided a shelter from the broader economy.  Thus: Time once put Updike on its covers; today, it features Dan Brown.”  

(Lee Konstantinou, “Reading Under Neoliberalism,” Arcade: Literature, the Humanities and the World: https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/reading-under-neoliberalism )

Rhys

The Potential Flaws of Networks

In this week's discussion of networks, I chose to focus more on "Demystifying Networks" by Scott Weingart. The post did a good job of introducing the two basic components of networks, or the "stuff" and the "relationships," clarified as "nodes" and "edges." In addition to describing the basic components and premises of network analysis, though, the post contained some warnings on what not to do with this type of analysis, two of which I decided to reflect more on.

When describing a researcher creating networks, Weingart describes a hypothetical where the researcher, "...because the software is easy to use, and has a lot of buttons with words that from a non-technical standpoint seem to make a lot of sense, they press those buttons to see what comes out." He specifically mentions an example of using the centrality feature in Gephi, an algorithm that software will let you apply to a bimodal network but was actually designed for single mode networks. As a result, while it looks like the researcher may have found some cool new information, the results can't actually indicate centrality as intended for a single mode network in a bimodal situation. To an extent, this reminds me of the reason that math and physics professors forced us to learn the long-hand methods for calculations, even if they were at times significantly more time-consuming and confusing in general. Solving problems the long way first meant that (at least in theory) we would know why we were using certain methods and what our results actually meant. I vividly recall an example problem where we had to keep all of the units attached to the numbers (rather than substituting them in later) when we first reached a problem concerning work and energy, and that was the first time that the concept of work really made sense to me in that class. 

The other interesting warning to me was when Weingart cautioned that, "If humanists care more about the differences than the regularities, more about what makes an object unique rather than what makes it similar, that is the very information they are likely to lose by defining their objects as nodes." For context, he was explaining that in order to create nodes, a lot of the flexibility of categorization has to be lost - something simply is or is not. Admittedly, there have been a few times where the nuanced nature of the humanities has been a tad bit frustrating as someone coming from more of a STEM background - while I understand that sometimes the fact that something doesn't fit cleanly into a category that we have now can be what makes it interesting, I also like to be able to square information away into easily understood boxes. With time and practice, I've gotten better at resisting this impulse, but even in my final project I can see a bit of what Weingart is trying to get us to avoid. I am categorizing quotes based on if they came from Union soldiers, Confederate soldiers, or civilians, but sometimes those broad categories mean that interesting information about the individuals is a tad bit overlooked - for instance, one civilian grew up in the area that I am focusing on, while another moved in after her marriage. Looking at the differences between the two is really interesting. On the other hand, if I create too many labels, the labels become useless, so there are possible flaws in both directions. 

Despite all of the warnings, though, Weingart says fairly early in the blogpost that, "Nothing worth discovering has ever been found in safe waters. Or rather, everything worth discovering in safe waters has already been discovered, so it’s time to shove off into the dangerous waters of methodology appropriation, cognizant of the warnings but not crippled by them." It's easy to become very, very excited about new possibilities in digital humanities and then, if you are like me, become very, very aware of all of the potential flaws and become worried about actually using the process. This makes Weingart's encouragement helpful - while there are many ways to mess up research, the obvious methods of analysis have already been used with the obvious targets, and rehashing the same process isn't going to be very useful long-term. 

 

Semester Review: We can’t afford to stop learning

Technology has changed a lot since I was a child. We didn’t have cell phones. PCs were still something of a novelty. I didn’t have email, until I was in college. With changing technology, there has been a significant change in how we learn, but also how we work. As technology changes, so does the job market. The skills that are cutting edge now, could either be irrelevant or mundane in a few years. With all this change, perhaps one of the most important skills to acquire is adaptability. Learning the digital humanities has a certain salability now, but what may be more important than the specific tools we learn about, is the willingness to try new things. But new is not always better. I frequently find when I go shopping, that I product that I like has been replaced by something that is “new and improved”. What I find most of the time is the product is different, but much of the time I don’t actually agree that it is improved. We need to be thoughtful learners, understanding something of what is going on behind the curtain, as we approach new tools. So for my final review blog post for class, I am focusing on the issue of limitations and change in the digital humanities.

One of the earliest blog posts I wrote was specifically on the issue of limitations in the digital humanities, “Facing limitations in the Digital Humanities.” In it I addressed the issue that just because a tool is available, doesn’t always mean that it is appropriate to use in every situation. A similar issue was addressed in our reading for this week. Scott Weingart blog post was on network analysis, “Networks Demystified 8: When Networks are Inappropriate.” In this post Weingart pointed out the fact that just about any data can be turned into a network—but that doesn’t mean that network analysis is always appropriate. Basically, he provided a more concrete example from the digital humanities about why the tool at hand is not always the best solution. My second blog post that I want to highlight is the last one, “Fair weather friends.” The issue that this post raised that I want to highlight is this: “In a sense, the success of digital humanities should be manifest in an increasing sense of invisibility, as the digital tools become become part of the customary experience of communication.” As our communications environment continues to evolve, some tools will become part of our standard work kit, and others will need to be replaced. Sometimes it feels like we, like Alice, have traveled Through the Looking Glass and are running the Red Queen’s race. That is, we must learn to run faster and faster just to keep from loosing ground.

If we need to always keep learning just to stay relevant to the job market, it raises issues regarding the quality of education. Wren Gehrke’s post “The Accessibility of Digital Humanities” considers the chapter by Anne McGrail that discusses teaching digital humanities at community colleges. There are social trends, including the quality of education that tend to perpetuate economic advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next. But Wren specifically raised the issue of how it is not very fun to be at either extreme of the learning curve in the classroom. If you are well ahead, that can lead to to a sense of boredom and futility to the learning experience. If you are well behind, it can create an atmosphere of fear, that is also not conducive to learning. This observation made me think of something. Confident students are less risk adverse. In order to provide equitable learning experiences, students need the opportunity to build not just skills, but the confidence to use them.

To close, I want to address an issue that Brynn Simons brought up in her post “The Sounds of Obsolescence”. In this post Brynn discussed the fact that the digital humanities was better at things like text analysis than at analyzing sound. The digital humanities is still an evolving field, there are some things that it is good at, but other issues of data analysis that it does not yet know how to efficiently address. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. As time goes on, digital humanists are continuing to develop new tools. Maybe some of the issues that are still limitations for the digital humanities today, will soon be better addressed. If the issue is relevant enough to our own research, perhaps we shouldn’t be waiting to see what solution someone else will come up with. Perhaps there might come a time when we need to make the tools for ourselves.

Topic Modeling

What is Topic Modeling? If you are like me you may never have heard of this term until now and that is why it caught my attention this week. Scott B. Weingart described Topic Modeling as, "Topic models represent a class of computer programs that automagically extract topics from texts." He also gives an example of, "if I feed the computer, say, the last few speeches of President Barack Obama, it’ll come back telling me that the president mainly talks about the economy, jobs, the Middle East, the upcoming election, and so forth. It’s a fairly clever and exceptionally versatile little algorithm that can be customized to all sorts of applications, and a tool that many digital humanists would do well to have in their toolbox." Sounds easy enough to me at least. 

Then I looked at TheProgrammingHistorian.org and getting started with topic modeling and mallet. They defined topic modeling as "a tool takes a single text (or corpus) and looks for patterns in the use of words; it is an attempt to inject semantic meaning into the vocabulary." They also compare Topic Modeling tool to that of Voyant tools for smaller scale projects Topic models represent a family of computer programs that extract topics from texts, like keywords. 

 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyant_Tools 

At the end of topic modeling, you will get a list of topics from the information entered in. The list of topics is meant to be thought of as a list of relevant "topics". There is no experience necessary says, Weingart. The easy user interfaces relate to my last post about minimalism, how programs are becoming easier and easier to use and not requiring the reading of a manual to use them. 

 

The Network generated by Elijah Meeks to show how digital humanities documents relate to one another via the topics they share.

image from: http://scottbot.net/topic-modeling-for-humanists-a-guided-tour/

 

Even though the images are different they still show similar things. The relationship between words or phrases in a text. The boldness of the lines to the size of the word in Voyant. 

Minimalism and the Digital Humanities

I read two articles this week: one on Minimalism within computers and the second on Digital Humanities are used for Social Good. 

Normally you would not think that these two could be connected. But if you think about them in way of a timeline they could be. Think about how much space was available for a computer in the 1970-1990's. I am a 90's baby, I recognize and remember the terms used from when I was younger. In the Wikipedia article on Minimalism, it says that 64 kilobytes were considered a vast amount of memory. And today we hold that much in our hands on a daily basis. Throughout time computer developers started to minimalize their designs when the technology was advanced to do so. This was termed by the post PC era in the early 21st century. As smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and laptops gained popularity made the design of the devices become more minimal. Interfaces of the devices became simpler also, " eliminating buttons and dialog boxes that may potentially confuse the user." John Millar Carroll wrote a book Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel and pointed out that the use of minimalism resulted in instant use devices where the user did little to no reading of a manual for the device. 

Now when a device requires little to no need of reading a manual it is open to a wider audience. More people are able to participate or use the device. Earlier this year, July 9th, 2018, Lindsay McKenzie wrote about when the Digital Humanities are used for the Social Good. A data mapping project named Torn Apart/Separados uses volunteers and a team of scholars mapping the location of various federal and private juvenile detention facilities across the country. Roopika Risam, a member of the mapping team and an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, didn't expect the strong reaction for the project received by other digital humanities scholars. This came with a sense of vindication and validation of the value of their work being done. 

The Torn Apart map shows ICE facilities as orange dots and private juvenile detention centers as blue dots.

With the minimalization of computer devices and their programs. That many people in the 21st century have computers in their hands or pockets and the simplicity of the programs, we are able to open research or data collections to the public. With projects like Torn Apart/ Separados and others on Zooniverse.org, anyone can volunteer and help out on larger projects and make them apart of the digital humanities. 

Social Media and Fake News

       For the last two years of the current presidency, every citizen of the United States has heard the term 'Fake News.' Setting apart the politics for a moment, I would like to take a look at what the term actually means and why it resonates with so many people. Social Media has exploded in the last decade, with it being hard-pressed to find a single person without some form of it today. Accompanied with the rise of Smart Phones, people are looking at posts are receiving some form of notification to check posts every single day. Never in history has so many people been connected in a space like this before in history. With the population at its highest ever (and growing), the implications of having these networks are an unknown. Newspaper and television businesses' are a product of the past, with many of them going over many layoffs because people just don't find use for them anymore. News in 2018 usually comes Social Media, and with there being millions upon millions of accounts it isn't easy to know who to trust. One phrase has emerged from the use of Social Media- 'Fake News'; and, I believe the problem lies with a person's lack of understanding how to search for the truth for themselves. 

    With Facebook and Twitter being public companies, anyone can create a profile. In some cases, a person or business working an agenda can even create multiple accounts. Both have great Search Engines that can look up any phrase of any event happening in real time. Here lies the problem though, as a live event is sure to have varying accounts as some people may have experienced and event differently or others can just downright lie. With the billions of users on each platform, what should someone do to know if what they are looking at is legit? In academia, for instance, a person can publish and article or case study and get it scholarly reviewed so that the readers will know if their read is fact. Social Media does not have anything as such, and thus 'Fake News' is born. 

    Solving this issue is not clear, as the internet age is still uncharted territory and relatively young in the grand scheme of Media. Getting everything instantaneously is a product for disaster when trying to get news to people. Maybe a change in the curriculum of early age schooling on the effects of Social Media and how to use it could help with some of these issues. The companies themselves could maybe add some feature that rates post on some sort of truth scale may also work. In taking Digital Humanities I am starting to make out issues like these but it usually does little to offer concrete answers as they are complicated. The implications are massive from political and social standpoints of the laws we live in. It is apparent that everyone needs to be at least aware of this issue so that we can work together to understand what to search for and how to search for the topic.

The (Digital) Humanities and the Neoliberal Turn

The timing of these particular readings, especially McGrail’s “The Whole Game:  Digital Humanities at Community Colleges,” was very interesting, informing my subsequent (and a bit circuitous) blog post.

Late last week, Professor Doc Martens of my Library Management course (LIS 5023) directed me to some writings by John Buschman, dean of the university libraries at Seton Hall University, given some critiques I had made on our prevailing economic structures in a Canvas discussion.  One of these was his article “Doing neoliberal things with words in libraries: Toward emending a discourse fashion in LIS” (2017; Journal of Documentation, 74[4], pp.595-617), criticizing the neoliberal economic practices that have infiltrated into LIS, public libraries, and too, universities, over the past forty-plus years, referring to the economic doctrines that have gained ascendancy since the economic difficulties of the 1970s:   the inflation that came in two forms—the demand-pull type from competing strong consumer demand and government spending (esp. for the Vietnam War—even if Great Society spending was seen as the bigger culprit, sometimes deliberately so) for the goods and services of the private sector during the mid- 60s into the early 70s, then the supply/cost-push type fed by the oil shocks of the mid- and late 1970s.

From these crises, the neoliberal turn, beginning ad hoc in the mid-1970s and becoming formal policy in the Reagan / Thatcher era (and then in the 1990s, liberal or left parties adopting “Third Way politics—Democratic Party Clintonites, Labour Party Blairites —to accommodate this formal policy) insists upon the primacy of, if not the exclusivity of, market-oriented capitalistic relations rooted in an anthropology by which human beings are little, if nothing, more than self-interested utility maximizers (and where seeking the common good has to be a smokescreen for this self-interest).  Human well-being under such auspices is to be had, therefore, in the deregulation of the market with the concomitant maximal stress on private property rights, with the subsequent critique and blunting of liberal democracies seen as “excessively responsive to their publics” (Buschman 2017, p. 610n. 1) in terms of social welfare provisioning (see the Great Society note, above).  The latter provisioning was judged especially as illegitimate state interference usurping private market and property relations (or, on a related note, as a form of dependency by—ironically—groups long disenfranchised in the political and economic life of the country, e.g., minorities and women, i.e., those who themselves, historically, have had their political and economic autonomy deliberately blunted so they couldn’t be more self-sufficient).

Hence, neoliberalism erodes the idea that institutions like universities and libraries are public goods, but are judged instead simply as marketable commodities which represent merely a private individual’s sense of investment, with concerns for this return on investment (ROI) always judged in (nearly) exclusive economic terms—marketability. In turn, those same institutions must now be concerned with marketing cache, esp. with (often deliberately) declining public revenues, as they no longer serve students or readers or learners in the traditional social-good sense, but just “customers,” whose information needs are almost seen as just economic or marketing ones as they strive to maximize the (economic) utility of these needs.

One of Buschman’s references here was to a rather polemical article by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette and David Golumbia (2016): “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities” which views digital humanities (DH) as very much originating in and complicit with the neoliberal turn:

“Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives. . ..  Advocates characterize the development of such tools as revolutionary . . . [yet] the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.”  (Allington, et al 2016, n. p.)

The concern here is that this technology is especially geared toward the quantified, marketable data that represents neoliberal economic values—information useful for industry and the vocationalist training of students seen only as future workers and consumers (rather than citizens or other anthropological values of higher purposefulness than just consuming)--and that is at odds with the more qualitative values (civic, intellectual, aesthetic ,etc.) that undergirds humanities research and discourse, with the authors claiming that DH is not at all interested in answering questions based on humanistic inquiry. 

As one might guess, there was both agreement and very notable push-back in the article’s comments.  I will say, I do think the neoliberal paradigm is a highly problematic issue for universities and libraries (and I detest neoliberalism in general) and the threats noted by Allington et al, are certainly real, all the more as these varied digital technologies are not themselves public goods or utilities, but are ones owned by private companies who must be remembered as having their own utility, bottom-line maximizing motives for these technologies no matter how they strive to position themselves regarding socially-conscious values.

Yet here, I found Anne B. McGrail’s “The Whole Game:  Digital Humanities at Community Colleges” to be an instructive response to this polemic, esp. as the students here, as she notes come extensively from the working class—the class perhaps most negatively affected by neoliberalism and its globalization of markets, yet the class, owing to their own economic anxieties and sense of necessity, that, ironically, are most inclined to harbor neoliberal maximizing values, including what they chose to major in as college students (cf. McGrail’s interesting contrast of values concerning time and commitments:  the working classes’ precarious sense of time that has to focus on the now versus the middle classes’ [esp. the upper-middle classes, in my opinion] potential sense of it that can be, like capital itself, “invested” in toward future rewards and accumulations of the same).

What I found instructive from McGrail was how she can point out to her students both the potential threats described above, but also reveal an opposite potential, one less dystopian as envisioned by Allington et al. This came through in her classes’ work using Amazon Mechanical Turk to write potential policy papers on what a digital workforce ought to look like.  This probably hit very close to home for many of these students as they could witness a social atomization that could leave workers poorly paid, without labor rights and protections versus the opposite in terms of better social and employment enfranchisement.  In McGrail’s words, “such assignments leverage the democratic promise of digital humanities and simultaneously reveal threats to democracy posed by the digital turn.”  I much agree.  Of course, the irony here in revealing both the promise and the threat is the making of DH technologies available to academic institutions including community colleges.  And given the current neoliberal state of affairs concerning higher education funding in the US, this is its own challenge as McGrail notes, given that community colleges are especially pressured to streamline, rather than expand, course offerings, all the more courses whose perceived (economic) utility is in question, like the humanities.

Rhys

The Accessibility of Digital Humanities

When discussing how Digital Humanities can take hold at community colleges, especially when students at these colleges tend to take few humanities courses in general, the author brings up some important questions. McGrail asks, " How will we teach all of our students—with their different preparations, goals, and futures—in the same class? How can we successfully incorporate students’ profiles into our assignment design so that no one is excluded?" This question really resonated with me, partially because of my experience as a student studying digital humanities at the moment and partially as someone working as a grader for a humanities course. Of course, being a grader is not exactly like being a professor - I interact with the students far less, for one - but it has given me a bit more insight into the experience of humanities students than I may have gotten just by looking at my own work.

Based on my own experience as a student, though, there were quite a few times where I felt somewhat lost as to what I was supposed to be doing, especially given how different some of the applications of digital humanities are when compared to other courses, and the fact that all of us in the course have such different backgrounds (if all within humanities) has made discussions feel a bit exclusive or turn-based at times. (This problem seems to have resolved with time) Additionally, the article pointed out that many vulnerable groups attend Community College, and the variety of backgrounds could lead to a large gap in terms of skills with technology. Reflecting on my experience in both this course and in other technology-focused classes, it can be frustrating when you are ahead of the curve and absolutely terrifying when you are behind it, something that might put students off of the digital humanities and further complicate the teaching process. 

As I just hinted at, though, we are all students fairly far into our schooling, and we all are already primarily focused on the humanities. This is where the experience as a grader comes into play - History of Science courses seem, based on the discussions I've had with other students, to be the general education course of choice for STEM people since it sounds relevant to their interests, and when grading, this means that there tends to be a spectrum of willingness to focus on varying issues. (Some papers skew far towards philosophy while others seem frustrated with the idea of examining anything that we potentially know today is false) Even the course I'm grading for, though, is a 3000 level course, which, yet again, ensures a certain amount of academic progress. The idea of creating a lesson plan for a 1000 or 2000 level course revolving around the digital humanities is fairly intimidating. 

Community colleges are a valuable educational resource, and digital humanities is a valuable field of study, so working to bring the two together makes sense. However, as Anne McGrail points out, there are some complicating factors in this combination. While she goes on to suggest various ways of making this work, reflecting on the sources of possible dissonance gave me a way to think about my experiences as a student of the humanities myself. Obviously, reconciling a problem is more important than just expounding on why a problem may exist, but pausing for reflection can have benefits, too. 

Fair weather friends

Does the work of humanists have to carry a lot of emotional capital to matter? If this is the standard by which our scholarly endeavor is going to be judged, then most of the work that is done across the humanities is at danger of being deemed irrelevant. For that matter, even much of the sciences would be at risk, if we start measuring by criteria of social relevance and immediate benefit. As part of the community of scholarship, I think it is important to keep in mind why our work might matter outside our small scholarly enclave. But the opportunity to tap directly into the heart of a story that has captured the interest of the nation cannot be expected to be a routine event in the careers of the majority of researchers.

Lindsey McKenzie’s article, about the digital mapping project that documented the location of detention centers involved in the resent news story of immigrant children who were separated from their parents after illegally crossing the border into the United States, raises issues of the potential social relevance of such digital projects. Her article documents some very enthusiastic responses to this sort of project being a model for how the digital humanities should function. Certainly this project is compelling, and I applaud the efforts the people behind the project Torn Apart/Separados put into this mapping this story. However, I am concerned about this being held up as a model of what digital humanists should be doing. For most scholars, I think the opportunity to respond with this kind of immediacy to a news story that has captured the attention and heartstrings of the nation will only rarely arise, if it ever arises at all. A project such as Torn Apart has merit that is hard to ignore, but I don’t think this work can stand alone as the gold standard of digital scholarship.

Because there is a certain degree of novelty still attached to digital scholarship, it may have a certain sense of capital within the humanities at the moment. But if it continues to be successfully integrated into the tool kit of the humanities, that novelty will fade, and with it the capital. In a sense, the success of digital humanities should be manifest in an increasing sense of invisibility, as the digital tools become become part of the customary experience of communication. Social relevance in our research may manifest itself in many different forms. To illustrate this point one might consider Anne McGrail’s discussion of her efforts to introduce digital humanities to students at community colleges. Because community colleges disproportionately serve lower income and minority families, their operating budgets are smaller, and their access to educational resources is often narrower than the opportunities afforded to students at four year colleges. As an educator at a community college, McGrail faces a unique set of challenges in providing her students experiences working in the digital humanities, that her colleagues working at more prestigious universities are less inclined to face. Activism may come in many forms, and certainly the tools offered by the digital humanities may offer a broader range of communicating across these goals. But it is good to keep in mind, there is not just one model for how we should do our work.

Lindsey McKenzie, “Digital Humanities for Social Good,” InsideHigherEd / July 2018

A. McGrail, “The ‘Whole Game’: Digital Humanities at Community Colleges,” Debates in Digital Humanities 2016 


Community College, Arduino and Learning How to Learn

Anne B. McGrail’s, “The ‘Whole Game’: Digital Humanities at Community Colleges,” discusses the uphill battle of incorporating digital humanities into the community college environment and I think a lot of her essay addresses intersectional issues that are unique to community college students. Being someone who has worked their way through community college, I can remember the mindset and events that relate to some parts of McGrail’s essay. For instance, my mentality along with many of the other community college students I had become acquainted with was that of dogged pragmatism. I was only focused on getting my Associate’s in Sociology before transferring to the University of Oklahoma; if a course wasn’t needed for a degree requirement, there was no way I could justify taking it due to personal budget constraints. I wasn’t alone and that was the case for many students at a CC. We couldn’t afford to take exploratory courses other than perhaps choosing a humanities or fine arts elective.

Rather than having singular digital humanities classes offered at a community college, McGrail suggests having other disciplines incorporate digital humanities theories and ideas. Outside of incorporating digital humanities into English courses through text analysis, a digital humanities academic could act as a consultant to see how it can be incorporated into the different studies offered at community colleges. Taking a note from the Wikipedia entry, “Minimalism in Computing,” Arduino software and hardware can be specially tailored for a variety of disciplines such as Art, Psychology, Music, Biology and Theatre Arts for a couple of examples. Costs aside, Arduino being used in settings outside of engineering or computer science classrooms can lead the way to innovation in how other disciplines embrace technology and someone with a digital humanities background can be the guide to help implement this change.

https://youtu.be/Epc2rBssAug

McGrail also created exercises for her students that gave them (somewhat) profitable job skills. Even though it was an exploration into the debate about the pros and cons of digital labor, her students walked away knowing how to work Amazon Mechanical Turk. It might not be enough to make a living off of, but it’s still a supplementary skill that I’m sure many of her students could benefit from. Teaching her students how to learn (technology and/or otherwise) and not be embarrassed about wherever they’re at with their skill level and to embrace mistakes has to be the most valuable idea to instill in her students, because now that they have an idea of how to navigate technology overall, they can continue to teach themselves throughout the duration of their careers and their lives, supporting her student’s years after the semester is over.