The Digital Humanities

I posted last week about the trouble that technology can cause in the classroom, in terms of students who insist on surfing the internet, reading Facebook, tweeting, and so on while class is in session.  This, however, does not mean that technology is a bad thing.  It means that we need to develop expectations in our classrooms for digital etiquette.

It is also true that the use of technology to teach and research in the Humanities is in full swing, and we need to catch up with this in our classrooms and become more savvy in terms of how we can use technology to help us with our research.

So I'm wondering what ideas you have, as students and as teachers.  What are some of the things that can be done to help us integrate our study of the Humanities and digital technology?  Express your opinion in the comments.

Today the Digital Humanities was featured in the news when 60 NEH grants were given for those with projects that integrated technology and the Humanities.  Here's the story:

WASHINGTON — “Secret plan to replace human scholars with robots,” read Brett Bobley's first slide.

“Oops!” exclaimed Bobley, director of the office of the digital humanities for the National Endowment of the Humanities, feigning embarrassment. The audience, made up mostly of NEH grantees, laughed. They were here at the endowment’s headquarters on Tuesday to celebrate their roles in forging a new frontier for the humanities -- a category of academic fields at risk of turning fallow for lack of public support. 

Humanities research is often derided as gauzy and esoteric, and therefore undeserving of tax dollars. Amid financial crises, humanities departments at many public universities have been razed. But even amid cuts, there has been a surge in interest in the digital humanities -- a branch of scholarship that takes the computational rigor that has long undergirded the sciences and applies it the study of history, language, and culture.

“While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them,” wrote Stanley Fish, the outspoken professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, on his New York Times blog in June. 

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Let's talk technology

I think about technology a LOT.  It is around me all day, every day.  When I'm not in my classroom, I am in my office sitting in front of my computer working.  Email dominates my space and time.  It is everywhere, on my phone, on my ipad, on my computers.  All correspondence with students, colleagues, administrators takes place via email and texting.  Blogging is an extended classroom.  I have become addicted to Dropbox (and no one has paid me to say that).  How did I ever work before I installed it?  Shared folders, updated files, multiple computers.  Wow.  Research articles come to me across the internet from libraries everywhere, in pdf format that I can read, search, and highlight on my iPad and my AirBook.  I no longer buy hard cover books when I can get the e-version and have my library on my iPad and carry it around with me.  It used to be that computer technology was mainly associated with my workplace and writing articles and books, but not anymore.  Now it dominates home and entertainment space too.  An Apple TV.  How fantastic is that gadget?  Ipods.  Netflix.  Hulu.  I am in love with my iPad which is the ultimate toy, especially for those of us who like to doodle, edit and filter photographs, keep track of Facebook, read novels, and what about Flipboard to keep track of news and my blog reader?  I draw my personal line at gaming, but my son loves Angry Birds and Webkinz World.

And I wonder why I am worn out?  Why my life feels like there isn't a moment of down time?  There isn't.  Technology, with all its bright lights and fast pace, has seeped into my life everywhere.  I am watching as the fascination with it - and it is fascinating - begins to disrupt traditional modes of communication in my life, like face to face conversations.  And my classroom.  No longer is it a place of focused conversation between my students and myself.  It is a place with computer screens bisecting desks, and students busy pushing buttons and playing on Facebook and Wikipedia, and texting on cell phones.

I guess what I am saying is that technology is ahead of us.  We are enthralled with it.  It has become essential to how we live and work.  But we have yet to figure out how to control it.  We are like that kid in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory who loves chocolate so much he jumps into the chocolate sea and nearly drowns.

I hope you don't think I have the answers to this dilemma, because I don't.  Of course, there are personal decisions that we all have to make, things we can do to create non-technology time in our days and weeks.  A sabbath day away from it all.  A sabbath time of day every day so families can see each other face to face.  The dilemma I am talking about is taking place in larger communities (like our high schools and universities) with lots and lots of implications.  One aspect of this communal dilemma that I think needs immediate attention is our classrooms, and how to recreate classroom etiquette.  I don't mean to sound like Emily Post, but my gosh, we need some etiquette here.  I am not harping on how rude these behaviors are becoming, or how disruptive (they are both these things).  What I'm harping on is that these behaviors have already destroyed our classrooms.  There can be no classroom when twenty students are sitting there on Facebook and Flipboard and their phones.  I don't know what it is, but it isn't a classroom.  No learning is going on.

The internet has allowed for an interesting yet destructive blending of mental spaces.  Want to know something?  Look it up on Wiki.  Learning something and entertainment have been blended.  Learning is no longer viewed as healthy hard work, something that our minds should have to struggle to do.  If it is not entertaining in the classroom, well then, let's surf the internet.  I think that this is due in part to the fact that because of the internet and sites like Wiki, all forms of knowledge have been blended into each other, so that popular opinion and popular ways of knowing (what is called plain style knowledge) have been given equivalent weight with critical engagement and critical ways of knowing that require years of training and professionalization in particular fields (what we teach in our classrooms and write about in our publications). 

So I put this out into cyberspace as a kind of call, especially to other teachers.  We need to get caught up with the technology and establish technology boundaries in our classrooms.  We need to take back the classroom.