How to Teach DH without Separating New from Old

Taking Stock of the Contemporary Humanities

Having worked from Gardiner and Musto’s Digital Humanities text for several weeks already, on this day students were assigned to read chapter 5, “Digital Tools.” I started class by directing students to compile a list of the tools mentioned by the authors as a means of reviewing what had been covered in the chapter. Working from that list—which, after it had been edited by the whole class to eliminate redundancy, included eighteen items total—students divided into their normal working groups to, first, discuss the significance of each tool and, second, rank it in relation to the others. The ranking process was introduced as a means of assessing utility and significance: students were asked to reflect on how often they used a particular tool or how significant it seemed to their abilities to carry out scholarly work in their discipline (in this case, English). In some cases, as with terms like philology and rhetoric, that discussion necessitated the development of a working definition of the particular tool or vocabulary term. They then shared their ranked lists with the other groups using Google Sheets and calculated class-wide averages for each item on the list (Table 17.1).

The results of the students’ work surprised me. The four tools the students decided were most important or useful to their work were rhetoric, personal computers, grammar, and archives. This led to discussion about the relationship between rhetoric—which students took to mean the art of persuasive communication, especially writing—and grammar. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the list were classrooms, desks and chairs, lecture halls, and bookshelves (see Table 17.1). Very quickly it became evident that what the least important tools had in common was physical space. This prompted us, in turn, to consider why physical objects and the spatial containers that house them seem to hold less value for people currently engaged in humanities scholarship. Many students were emotionally stirred by this conversation—one to the brink of tears, even, as she described how her motivations for becoming an English major were deeply rooted in a love for physical books, particularly old ones. Yet as I traveled about the room and observed the various group discussions, I noticed that such emotional responses were primarily attached to objects (books, archives, etc.) and not spaces: several groups mounted a passionate defense of archives, for example, and followed up by ranking them quite highly. Yet in assigning a low rank to physical appurtenances like bookshelves, they seemed to simultaneously suggest that the very spaces in which bookshelves are most often found—that is, libraries (ranked higher than bookshelves but significantly lower than archives)—might need to exist in physical space in order to be useful to the modern humanities scholar. One student, for example, observed that she could not conceive of carrying out her work as an English major without books, yet confessed that she had not stepped foot inside the campus library in over a year.

What these results led me to reflect on was the apparent gaps between “new” and “old” and how the humanities curricula in which I myself was a part might be serving to widen them. For example, it is tempting to read the class’s rankings with relevance to expectations about convenience. First, there is the ubiquity of personal computers (which students ranked second highest); following from that, we see that students ranked tools designed for remote convenience, such as digital databases, above libraries, which, though they house and enable access to those digital databases in the first place, appear less convenient, with the term library signaling a building or space to which one must travel. Ease of access, then, might seem like a foregone conclusion, since the first of these options makes the second a more convenient and, thus, more accessible option for many students. But with items like archives and rhetoric listed so highly, convenience can, at best, only account for part of the story here. As anyone who has spent any time in them will tell you, an archive is anything but convenient. What is more, in discussing our class results, I noticed many students struggling to distinguish the idea of an “archive” from that of a “library.”

When I asked them to explain why these two entities, being functionally similar in many ways, might appear ranked so differently, most students admitted that they had comparatively much less experience with archives; indeed, most of them had not physically visited or used one. This information, while it shed light on their difficulties in distinguishing archives from libraries, also revealed the extent to which aspirational logic might be at work in this scenario. In the following section, I work to expose the roots of that aspirational logic while also proposing strategies for mitigating the sorts of tension that arose from this exercise and discussion.

Resisting “Revitalization”

We tend to associate that which is old with decay and death. Yet no tool is ever truly “dead.” We know this thanks to media scholars like Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and many others who have, for years, steered us toward alternative understandings of how certain tools fall out of everyday usage, only to be reborn within the context of archaeologically based research, exhibition, and instruction. As Wolfgang Ernst puts it, in order to avoid the easy slippage between “old” and “dead,” any theory of media “needs to be archaeologically grounded in the twofold presence of media technology,” which is both “material” and “symbolic.” With regard to the first of these categories, Ernst emphasizes “archaic artefacts (which are never ‘dead media’). . . . Technological items need to be analyzed in action in order to reveal their media essence; otherwise, a TV set is nothing but a piece of furniture.”6 In this way, Ernst and others encourage those who would make digital tools a foundation of their work to save space for the past. Through the construction of media labs on their own campuses, many of these scholars have shown us what a generous sense of historicity may look like and have usefully argued for its significance—particularly where archival objects are concerned—to new media and digital methods.

But the same spirit, I would argue, does not always infuse our understandings of past skills and methods, nor does it extend to cover the spaces that have historically served as the hard-won sites of their development. This is a problem that has the potential to unfold on many fronts since, to start, it threatens to separate digital humanists from the disciplinary communities that are so integral to their success. By this, I mean both older generations of scholars who were educatively reared under different conditions and novice scholars or students who might struggle to see how their own research and teaching might be productively fertilized by an expanding array of digital tools. The temptation is to cast the digital humanities as a revitalizing force within these communities, which explains the reoccurrence of that previous term throughout our ongoing scholarly discussions about it. For instance, in their handbook Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom, Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross show how digital repositories can be used to “revitalize” old assignments and course designs, which compares to Andrew Piper’s claim about how computational methods are a “newly vital form of humanistic thought.”7 Likewise, the editors of the series In Search of Media observe how, “increasingly, disciplines . . . are in search of media as a way to revitalize their methods and objects of study.”8 But while the rhetoric of revitalization sheds strategic light on the motivations behind certain scholars’ interests in digital media, it carries with it an oppositional sense of “deadness”: only that which is dead or dying merits revitalization.

Prelinger, for example, invites us to consider the more sinister side of “revitalization” efforts in Archives. He mounts a defense for the use and preservation of physical archives, even though digital technology has now succeeded in granting researchers more convenient alternatives to them, as we saw previously when the students in my class ranked digital databases above both libraries and archives. The preservation of these containers, like the preservation of their contents, often proves inconvenient, Prelinger notes, but “inconvenience can be formative. Wrangling with inconvenience is like choosing to write by hand instead of typing or dictating; you learn more about the words you are processing.”9 An archive, he maintains, is a kind of container that is worth fighting for. The same, I want to argue, is true of a classroom.

As teachers, we have perhaps lived with the idea of the seminar classroom environment long enough to take it for granted. This is because, for anyone living and teaching within the contemporary landscape of American higher education, the seminar classroom has been there for us the whole time, despite its relatively short history so far as the much longer life-span of the university is concerned. Contemporary colleges and universities—including those that are many hundreds of years old—have inherited the seminar format “almost entirely intact, from the late nineteenth century,” argues critic Caroline Levine. Levine goes on to argue that the seminar, as a form or species that was once particular to the humanities, “continues to foster disciplinary norms.”10 The same, meanwhile, might be said of the objects (tables, chairs, books, chalkboards) that we might find in a humanities classroom, and of the skills (reading, writing, discussion, expression) that instructors might hope to cultivate among the students assembled there. Yet, as our recent, collective experiences with the coronavirus pandemic have made all too clear, it is no longer possible or appropriate to view the classroom as a given component of the higher education experience. Recall how, in the spring of 2020, physical classroom spaces were hastily uprooted and transplanted to Zoom or similar online environs, in a manner that suggested the two formats might be interchangeable, though they have proved, in fact, to be anything but.

Given the classroom’s declining ubiquity, my concern is that the digital humanities classroom, whether material or not, may find itself inadvertently recruited to the work of dismantling or degrading such “disciplinary norms,” while helping to impose strict limits on future understandings of what is, or is allowed to be viewed as, normal. It is important, for instance, to remember that the companion of gentrification is, often, homelessness. Indeed, this is geographer and critic Neil Smith’s point: according to him, the two represent the twin poles of the “seesawing of capital,” which sees famine and feast as inextricably linked responses to the experience of crisis. Gentrification forms part of the “restructuring of geographic space” that is, according to Smith, “both a response to crisis, part of the vain search for a partial solution,” and “an unwitting foundation for longer-term solutions at the hands of capital.”11 What this means is that gentrification, as a process, is first born from crisis but then becomes, over time, a substitutive baseline through which crisis itself continues to be experienced and processed.

For decades now, “debates” have unfolded across the field of the digital humanities—including those collected here, in this series of aptly named books—testifying to the connections between DH and various forms of “crisis.” So how do we, acting in league as a community of educators and students, critically assess the tide of revitalization that risks seeing the history of our work (and our colleagues’ and predecessors’ work) paved over or devalued in the name of crisis? This is the question that I was forced to ponder in the wake of the in-class activity described earlier, which seemed to gesture, in its own way, to students’ latent anxieties about what their own futures, as bearers of humanities degrees, might look like. I wondered about what might cause students in an upper-level course such as the Digital Humanities class—the only one in the department’s curriculum that focuses specifically on digital methods—to dismiss things like libraries and classrooms. Because the department at this university does not offer English degrees online, both of these “tools,” in the Gardiner and Musto sense, had to have been key, sacred components of these students’ educational training. What, then, would induce them to undermine that training?

In the end, I settled on what seemed like the two most reasonable answers to this question: the curricular sequestration of digital training, combined with expectations regarding advancement, and advanced work, in humanities scholarship. Harvey, in discussing the logic behind the neoliberal mantra of “innovation,” warns that “the effect of continuous innovation is to devalue, if not destroy, past investments and labor skills.”12 His point is that the relentless push for newness and discovery, both sacred to the rhetoric of revitalization, assumes the primary form of destruction. In considering patterns of urban gentrification, we can see how this is the case: the old is razed to make way for the new, with convenience and expanded freeways replacing the outdated housing schemes of yore and, ultimately, upending the lives of those who once called them home. In a similar sense, contemporary scholarship bears the responsibility of “rescuing” the past from what E. P. Thompson calls “the enormous condescension of history,” including the devaluing of the historical laborer, whose previous “aspirations” must nevertheless be viewed as having been “valid in terms of their own experience.”13 If we would have humanities students see all of their training and education as valid; if we would have them avoid internalizing the logic of “revitalization” and its attendant processes of destruction, then we must work to animate the history of humanities scholarship and to see our work with digital tools embedded securely within it. Gardiner and Musto, in their volume, help to show how this is possible, but it is a process that has to unfold on the ground and structure our educational environs, too.

How do we historicize the contemporary work of the digital humanities, within the framework of the digital humanities? I would like to conclude by proposing two strategies. First, through course design, including assignments that locate digital pedagogy within an evolving continuum of humanities methods and tools. That might mean, for instance, strategically pairing book history assignments with the use of digital databases and archives or surveying the history of bibliography alongside discussions of contemporary metadata. Second, by desegregating the DH curriculum. Digital literacy must form a core part of humanities education, to the same degree as basic skills like reading and writing. This means that it may be deemphasized at points, as in writing-intensive classes, but it should always be there. Establishing digital literacy as a core competency, rather than treating it as an “advanced” skillset that requires leveling up in order to even begin, would potentially work against some of the aspirational logic that I have described with regard to this class assignment. It would, for instance, unyoke the idea of advancement from that of intellectual abandonment, encouraging students to see the full gamut of skills gleaned within the humanities classroom as mutually reinforcing and related. And it would furnish a platform for the criticism of newness for newness’s sake, from which students might turn their critical attentions not to the devaluation of their own skills and labor but toward those who would see them devalued, defunded, and, yes, destroyed.

Notes

1. 1. Bond, Long, and Underwood, “‘Digital’ Is Not.”

2. 2. I acknowledge that the term gentrification remains definitionally linked to both race and class. My aim in using the term is not to undermine or devalue the fraught histories of either but to, in the words of Sarah Wasserman, position gentrification as a process of a “perennial unmaking” and a “process of constant transformation that is never complete” (“Ralph Ellison,” 531).

3. 3. Prelinger, “Archives,” 21.

4. 4. Gardiner and Musto, Digital Humanities, 87.

5. 5. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 106.

6. 6. Ernst, “Interview.”

7. 7. Battershill and Ross, Using Digital Humanities, 66; Piper, Enumerations, 5.

8. 8. Beyes, Bunz, and Chun, “In Search of Media.”

9. 9. Prelinger, “Archives,” 38.

10. 10. Levine, Forms, 47.

11. 11. Smith, Uneven Development, 209.

12. 12. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 106.

13. 13. Thompson, Making, 12–13.

Bibliography

1. Battershill, Claire, and Shawna Ross. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
2. Beyes, Timon, Mercedes Bunz, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. “In Search of Media.” Meson Press. https://meson.press/series-page/in-search-of-media/.
3. Bond, Sarah E., Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood. “‘Digital’ Is Not the Opposite of ‘Humanities.’” Chronicle Review, November 1, 2017. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Digital-Is-Not-the/241634.
4. Ernst, Wolfgang. “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” What Is a Media Lab? (blog), August 22, 2016. http://whatisamedialab.com.
5. Gardiner, Eileen, and Ronald G. Musto. The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
6. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989.
7. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015.
8. Piper, Andrew. Enumerations: Data and Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
9. Prelinger, Rick. “Archives of Inconvenience.” In Archives, by Andrew Lison, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and Rick Prelinger, 1–46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
10. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.
11. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
12. Wasserman, Sarah. “Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and the Persistence of Urban Forms.” PMLA 135, no. 3 (2020): 530–45. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.3.530.