Digital Humanities in General Education

General Education: Common Ground between Computer Science and Literature Students

After that first experience teaching DH at PSU in 2015, I found myself in a dilemma. I wanted to impart technical knowledge that students could use to defamiliarize close reading. But I could not rely on the consistently high levels of student preparation I had experienced previously in my career at R1s. PSU terms are just ten weeks. How to keep the technically intensive parts of my curriculum without overtaxing students already disadvantaged by poverty and other barriers to education?

I lit upon the idea of fitting my DH literary approaches into PSU’s general education requirement, reasoning that if I had more computer science majors in the class, even students with little to no technical training might imbibe some of the problem-solving approaches used by computer science and other technical majors. The obverse would apply as well: literature majors could model how the exploration of productive ambiguities can yield new ways of understanding knowledge and power, even in seemingly values-neutral things like operating systems and search returns.4 I wrote a proposal to have my DH course designated as part of PSU’s “Design Thinking/Innovation/Entrepreneurship” general education cluster, which originates in the School of Business Administration. In the Design Thinking cluster, students are tasked to “identify needs, brainstorm solutions, incorporate feedback, iterate designs, and formulate enduring business models.”5 The team-based approach to problem solving and iterative “design” thinking would be a great meeting ground between my two target populations. The proposal was approved, the only humanities class in the cluster.

The next time I taught the class, I forged a collaborative mind-set by having students collectively annotate our first text, The Waste Land (TWL, 1922). Each student is responsible for twenty-five lines and loads their annotations into a shared Google Slides presentation. This exercise shows how understanding the poem depends on hunting down allusions, and it also permits students to see how others approach the task. It introduces students to close reading as a method, which we apply also to the digital tools we use to trace Eliot’s allusions. The speed and ease of internet search fundamentally denatures Eliot’s intentionally “slow” poem. Before computation, TWL would have required library access and dozens of hours to parse. TWL hobbyists built early hypertextual glosses of the poem in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We read the source code of these hand-built websites and talk about why early HTML workhorses persist when other digital objects (such as same-era Flash games and MySpace) are obsolete. The durability of HTML enables an enriched, concordance-like experience of reading TWL that is also a lesson in media history. “Close reading” is semantic, bibliographic, and a stealth introduction to comparative media studies. I lug into class the elegant, oversize hardcover The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (1971), and we frame the poem’s bibliographic history as versioning. Both lit majors and computer science majors get to be smart about their domains of expertise. By listening to others outside their cohort, students find a bridge into intellectually foreign terrain. This would be harder to do if the class were not a general education course. In the past at R1s, I was usually the one imparting technical knowledge. Now I had created a context where, if I shaped lessons wisely, students could meaningfully tutor each other while I urged discovery and curiosity about both domains.

My charge as the bridge builder is to learn everything I can about the expertise each student brings into the classroom. I ask a lot of questions, and I listen. I roam the classroom and translate student observations that might be obscure to the others outside that domain. We frequently view source code, comparing the legibility of the early hypertext TWL glosses to the code of a single JPG file or an open email on the Gmail client. We delve into literary critical insight about high modernism, the social conditions that Eliot was critiquing, and the poem’s anxieties about sexual attraction. When I taught at R1s, my process of appraising student talent was nuanced because almost everybody shared elite preparation. At PSU, I must slow down and ask more questions of students to find a space of intellectual safety where they feel confident. One man in his forties who had been a technical manual writer asked questions about the poem and the assigned critical reading that revealed he did not understand them. I authorized this student to approach his annotation of twenty-five lines from TWL as if it were a technical manual. Invited to harness his professional expertise and apply it to this foreign domain gave this student a path into Eliot’s poem and an essay by N. Katherine Hayles. His “tech manual” gloss of the twenty-five lines laid important intellectual groundwork for him. He had just transferred from a community college, where he had been praised as a good writer. He was baffled to find himself out of step with university-level critical thinking. When students kindly asked him questions to push his precision as he presented his tech manual to the class, and beyond throughout the term, these exchanges shifted his approach from placating my standards (“What are you looking for?”) to participating as a colearner in a knowledge community. As he reflected on what the other students taught him through their questions, his confidence and capability grew.

Once the team mind-set is established by each student presenting their twenty-five-line annotation to the class and fielding questions, it is time for “design thinking.” We use technologic methods to “deform” TWL. Deformance “is a portmanteau that combines the words ‘performance’ and ‘deform’ into an interpretative concept premised upon deliberately misreading a text, for example, reading a poem backwards line-by-line.”6 Teaching Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann’s classic essay “Deformance and Interpretation,” we use subtractive methods (eliminating or isolating words) to “reinstall the text . . . as a performative event, a made thing.”7 This materiality resonates with students, who are liberated from Eliot’s dense forest of references to examine the concrete-poem-like shapes the poem makes when keywords related to “water” or “woman” are isolated. Literature students model how to interpret textual meaning from these shaped deformances. Most-frequent-word analysis is a very accessible way, particularly for computer science majors, to explore the poem as a made thing. Some have built speed runs where stanzas output atop each other, blacking out white space and turning the poem into a kind of Rorschach test. Paul Benzon first shared this “deformance” assignment with me in 2013, and I have tinkered with it ever since.8

Deformance activities are a lab where students can experiment across knowledge domains by imitating and remixing other students’ approaches because we share work in progress at every class session. A Spanish literature major wanted her deformance to remediate Madame Sosostris’s tarot cards in TWL as an interactive system. As she presented her concept to the class, computer science majors suggested JavaScript techniques they would use to build such a system. This sparked a conversation about the essential qualities of chance and randomness, which could be executed even using paper-based flash cards. The Spanish literature student found a browser-based flash card engine in which she built her tarot cards. She accurately gauged how to deploy her existing technical knowledge into a literary critical context because the JavaScript programming suggestions expanded her perception of possibilities beyond her domain of expertise, close reading. Later, in her interpretive essay about the tarot card deformance, this student situated the technical experiment as a literary critical act. Remixing the tarot-reading scene of TWL as online flash cards “enhances the wonder and unease of a tarot reading which is already produced in the poem, and leads the reader to a deeper understanding of the poem’s prevailing themes of distress and the passage of time,” she observed.

Deformances elicit creativity from both literature and computer science students. Here are some examples of things they have made:

• Visual representations of TWL’s mountainous and arid landscapes through word-subtractive methods.
• A game written in JavaScript where each word from the “Phoenician sailor” sequence is converted, in the poem’s output, to a dictionary definition of that word. As readers “play” TWL, the goal is to guess Eliot’s original word based on those dictionary definitions.
• An erasure poem where, on hover, certain keywords are blacked out.
• A montage of YouTube video clips made from top search results for keywords from the “Death by Water” sequence. This associative work blends human and machine intelligence, and gave the student occasion to talk about search as our public commons and Google’s ownership of it.

Extra-academic Intelligence

Having to formally present work in progress to the entire class every three weeks—part of the “design thinking,” prototype model of pedagogy—acculturates students to seek the wisdom of other students. The broad mix of disciplinary expertise and extra-academic life experiences in a PSU classroom exceeds what any one instructor could provide. In addition to helpfully creating deadlines where students are accountable to each other (instead of me) for work in progress, student presentations foster camaraderie. Students feel vulnerable and excited standing up in front of one another, and then supported as peers attend to their work carefully. Of course, the professor must cultivate an environment where failed experiments and partial successes are recognized as important data. Early in the term, students model their questions and reactions on mine. I always applaud students after a presentation, a gesture of respect that acknowledges the labor of making a presentation and the emotional transaction between speaker and audience. My “bridge building” between types of student expertise redistributes the power balance from hierarchic to rhizomatic. Different students emerge as domain experts and classroom leaders at different moments in the term. In this rhizomatic power model, the professor does not abdicate responsibility and leadership. I fortify ligatures, asking students to fit their discoveries and ruminations back into the methods and lexicon of our course.

In this volume, Lik Hang Tsui, Benjun Zhu, and Jing Chen describe the process of folding nascent digital humanities approaches into the general education curricula at Chinese universities. The heart of Tsui, Zhu, and Jing’s general education approach is an iterative method that remedies “limited prior training in both computational technologies and the humanities,” which “made it difficult [for students] to consolidate their DH knowledge and skills.” The Chinese pedagogues found success in hands-on workshops in both humanistic production (“making thread-bound traditional Chinese books, [and] ink rubbings of inscriptions”) and technical methods (“how unstructured Chinese texts . . . are usually transformed into structured datasets, which are a core component of . . . Chinese DH project work”).9 I, too, find that “making stuff” creates various and multiple access points for students to encounter unfamiliar, domain-specific knowledge.

I did not foresee, in designating my course part of the general education curriculum, how extra-academic forms of knowledge possessed by nontraditional learners would get activated in these cross-disciplinary conversations. One student hit roadblocks while coding a web page in HTML and CSS. Just a few weeks later, she used problem-solving skills she had developed as a neurodiverse woman parenting neurodiverse kids, finding a snippet of code that would insert checkboxes into the Twine game she was building. Checkboxes were an essential feature of her game, which created a playable experience of the mental checklist a neurodiverse elementary-age kid ticks off as they get ready for school. This mother and nascent game maker, an expert at hunting for appropriate resources to help her kids learn at their public schools, tapped the cognitive resources of other students in our class during our open-ended workshop time. Students attacked the problem, scanning through the Twine Cookbook and tapping snippets of code into a YouTube search bar. Collectively, they found workable code. When the student demoed the game for the class as her end-of-term presentation, everyone was able to see the code itself and why checkboxes were essential to her game’s procedural rhetoric. This student’s accomplishment prompted metacognitive reflection as we collectively reviewed her learning process, which included the extra-academic skill of asking for help from a variety of resources until she got a positive result.

“I would happily take this class as a year-long set, just to get deeper into the material,” wrote one student in a course evaluation. “I think there’s a strong case for the importance of this class along multiple vectors: as a way to meet students who are interested in the same material but pursuing different majors, as a way to improve criticism of digital media as a cultural mechanism, and finally as a way to improve and enrich the media literacy of the students who take the class. Thanks! Please keep offering this class!”

My capacity cannot keep up with demand. I was hired to teach both digital humanities and book publishing at PSU, an appointment split between two separate programs in the English Department. As our master’s in book publishing has attracted more and more students, I have less time to teach DH to undergraduates. This class is my one shot to impart DH literary methods at PSU. Students have talked about organizing an exhibition of their DH work in a campus commons after the term has ended. Making literary-technical work, presenting it to each other, and talking about it was so rewarding they wanted to keep doing it.

Looking back on my decades at R1s, I wonder now at my blithe unawareness that many college students skip meals to afford school, live in cars, or share a one-bedroom apartment with six family members. But I also know that my students’ intersectional challenges impelled me to make DH more accessible by situating it in general education. Building bridges among literature and computer science majors freed me to define expertise generously, where student brilliance can circulate and accrue by various mechanisms: domain specific, emotionally resilient (as in the neurodiverse student), or professional (as in the tech manual writer). Teaching DH as general education allows students to sample intellectually “other” approaches and reflect on how that exposure should inform their disciplinary knowledge.

Notes

1. 1. “I swear that the football team will never eat another peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever in their life once they leave here,” said Portland State University Athletic Director Valerie Cleary, “but it’s cheap and it’s rich in protein and it’s easy; it’s quick” (Concannon, “Food Insecurity”). Concannon further reports a survey that finds “48% of PSU students experienced some kind of food insecurity in 2018,” approximately four times the national average level. Each month circa 2019, a food pantry in the basement of the PSU student center served approximately two thousand students (Concannon).

2. 2. Ma, “Portland State.”

3. 3. Student Achievement Measure, “Portland State University.” Per this report, 48 percent of first-time freshmen completed their bachelor’s degrees within six years.

4. 4. Compelling critiques by Noble (Algorithms of Oppression), McPherson (“Why?”), and Earhart (“Can We Trust?”) are essential contexts I weave into course discussions about media’s materiality and susceptibility to human bias.

5. 5. Portland State University, “Design Thinking.”

6. 6. Sample, “Notes.”

7. 7. Samuels and McGann, “Deformance and Interpretation,” 30.

8. 8. Benzon, “Deformation.”

9. 9. See chapter 24 in this volume.

Bibliography

1. Benzon, Paul. “Deformation.” Electronic Literature, fall 2013. https://tuelit13.wordpress.com/deformation/.
2. Concannon, Sophie. “Food Insecurity Affects Student-Athletes, Greater Campus Community.” Portland State University Vanguard 74, no. 10 (November 5, 2019): 8–9. https://issuu.com/dailyvanguard/docs/11.5.19.
3. Earhart, Amy E. “Can We Trust the University? Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities.” In Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, 369–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu.
4. Ma, Kenny. “Portland State Ranked #1 in Oregon for Graduating Students Receiving Pell Grants by U.S. News & World Report.” Portland State University News, September 19, 2019. https://www.pdx.edu/news.
5. McPherson, Tara. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? Or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 139–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu.
6. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
7. Portland State University. “Design Thinking.” https://www.pdx.edu/university-studies/design-thinking.
8. Sample, Mark. “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities.” samplereality (blog), May 2, 2012. https://www.samplereality.com.
9. Samuels, Lisa, and Jerome J. McGann. “Deformance and Interpretation.” New Literary History 30, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 25–56. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.1999.0010.
10. Student Achievement Measure. “Portland State University.” http://www.studentachievementmeasure.org/participants/209807.