Remediating Digital Humanities Graduate Training

The introduction of digital methodologies in graduate education has led to a refashioning of the tools and approaches scholars use to create new knowledge. Graduate students are often at the forefront of this new knowledge and tool creation when they serve as project managers, interns, and research assistants on digital humanities projects or when they plumb the depths of their home disciplines and study digital methodologies in research seminars. While studying digital humanities methods and epistemologies, graduate students also engage in the act of digital media creation when they work on digital projects. Thus, graduate students embody two roles: that of learner and consumer of theories and models about the discipline and that of creator of new work, typically digital media in the form of tools, projects, and software. Digital media scholars have already enjoined the disciplines of media studies and digital humanities in academic conversation, most notably in Jentery Sayers’s edited volume, The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, as well as others elsewhere (McPherson; Kraus; Mittell; Ferguson). There is little conversation, though, about what media studies can do for digital humanities graduate education. Although some scholars are addressing graduate education in the digital humanities, there is scant attention paid to how media studies plays a role (Huet and Taylor; Opel and Simeone; Reid; Selisker; Sutherland). Working within the space created for this conversation, my goal is to present the phenomenon of remediation as a metaphor for graduate education in digital humanities to urge a more central position for media studies as a necessary component within graduate education training. Media studies provides a way of assessing digital humanities products as media artifacts and offers a theoretical framework for doing so.

There are some tensions between media studies and digital humanities. Sayers proposes this tension may be because digital humanities takes as their topics of study material typically in textual form from before the 1800s, whereas media studies seldom looks before 1800 and studies multimodal texts. Additionally, although media studies takes media products as its central study, digital humanities integrates media into its processes and methods. Such tensions, although not trivial, are not insurmountable and reinforce that we are not separate from media, but rather, as Sayers notes, entangled in their production, consumption, and analysis. Likewise, I emphasize that media are entangled with graduate student research and training.

Digital humanities has become a somewhat permanent discipline; certain universities offer MA and PhD positions in digital humanities and may have a coterie of fully onboard educators who “get” digital humanities. Students who work from disciplines outside those with scholars friendly to digital humanities are likely to encounter thesis members, tenured faculty, endowed chairs, and people occupying otherwise impressive positions of academic power, who dismiss digital humanities. This is not a trivial experience for graduate students defending their research. It is to both of these imagined subsets of graduate students that I argue media studies as a discipline might offer instruction on how to position and defend one’s research and how the field itself can aid in furthering digital humanities epistemologies.

The scholars Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin employ the term “remediation” to indicate a refashioning of traditional media to address how new media, like the internet, build on and improve upon older forms of media, like film. Bolter and Grusin argue in Remediation: Understanding New Media, a work stemming from a series of graduate courses they both taught at Georgia Tech, that the outcome of media studies is not to serially displace “old” media with “new” media. In fact, such distinctions between old and new media are not all that useful. Instead, they maintain, “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (15). Similarly, Lev Manovich argues that all new media relies on the conventions of old media, thus complicating the terms old and new. Using the interplay between new and old medias as our metaphor, then, new graduate pedagogical approaches do not make old ones obsolete. Rather, there exists the potential to transform older pedagogies, retaining some features while discarding others. Through this perspective, the notion of remediation serves as a bridge between subfields in the humanities and can transform and reenergize disciplines. Furthermore, using media studies as an analogy and metaphor may offer graduate students a position of strength to articulate to themselves and those resistant to their efforts why their digital humanities work matters.

In the last ten years, digital humanities scholars have shifted their thinking about interdisciplinary work in the digital humanities from the metaphor of the Big Tent to the more recent “zonas de contacto” (Pannapacker; Ortega). In response to the gathering of disciplines and approaches brought into the DH community, Elika Ortega argues for a “synthesis of multiple” models of knowledge production because “a single hegemonic epistemic model is insufficient” to fully capture the interdisciplinarity of digital humanities works (Ortega, “Zonas de Contacto,” 180). Within the context of contact zones, there are two principal ways that media studies can help illuminate digital humanities graduate education. First, media studies and digital humanities are both embedded within and easily reach out to other disciplines, such as English and history, and create pathways for interdisciplinary connections. Second, media studies can help explain digital humanities artifacts and help digital humanities projects and products become objects of analysis and sites of new knowledge production about the nature of digital media and the production of knowledge.

Media studies is an interdisciplinary discipline. After the Second World War, media studies grew, taking many of its cues from more established fields like psychology and sociology with a sharp eye toward early information theory outlined by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. The critical study of media burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s and took inspiration from literary studies, feminist criticism, film and television studies, science and technology studies, and critical cultural studies. Although these approaches could contradict one another at times, they have a long history of integration with media studies, furthering the discipline and at the same time facilitating pathways for media studies to be situated within academia (Ouellette and Gray, Keywords for Media Studies, 2–3). Allegorically, media studies can be seen as an older, world-wise academic sibling within the interdisciplinary family, one who has already been parented and forged an academically institutionalized path.

Part of the origin story of media studies, then, much like digital humanities, is an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and collaboration across disciplines. Mentioned so often it may now sound trite, digital humanities scholars time and again note the strength of interdisciplinary collaboration. Tara McPherson, in her description of intersections between media studies and digital humanities, inscribes this interdisciplinary collaborator as the “multimodal scholar” who “complements rather than replaces” other types of digital humanists, and indeed other humanists generally (“Introduction,” 120). Working with different tools and products—visualizations, databases, video games, and films—the multimodal scholar seeks to analyze ways of knowing and create new ways of seeing the world; in other words, the multimodal scholar is in the work of creating media and assessing epistemologies in whatever modality she encounters them. But how does such a multimodal scholar pursue her training, or how is a multimodal scholar made? What formalized pedagogical trends in graduate education promote and encourage such interdisciplinary multimodality? More importantly, where do graduate programs stand with training multimodal scholars, or is this burden of educating themselves as multimodal scholars something graduate students pursue outside their formalized disciplinary training? Part of the process of remediating the future of graduate education will be answering these questions, but one immediate response is the role media theories can play in assessing media artifacts. For example, social network analysis, which is a theoretical concept stemming from communication studies, is increasingly used to analyze humanistic phenomena such as networks of British luminaries (Kindred Britain) and the lineages between jazz musicians (Linked Jazz).1 Built within social network analysis is not only the theory of why nodes, edges, and connections are significant but also a pathway for recognizing network analysis as a reductive tool of western categorization intent on capturing a static moment in time (Drucker, “Graphical Approaches”). Thus, within social network analysis, instruction on creating a tool that integrates humanities data as well as a mode of analysis for critiquing the tool as an “object of inquiry” can be found.2

In his explanation of the intersections between digital humanities and media studies, Sayers emphasizes that one fruitful area of analysis is not just asking “what media are,” but also “what media do” (Routledge Companion, 3). This approach employs media studies and digital humanities as a matter of politics, or in other words, as a way to unpack the power structures embedded within our technologies and media. As digital humanities products become increasingly multimodal and move beyond the remediation of print texts to also include sound, maps, visualizations, and archives, studying these artifacts as media can be instructive for locating politics of labor, race, gender, and class.

To further explore the above concepts (interdisciplinarity embedded in DH work, the entanglement of DH and media studies, and the usefulness of viewing DH projects as media artifacts) within the context of graduate education, I will present my experiences of working on a digital humanities project outside my home discipline of history—one that proved instrumental to my education in media studies and the “learning by doing” inherent in digital humanities projects. Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th-Century Visual and Material Culture is a digital archive of material objects documenting changing representations of Japan from the early to mid-twentieth century; it is headed by Joanne Bernardi in the University of Rochester’s Department of Modern Languages and Cultures (Bernardi and Dimmock, “Creative Curating”). The archive contains postcards, sheet music, small gauge films (8–16mm), glass slides, photographs, print ephemera, and three-dimensional material objects such as a souvenir doll, Japanese fans, and as I will examine in greater detail below, a nutshell containing a tiny booklet of scenes from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

As part of an Andrew W. Mellon predoctoral fellowship in digital humanities, I worked on Re-Envisioning Japan as a member of the digital archive’s redesign team and as a teaching assistant in Tourist Japan, a course that complements the archive. At the heart of the redesign was the question of how to best portray three-dimensional objects in a web-based space. Many of the objects begged for tactile interaction, such as the smooth feel of the pages of a book made of Japanese crepe paper, the heft of the souvenir Hanako doll, and the fragility of a small nutshell containing tiny pages. We were conscious, too, that the photos taken of these objects had their own media specificity distinct from the actual objects. Understanding that the digital surrogate could not replace the material object, how could we compose an experience for our digital archive user that communicated the nutshell’s material characteristics? This caused us to think about two central issues: first, the affordances and limitations of web-based digital media, and second, the characteristics of the material object itself. For the latter, we engaged in a detailed Prownian analysis to explore the nutshell (Prown and Haltman, American Artifacts). Sitting in a circle, we each looked closely at the object and verbally analyzed the following: description, deduction, speculation, research, and interpretive analysis. As we progressed, we created a narrative that summarized our experience of the nutshell as an object and media artifact, as well as a contextual analysis of the nutshell’s time and place in history.

Because the nutshell contained a small paper booklet detailing the attractions at the 1933 World’s Fair, our analysis and subsequent narrative from the start blended both language about the object and the printed paper media embedded within the object. Such close reading illuminated the object’s history, materiality, and cultural significance. We then began to think about the digital characteristics of this object displayed on the web and imagine web-based media afforded a similar, albeit nontactile, experience, especially if the encounter focused on storytelling via a photo-essay type gallery and close description of the object. Built into this plan was the understanding that the digital encounter was its own media artifact that had value not only as Japanese material culture and history but also as digital media. Central to distinguishing the material object and the digital surrogate was the rich Dublin Core metadata that outlined the digital media surrogate and its description of who contributed the labor to digitize this object, the technologies required to create the surrogate, and when the digital object was created, as well as key metadata about the analog object.

As a predoctoral student in history, I was unfamiliar with Prownian analysis and thinking of objects as media. As I watched others in the group who had greater familiarity with media studies, visual and cultural studies, and digital media, as well as course subject expertise in Japanese material culture, I began to see that this educational experience was for me as much about learning how to intellectually engage with material objects as it was about learning the language of other disciplines and how they applied theoretical frameworks. In this way, our attempts to remediate the nutshell—to transform an analog nutshell into a digital media artifact—became a true contact zone à la Ortega. For this type of graduate education to happen, two factors needed to exist: first, an interdisciplinary ethos and space for cross-disciplinary activities, and second, a focus that emphasized both the material object and the digital surrogate as not only products of our work but as media artifacts themselves. To the former, Sean Weidman’s point about the vulnerability and precariousness of graduate students occupying in-between spaces of DH’s intradisciplinarity is especially salient. As Weidman argues in chapter 16 in this volume, the efficacy of this in-between work varies from institution to institution and even more granularly from department to department. From my experience, the presence of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Rochester centered our institution’s DH work and provided a physical in-between space that was essential. Secondly, the formalization of DH graduate student fellowships via the Andrew W. Mellon predoctoral fellowships in the digital humanities provided the pathway for experiencing digital humanities and interdisciplinarity perspectives.3

In important ways, this example shows what digital humanities is (a process of collaboration, an archive) and what digital humanities does (inspire collaborators to consider their disciplinary biases) and how these are entangled with media studies. Although this example is personal to me, other examples of graduate students engaging with digital humanities artifacts as media do exist, for example, the Blake Archive’s XML transcriptions of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts (Reed, “Managing an Established Digital Humanities Project”), a television archive (Van Gorp and Bron, “Building Bridges”), and a Native American video game focusing on indigenous storytelling to portray the history of native experiences of colonization.4 Through creating media objects, students explored what media are as artifacts and what media do as sites of collaboration, knowledge production, and political power. There are debates about what constitutes “making” within the digital humanities, and I do not have space to address this here other than to say that embedding media studies within DH graduate education not only emphasizes the process of students building digital things (experiential learning), but also on the object itself and what it took to “build” that object within its time and place (i.e., papermaking, bookbinding, ink production, and gathering real nutshells).

Jamie “Skye” Bianco, in an argument for a “digital humanities which is not one,” notes that digital humanities is “radically heterogeneous” and “multimodally layered” (“This Digital Humanities,” 109). It is this richness of perspective that addresses “the contexts and conditions in which we find ourselves” that gives digital humanities and its upcoming practitioners (i.e., graduate students) political power in their creation and critique of media. The metaphor of remediation illustrates that a refashioning of pedagogical approaches does not automatically render old graduate pedagogies obsolete. Instead, remediation allows graduate students to cultivate a more productive, multimodally layered conversation with emerging, transformed pedagogies. It allows us to respond to the ultimate critique of the digital humanities and answer with the new knowledge we discover in our endeavors.