What versus How

In March 2020, the Covid-19 lockdown finally swept into the United Kingdom. In its wake, in the space of a week, many institutions including my own underwent the kinds of change that would normally take five years or more to bring about. In particular, the sector was forced into a comprehensive reevaluation of online teaching. We were suddenly faced with searching questions of what it is for, as well as what it should be and how it should be done. But in those panicked weeks leading up to, and after, the national lockdown on March 23, 2020, there was little time for anyone to consider these questions in detail, least of all with any kind of historical perspective.

Considering the forced acceleration of change in the spring of 2020 in its wider historical context is valuable. In the United Kingdom, universities have been offering online teaching in one form or another for at least two decades, with the concept of remote teaching stretching back much further. Most notably, remaining with the UK context, the Open University was established in 1969 to offer remote education by correspondence course. The motivation for this, on a relatively small island, was not to enable students to overcome geographical barriers to their education but rather to promote social inclusion and mobility as the country emerged from the post–World War II period (Open University, “Take Your Teaching Online”). The sudden shock of the total move online in March 2020, therefore, fell within a longer historical trajectory, one in which online teaching is only part of the story. In this extended historical period, universities moved from predominantly paper to predominantly electronic communications. The United Kingdom’s JANET network connecting campus computing systems was established in 1984, at the time a pioneering system driven by substantial government investment (JISC, “History of the Janet Network”). Since the 1990s, higher education institutions (HEIs) have adopted Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) systems, and digital and/or automated systems for most aspects of administration and governance. And although many studies dismiss the idea of the “digital native” as a myth (e.g., Kirschner and De Bruyckere, “Myths of the Digital Native”), in the fifteen years or so since the inception of so-called Web 2.0, students (and staff) in western HEIs have generally become more digitally connected as social media platforms have taken hold, and digital communication channels have become dominant in social and political discourse. This has changed many important relationships, including HEI members’ relationships with their institutions. When considering the disruption of Covid-19, we must remember that the digital space is one that universities and their inhabitants have occupied gradually, incrementally, and cautiously, over a period of decades.

In the “new normal” of the Covid-19 pandemic, however (a phrase that rapidly became hackneyed and overused in media discourse), lectures, seminars, whole modules, and programs were reimagined for the digital world within weeks, if not days, within the capacity that was designed for teaching in the “old normal” world. Despite this, many such changes persisted and continue to challenge the assumptions about any relative benefits and drawbacks of online and in-person teaching. Blended learning, where students will have an option of taking their courses in the virtual and physical worlds, will surely continue to have a role, given the great dependence of the global higher education I sector on academic and student mobility. This sudden, exponential, and enforced occupation of digital space far beyond the frontiers of anything that had gone before should therefore be seen partly as a matter of institutional resilience. After all, the protointernet itself emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in part as a response to the shadow of the Cold War, providing a means of channeling executive command decisions through “distributed networks” that could survive a nuclear attack (Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 183). Given that Covid-19 and other pandemics may well recur and that national and global issues continue to dominate, including climate change and—since the pandemic—the cost-of-living crisis, we have a responsibility to our students and to each other to consider how the digital space might help weather such future storms. We must, in other words, seek to ensure that our ongoing occupation of the digital space can sustain as well as survive.

With the benefit of some distance from the pandemic, it is worth taking stock and looking again at some of those bigger questions and what they mean for digital humanities (DH) in general, which I approach below through the particular lens of our work at King’s College London. Many in the world of the old normal might have assumed that DH would be naturally placed to embrace these changes, indeed that it already occupied “the digital” in a way that other disciplines did not. Most digital humanists would probably argue that the reality is more nuanced and complex than this. However, I believe that the initial distinction between what we teach versus how we teach it, exposed by the emergency situation of March 2020, remains and indeed holds deeper significance when we consider the digital in our teaching. The digital in the context of the digital humanities in my view means an increased entwinement of digital and nondigital modes of critical discourse, practice, and analysis that include teaching and learning in which frictionless networked contact alters not just how we communicate but how we interact, behave, and think. This is an old idea in the context of the internet’s history. Such a blended place is much as the internet geographers Matthew Zook and Mark Graham imagined it in the world of “DigiPlace” back in 2007, as digital mapping platforms emerged: “DigiPlace is not determined and constrained by transcendental structures but exists instead in a fluid and complex state of being, in which agents and structures are interminably enabling and shaping one another” (“Creative Reconstruction of the Internet,” 480). The digital, as a space that DH (and other academic disciplines) had to occupy so rapidly, thus blends both form and content, both “what” and “how.” A cursory examination of the history of the digital before DigiPlace shows that this dichotomy, so starkly exposed by Covid-19, is even older, being indeed almost contemporaneous with the establishment in the United Kingdom of distance learning in the late 1960s. In 1968, J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, the U.S. computer scientists and administrators of the ARPA program, noted the following in a paper titled “The Computer as a Communication Device”: “Creative, interactive communication requires a plastic or moldable medium that can be modeled, a dynamic medium in which premises will flow into consequences, and above all a common medium that can be contributed to and experimented with by all. Such a medium is at hand—the programmed digital computer. Its presence can change the nature and value of communication even more profoundly than did the printing press and the picture tube, for, as we shall show, a well-programmed computer can provide direct access both to informational resources and to the processes for making use of the resources” (22). When university pedagogy, which we might certainly consider to be an example of “creative, interactive communication,” is placed into this context, the “dynamic medium” of the digital must be considered not, in fact, just as a medium, but rather as an environment. And most would accept that since the mid-2000s, the internet has been a conversational networked environment rather than a formal one (Castells, “Network Theory of Power,” 782).

Moving from a physical environment to a digital one is therefore a matter of pedagogy, or more precisely of pedagogical environment, and not just a shift from one mode of teaching to another; it follows, then, that moving teaching normally done in person to an online format during a time of emergency is not the same thing as online pedagogy, never mind good online pedagogy (this may be extremely obvious within the DH community, but it perhaps still needs restating). No one—academics, students, management—should expect it to be. The lessons of internet history are clear on this. Once this fundamental truth is acknowledged, a range of important and self-reflective questions about what constitutes good online pedagogy emerge that DH as a field needs to address.

The flurries of discussion about online teaching in the first part of 2020—the relative merits of Discord, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and institutional VLE platforms—were driven by how we coped with the crisis. The “how” changed (literally) overnight, driven by the need to deliver what had already been promised to students. Despite this, the creativity and innovation of DH was much in evidence. Much of this came through in the roundup of Covid-19 think pieces in Digital Humanities Now and other contributions (“Editors’ Choice”). There were many stories of compromise, improvisation, imagination, and the challenges of the digitalization of content and delivery. However, taking a wider historical-environmental view of online pedagogy, it becomes clear that the Covid-19 crisis merely accentuated, rather than caused, the distinction between what we teach online (in DH and everywhere else) and how we teach it, while also greatly accelerating the shift between the two. Looking both beyond the immediate and pressing need for digital teaching as a palliative for the institutional problems caused by the sudden immobility of the student population and to the more distant history of the digital, we see that these “how” questions are purely symptomatic.

In the longer term, the question of what we teach online and how this differs from in-person degree programs presents many more fundamental challenges and opportunities. What kinds of learning can best be imparted remotely, how might these be used to meet the specific challenges of graduate study, and how can the digital itself be co-opted into such new forms of learning? It will take time, resources, effort, and imagination beyond the teaching we already do and the efforts that we have all made to salvage our existing teaching tasks.

We can begin by asking if it is even possible to deliver remotely the same learning outcomes for graduates as we do from the lectern. Should we even try? If not, what should we be doing instead? These are fundamental questions that have been bubbling under the surface of DH pedagogy for years. Any current debates in the newer forms of DH embrace the digital as its own theoretical construct. These debates frame the digital as having its own modes of production and interpretation that are separate from printed materials or physical image media. Indeed, this idea permeates much of our teaching and research in the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s, where one of our core aims remains to build and contribute to the global body of that theory as driven by the humanities (Dunn and Schuster, “General Introduction,” 8). It follows that “digital methods” should be seen as a body of methodology distinct from other types of methods, particularly the discursive approaches used by humanities researchers to understand and interpret the human record. If this is true, then we will have to accept that delivering the digital and digital methods online to students means that the fundamental building block of higher education programs, the learning outcome, must be rethought for online delivery. What are learning outcomes for in the digital age, when students are, as part of their everyday lives, increasingly connected with networks of knowledge, information, ways of doing things, cultures, and economies that are fundamentally enabled by the digital?

In the DDH at King’s, we offer five master’s programs. Hitherto, these have rested relatively comfortably within the standard credit and timetabling structures: generally, they have been delivered as one core module, four elective modules, and an extended personal dissertation research project. Learning outcomes, defined as the skills and knowledge that a student possesses upon completion of a course, are inevitably tied to the types of material we teach within these structures. In the kind of humanities-driven learning of, with, and about the digital that we pursue in the DDH, the origins of such material may lie in the physical world (such as manuscripts, artworks, and photographs) or the digital world (content created purely online). The latter, especially, are of significance for our more professionally facing modules, whose subjects include advertising, digital content, and social media analysis and subjects related to the digital economy. For reasons set out in more detail below, I believe that online teaching, in particular, offers opportunities to question the distinction between these different kinds of material in new ways.

Digital humanities researchers of all kinds need to engage with the ways that the digital changes our interpretive relationship with our material. We have been forced to confront and deconstruct the assertion that “an exact replica” can be easily delivered to any student, anywhere, as in the vision in the quotation from H. G. Wells given at the start of this chapter. The medium in such a world will never be value-free, as it will always have phenomenological significance, forming part of the interpretive process. Of course, digital transmission changes our perception and reception of cultural material. Try writing a tweet with a fountain pen and posting it through the mail or opening a text file in MS Word 95. The digital is a prism through which we see and experience the human record of past and present, not a window. Online teaching needs to embrace this, and this is very much a matter of what as well as how.

Therefore, one challenge for DH’s pedagogical theory and practice as it approaches both the how and the what of online learning in the post-Covid-19 world is the need to construct new forms of learning outcome that enable students to embrace that prism: the teaching of digital methods, digital citizenship, and digital ways of being rather than just digital content, as per Wells, as simply an exact replica of what we get in the library or the archive. There is much one could draw on from other DH discourses here: for example, much is made in library and archive studies of the truth that preservation (e.g., the creation of exact replicas of content) is not sustainability, which is the ability to use those replicas in some way. I make no claim that this is a new idea in DH pedagogy, and it is certainly very present in my own department, but it shows that DH has many rich and deep seams to draw on in understanding the key how versus what difference for engaging in both teaching and research online.

There are some areas that I think we need to consider when building a new framework for online teaching in DH. I do not purport to offer any answers here but rather present these as high-level ideas to act as way-markers to help kick off conversations that many of us will be having as the years of the post-pandemic world unfold. No doubt they will be changed, deleted, reorganized, reordered, and added to, but for teaching that approaches the digital in a humanities-driven way—which, for me, is the essence of DH pedagogy—these represent the starting points as I see them.