Seven Lions

The last time I was writing about qausi-amateurs in knowledge production, I primarily focused on the phenomenon of scientists writing history, particularly environmental history, because historians trained in the current university system are unfamiliar with environmental science and uncomfortable making sweeping claims about environmental systems, whereas scientists feel that philosophy and history are easy enough to jump into based, I assume, in a perceived “Rigor Gap” between the sciences and the humanities.

But that’s not the only way in which academics change course from their initial field of study to produce scholarship outside their discipline.  Laura Mandell wrote an excellent article about the growth of the Digital Humanities, wherein she highlights the attempts by scholars of literature and history to assimilate digital tools and theory into their scholarship.  Mandell echoes Mark Taylor’s call to dismantle the disciplines that define modern scholarship but with more pressing concern based on the currency of university education:

But these efforts to dismantle the disciplines may resemble a wrestling match between Thor and the Evil Demon more than it does any revolution, velvet or otherwise.  There will be no disciplines if there is no one to discipline.  It’s not simply a matter of Phoenix University or universities-without-walls or distance learning.  It’s really that so much learning is taking place online, without us.  Oh sure, kids in the U.S.: they’ll come to college, they’ll do their time, get their credentials: but their thinking will happen elsewhere.

A couple years back I claimed that the university needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs the university, and I think it’s time I amend that statement.  It’s really not the university–which is simply a construct arising out of the interaction between scholars and students, society and academy–or Wikipedia–which is much the same.  Rather, it is that the humanities need the digital more than the digital needs to be humanistic.  We already wander an Internet where humanities knowledge is readily available, produced and collated by non-scholars in more innovating ways than even well-funded scholarly digital humanities projects.  The Victoria Improvement Project, a user-created mod of Paradox Interactive’s colonial conquest game, has done a better job of creating a vibrant, historically accurate world than History Game Canada, which just won a large Digital Media and Learning Prize.  Another prize-winner was Hypercities, which is little more than a Google Maps mashup that seems to be inspired by the amazing work of David Rumsey.

It’s not that these projects aren’t the cutting edge of digital innovation, they shouldn’t be, but the current production of scholarly digital media is sadly lacking in real depth and is reflected by the concurrent monographs and journal articles written about it.  More and more, scholars are realizing that there is something to be gained from the development and use of digital tools, but their years developing expertise in literature, history or art have left them unable to write or understand code.  As such, though they may be experts in the colonial history of Kenya, they cannot translate their knowledge into a systems theoretical expression suitable for presentation in digital media, and so we miss out on truly innovative humanities digital media.  The work done in the Digital Humanities is done by quasi-amateurs, whose vision needs to be translated by technical experts unschooled in historical, artistic or literary dynamics.  It is as if we had brilliant but illiterate scholars of philosophy whose arguments were being written down by scribes unschooled in the philosophical arguments they record.  Heidegger wrote of the damage done by this process when he bemoaned the translation of Greek philosophy by translators not as brilliant as the original writers.  Plotinus argued that philosophers shouldn’t write books, and there are still many humanities scholars who see digital media in the same light, but if we’re going to accept that digital media is the new book, then that requires the academics to be software literate.  Lev Manovich makes the same claim in Software Takes Command, pointing out rightly that you don’t need to produce all the code, or even understand it all, but you must understand how software functions if you want to create software.  As Daniel Cohen points out in The Promise of Digital History:

But those who would like to do advanced work in digital history will ultimately have to acquire significant technical skills, not only to execute complex digital projects successfully (or to guide those doing the design and programming in a technically literate way), but also to have a more far-reaching vision of what is possible for historians in this new medium.

This focus on software literacy has to begin in undergraduate humanities education and must be stressed in graduate school.  Already we claim that a quality humanities scholar must be able to write, hence the required writing courses in every university, and that they must have a grasp of foreign languages, hence the similar requirements in graduate programs, now it’s time to place software literacy on that list.  You cannot be an expert if you are illiterate in the subject you claim expertise.

Updated to improve my street cred, apparently Nick Montfort at MIT is willing to acknowledge the reality on the ground:

I certainly don’t want to ban anyone from the field for not knowing about computing systems, but I also think it would be a disservice to give out game studies or digital media degrees at this point and not have this sort of essential technical background be part of the curriculum.

Wouldn’t you find it strange if a literature professor said that they didn’t “want to ban anyone from the field for not knowing how to read and write”?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 8:59 AM and is filed under Academia, Digital Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.