Musings on Digital Tools

The more we learn about the tools used by DHers, the more I picture Orlando Jones as the hologram AI library computer in the 2002 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. In the movie, the AI Vox 114 is sentient, and has at his disposal every text of every genre ever written. He has a human personality. He can make predictions about what people are looking for. He can connect to relevant data from diverse fields and disciplines. He can even argue about truth and fiction, fact and fantasy. And he can learn with empathy. He can, for instance offer hypotheses about why certain texts may not have survived or social issues impacting the writing and various texts. We don’t get much of a hint at that from the movie, but the implication is there when he and the protagonist argue about the possibility of time travel followed by how Vox 114 embraces his role in the future as teacher for children at the end of the movie.

After reading the introductory readings for our DH course, Lauren Klein’s article, Distance Reading After Moretti, and especially Andrew Piper’s Fictionality, I can’t help but surmise that Vox 114 may be the ultimate payoff for DH scholarship. I can also finally see the legitimacy in the arguments by Dennis Tenen and Ted Underwood that DHers should understand and write code. For all the value end users and humanities scholars gain via the work of these makers, continued progress cannot happen without them. Yet in Vox 114’s personality I see the ultimate importance of values, and Lisa Spiro’s article about establishing them for DH earns renewed respect.

Perhaps the undergrad and graduate field of Digital Humanities needs to remain true to the humanities computing roots, and degree requirements need to continue including writing code and creating new tools with ongoing research and experimentation. If so, however, all the core humanities disciplines need to add courses, especially for teacher candidates, on how to use the best of those programs and resources created by DHers. At the very least, we need to know who to thank as we put their tools to use in education.

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Digital Humanities is all about creating “. . . new ways of thinking about how academic work might be done in the coming years.”

Kathleen Fitzptrick

A few short weeks ago I had no idea that Digital Humanities (DH) was its own field of study. In fact, I’d never heard the term before. As a high school English teacher, I’d watched as texts and other teaching resources found their way to the Internet over the last fifteen years. I had no idea who was putting them there, or how. All I knew was that it became increasingly easy to locate lesson materials and connect them using more and more sophisticated tools. The entire world and all its history of literature, art, music, and philosophy came together and were at my disposal to broaden the scope of what students could learn.

With these resources cam new ways to conduct research. 3X5 index cards and hours spent in the library combing through its limited supply of printed texts were replaced by search engines and curating complete texts to the cloud. The entire world’s texts were now at students’ fingertips, instantly available to read, cross-reference, and compare with diverse points of view from other texts. Hyperlinks, search filters, wikis, and online publishing led to new and avenues for dynamic sharing and collaboration.

And the teaching resources! Images of primary documents, original artwork and maps, video and audio files, complete biographies and pictures of authors and places where they lived and wrote. These evolved into mapquests and webquests and students curating diverse artifacts to paint interactive presentations representing their learning and their unique interpretation of texts.

All this and much, much more seemed to happen overnight. Teachers couldn’t keep up, and almost every day someone shared a new tool we could integrate into lesson plans and student driven projects. Many of us were excited by the possibilities and experimented on our own, attended workshops, and worked to incorporate as much technology-driven learning as we could handle. Technology standards were added to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Testing began to move online.

The K-12 school system is not even the focus. Higher education and scholarship was where the real DH has really made its mark. And the ingenuity and hard work started well before most people’s lives began to change. I am just beginning to learn what Digital Humanities is all about, just beginning to learn what is and is not included in the discipline (apparently there is some debate concerning “makers” who code the programs and “interpreters” who use them to study the humanities in new ways). Already though, as a teacher who has experienced the proliferation of digital technologies in education and the fantastic impact they have on learning, I know DH is possibly the most important work being done in scholarship for scholarship. I can’t wait to understand more!