DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2014
Volume 8 Number 2
Volume 8 Number 2
A review of Brett D. Hirsch (Ed.)’s Digital Humanities: Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics
Abstract
This is a review of Brett D. Hirsch (Ed.)’s Digital Humanities: Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics.
Brett Hirsch begins his introductory essay to his collection Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles,
and Politics with something every digital humanist should
be familiar with: a word frequency table. In it, he compares the
frequency of some common words (e.g. research) with those pertaining
to a particular focus (i.e. pedagogy) within the Blackwell Companion to the Digital Humanities
[Hirsch 2012, 4]. Hirsch notes the shocking
results – “research” with 504 instances, and “pedagogy”
with only 8 – along with other data as testament to an overall lack
of pedagogical discussion in the digital humanities community.[1]
While each article within Digital
Pedagogy examines different areas of the digital
humanities corpus, the common theme of digital humanities pedagogy,
techniques of “bring[ing] the technological and
the human together,”
[Hirsch 2012, 17], remains the focus for every
contributor.
To this end, Hirsch splits the collection into three overlapping
sections: “Practices,”
“Principles,” and “Politics.” These, like most areas of digital humanities,
are neither static nor exclusive to each other. Hirsch admits the
overlap, and the categories end up serving primarily the convenience
of the reader, functionally breaking the extensive collection into
manageable chunks. Since almost all Hirsch’s essays rely on
author-specific case studies as their primary source of discussion,
the diverse and unique experiences of any one classroom cannot
cleanly fit into any one category or other. Rather, Hirsch’s
categories serve to mark the overall impact of each author’s
conclusions. The case study model of each essay allows any
interested reader to track, from beginning to end, the
decision-making processes, issues, and outcomes of each program
under analysis. It also shows the emergence of consistently
successful traits of a digital humanities teaching exercise, to
which I will return later. With the artificial three-category
structure, Hirsch can set aside typical divisions of the digital
humanities (e.g. GIS, textual analysis, modeling) and rein in these
case studies under a more orderly – though intersectional –
structure.
The publication itself, released through Open Book Publishers,
merits some evaluation alongside the content of the text. While the
work is available for purchase in physical copy and PDF format, it
is available for free on the Open Book website [Hirsch 2012]. While this is a welcome attempt at
open-access information dissemination, the online infrastructure of
Open Book distorts some aspects of the text that are worth
mentioning. Since digital humanities publications are likely to cite
open-access and internet sources, direct links to many citations
within the text are clickable and will take you directly to the
source. This is not always the case, however, as some links are
either not clickable or simply do not work. There is no option to
view a PDF or cached version of these links, so the reader is forced
to rely on the site maintenance quality of 100+ websites and
resources. This collection is also heavy in pictures and graphs and
while some can be read easily, blurry and altogether illegible
visuals abound. The poor resolution of these images is such that the
zoom function on the site – as well as the PDF version – serves to
make them all the more impossible to read.[2]
The linked-citation function, despite some occasional dead links, is
employed quite early and often in this collection. Were a beginner
to pick up this text with next-to-no knowledge about the digital
humanities, she need only go as far as the “Notes on Contributors” section to gain a firm grip on the
community. The CVs of the authors in this collection are long and
diverse enough to capture a large percentage of the current big players in
DH, with their other articles filling in the
many remaining gaps. Lisa Spiro’s bibliography alone is enough to
keep the novice researcher busy comprehending wider digital
humanities developments. Hirsch’s readers would be well-served
spending as much time with this section as with any of the other
three if only to observe a telling snapshot of the state of DH in
its current incarnation.
As the reader dives into the essays themselves, she will find a
multiplicity of case studies from many different countries,
institutions, and classrooms working toward very different goals.
The scope and summary of these essays are well-covered in Hirsch’s
introduction, but I think it quite relevant to note here the range
of topics covered as well as the missing subjects. Included are
digital humanities doctoral programs, digital archives, digital
historiography, textual analysis and editing, mapping, and
discussion about the digital humanities community in general. What
is missing, as the author himself notes [Hirsch 2012, 39], is a discussion of self-directed learning and
copyright issues. While Hirsch saw a reason to single out these
omissions specifically, I do not see them as detrimental to this
collection. From the standpoint of self-directed learning, the
overwhelming majority of students in each case study discussed did
seem to have a basic level of technological proficiency. And, even
if the technical knowhow of the student body was already high, many
authors mentioned the importance of constant peer-to-peer and
peer-to-mentor communication and consultation. No author in the
collection advocated sending students off to an island to put
together a digital text on their own, and so self-directed learning
– while possible to a degree – can rightly be omitted here. As for
copyright issues, they become, as necessitated by the novice level
of the student body, the responsibility of the mentor or professor –
making copyright education part of the process rather than a specific pedagogical topic needing
to be addressed.
Also not included are some more controversial aspects of the digital
humanities corpus, such as the viability of some DH practices as
research tools. For example, the Sinclair and Rockwell essay “Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis:
Approaches to Learning New Methodologies” shows little
faith in students’ ability to learn basic programming. Most of the
other essayists, however, noted satisfaction in their students’
ability to grasp programming as part of the curriculum. Sinclair and
Rockwell also praise the “word cloud” tool for use in
philological research, a technique that has been, at the
professional level, bypassed for much more comprehensive textual
analysis software. While the essay contains a fair number of
pedagogical techniques such as project learning, it presents no case
studies as evidence, an oddity for this particular collection. Thus
the essay and its suggested methods go untested, making it somewhat
out of the norm in the text as a whole. Word clouds are sometimes a
student’s first interaction with the digital humanities, but an
argument for their place in research and the classroom through
case-study or some other means is needed as proper evidence in order
to make their case.
While articles containing more theory than evidence drawn from case
studies are rare in this collection, there are other notable
exceptions to this rule that deserve mention. A subject recurring in
several articles is the perceived fluency of the digital generation,
or those who grew up around computers. The assumption would be that,
having grown up in the emergence of the digital age, these students
should be more adept at basic computer technology such as light
programming. But, as Don Tapscott has shown, the broader educational
system’s adaptation to the technology known to the “net
generation” (those born between 1977 and 1997) has lagged too
far behind, not allowing for the kind of basic computer knowledge we
might expect to prosper [Tapscott 2008]. Tapscott’s
observation is cited at least twice, but for conflicting reasons in
various essays within this collection. Some cite it as a reason to
start at the beginning when teaching students in the digital
humanities. Others use just the first half of Tapscott’s conclusion
– that net-gens are fluent in computer media – to reason that there
should be an understood baseline that all students should inherently
know, even if socioeconomic backgrounds may not have exposed them to
the same technology. An example of using Tapscott in this way, the
Saklofske, Clements, and Cunningham essay “They
Have Come, Why Won’t We Build It? On the Digital Future of the
Humanities,” is a non-case study-focused essay that, while
it makes a valid point about the slow rate at which academia has
adapted to the net generation, gives untested pedagogical
suggestions and even some that are proven ineffective or even false
elsewhere in this same collection, such as Facebook’s utility as a
teaching tool. The overall conversation on the supposed knowledge of
the net generation is weakened by untested theory in a text mainly
consisting of case study material, and Hirsch might have noted this
discrepancy.
This is not to say that the balance of Digital
Humanities Pedagogy tilts away from sound and
well-presented papers. Willard McCarty’s extensive description of
the implementation and evolution of the digital humanities PhD
program at King’s College is a thorough treatment of the
complexities and issues surrounding this doctorate. Particularly
helpful is the list given of all current projects undertaken by the
doctoral students. Many authors in this text provide invaluable
supporting resources, such as their course syllabi, project goals,
and screen shots of each step of their various projects. In terms of
theory, Lisa Spiro’s call for a universalized DH program and her
justifications for it open a welcome and much-needed discussion for
the community and present big questions that DH must wrestle with
eventually.
The main strength of this text lies in the unmentioned, overarching
conclusions that bind virtually all essays together. While the
authors differ in their topics and in the implementation of their
programs, they all could be said to arrive at the same three
conclusions as to what works in the classroom. First, the goal
should be project-oriented. It is not enough, many have found, to
simply “learn” digital humanities. The class must put a text
online, analyze a handful of documents, or map a single aspect of a
culture; in short, there must be a tangible end goal. Second, the
project must be done in a group as opposed to each individual
completing a big project alone. Third, work in the digital
humanities should be as interdisciplinary as possible. While some
found trouble when mixing undergraduate and graduate students on a
project, none mentioned issues in putting an art historian, a
classicist, and a computer programmer all in one group. These three
points are not mentioned directly by Hirsch as prerequisites for any
digital humanities program; they are simply patterns evidenced by
each case study of what, out of everything else, seems to work
best.
In conclusion, permit this reviewer to reflect upon another gap in
this collection which is also, not coincidentally, a gap in the
field of digital humanities. The third and final section of this
text, “Politics,” is rife with heated
discussions about the problems and future hurdles that present
themselves in digital humanities today. Lisa Spiro, Tanya Clement,
and Melanie Kill interrogate large topics such as, among others: the
necessity for universal digital humanities programming, the false
notion that the Internet makes us stupider, and the dissolution of
prejudices around resources such as Wikipedia. What is generally
avoided, or otherwise skirted, is the all-elusive definition of the
digital humanities. While most case studies mention bringing this
question into the classroom for the first week, it quickly dissolves
into the “we can’t define it” discussion familiar in most
classrooms. It is necessary, however, to wrestle with this idea even
more than has already been done, especially when the classroom and
pedagogy, the touchstones of a professor’s performance, is in
question. While no direct answer is raised by any one author, the
collection as a whole hints at the beginning of such a conversation.
The theme of interdisciplinary work, trumpeted by almost all the
essays, makes marking the digital humanities as its own exclusive
field a tired and trite gesture. This is especially true when the
act of making it a unique discipline might, as has happened with
other academic disciplines, further alienate the digital humanities
from those who might benefit from its work.[3]
In contrast, the essay by Olin Bjork, “Digital
Humanities and the First-Year Writing Course,” frees and
widens the digital humanities from a field to a method-set. Like the
works in this collection, the digital humanities consists of many
methods (GIS, text analysis, etc.) that can be added or subtracted
from a research project as need dictates. Digital humanities, then,
becomes co-synchronous with any field that requires it, and avoids
the limiting box of a “discipline” that other useful methods
might be placed in. While no one should expect a definition of the
digital humanities to come out of one book – a point that Hirsch is
right to avoid – this collection nonetheless lends its own voice to
that ever-changing discussion.
Overall, this collection is a much-needed resource for the digital
humanities community. Not only does it introduce the field to many
professors and students who might not know the digital humanities at
all, but it also provides real-world, step-by-step accounts of how
programs using the digital humanities have been put in place and
implemented across various institutions. Like the study of history,
this text can exist for others to see past mistakes and not be
forced to start from square one in the classroom. Finally, this
collection brings to light the massive gap in existing pedagogical
study; the radical but essential calls-to-action by all authors,
Hirsch included, should spur on other academics to publish their
classroom experiences, theories, and failures in order to bring
digital humanities further into the digitally-lagging academic
system.
Notes
[1]
Further substantiating evidence here would be most welcome, but
this reviewer was not able to source this claim through other
literature – which perhaps drives Hirsh’s point forward that
pedagogical publications in the digital humanities are severely
lacking. For example, a quick search of “digital humanities
pedagogy” in Maryland’s library search engine produced one
additional text besides Hirsh’s: Matthew K. Gold’s edited
collection, Debates in the Digital
Humanities (2012), which features one relevant essay,
called “Where’s the Pedagogy.”
[2] One recent
development for this problem is the WebCite system: http://www.webcitation.org. These particular
eccentricities of the publication medium dilute a fair amount of
the text’s content, and make for an occasionally frustrating
reading experience.
[3] Two notable
examples, from this reviewer’s own discipline, are a Classics
philologist examining intertextuality without intertextual tools
like Tesserae [University of Buffalo] or an economy-focused
ancient historian who is unaware of the ORBIS network project
[Stanford].
Works Cited
Hirsch 2012
Hirsch, Brett D., ed. Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices,
Principles, and Politics. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012. http://www.openbookpublishers.com/reader/161.
Tapscott 2008
Tapscott, Don. Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation
is Changing Your World. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.