Digital Humanities in Education: The Prospects and Pitfalls of an​Uncertain Future

The term “Digital Humanities” (DH) is a term coined to identify a number of growing digital trends in the profession, research, and products of humanities and liberal arts. As I prepared myself for the end of my PhD program and looked toward a college teaching career, it became clear that I should get better acquainted with the Digital Humanities. Therefore, I decided to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which is held annually at the University of Victoria. Each year, the institute gathers DH’s most renowned scholars to offer intensive workshops on cutting-edge digital research, theories, methods, and technologies. My primary aim was to be exposed to new and developing teaching methods incorporating technology. My other goal was to find out firsthand how these could benefit liberal arts higher education. While interacting with many of the greatest DH scholars at the institute, what I discovered unexpectedly was a jungle of unanswered ethical questions, a spectrum of useful-to-hindering classroom integration strategies, and a community that is too young to communicate what it uniquely contributes to the academy, let alone the classroom.
 
As for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute itself, the program is wonderful. The institute gathers for a number of weeks during the summer in picturesque Victoria, Canada, at the local university where scholars are housed, wined and dined, all the while attending all-day training camps, night-long symposia, and multiple weekend-long research conferences. It is a breathtaking whirlwind of networking, studying, and getting to know the who’s who and the what’s what of the Digital Humanities.

et even the term “Digital Humanities” remains difficult to define. The idea began with the work of literary critics Joseph Miles and Fr. Roberto Busa who were the first to harness computer technology for analyzing texts;1 however, from these simple beginnings continues to grow an unclear field of study:


Along with the digital archives, quantitative analyses, and tool-building projects that once characterized the field, DH now encompasses a wide range of methods and practices: visualizations of large image sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, ‘born digital’ dissertations, hashtag activism and the analysis thereof, alternate reality games, mobile makerspaces, and more. In what has been called ‘big tent’ DH, it can at times be difficult to determine with any specificity what, precisely, digital humanities work entails.2
 
Perhaps, all that one can say with confidence is that any scholar whose expertise involves an area of the humanities and technology in any form might consider oneself a digital humanist. Similarly, any product which either assists the digital humanist or comes under the digital humanist’s microscope might be considered part of the Digital Humanities.

At the same time, the dominance of the Digital Humanities cannot be denied. In college job boards there are increasing demand for digital experts to teach in liberal arts majors. On the web, there are programs which catalog and analyze texts, whether the Bible, classical literature, Shakespeare, or any other body of literature. In conferences across the world more research papers are relying exclusively on digital methods, tools, and sources. Entire research panels discuss digital trends in fields traditionally considered part of the arts and humanities. This thing we are calling DH is gradually displacing outdated books in culture, anthropology, and sociology with new books on digitalized culture, digital humanism, and digital social sciences.

A recurring theme throughout my time at the institute was discovering that for all of the bright future and present value in the Digital Humanities, all too often educators are attracted more to its bells and whistles as a way to keep students engaged than to any of the opportunities it offers for deeper learning. So often DH was discussed as opportunity for the college course in three ways:

1. As tools for students to use, such as online information sources or an electronic concordance;
2. As a mode of classwork, for instance creating a video essay;
3. As a teaching tool for the teacher to wield as students watch, for example a visual tour through a digital replica of a historical location. In all three cases, there is both the potential to add depth to learning and the danger of merely exciting students with the trappings of technology, possibly even detracting from actual learning. One is reminded of the various strategies with which educators use Microsoft PowerPoint in the college lecture. Whereas some rely on it sparingly to add audio, video, and still-image media to already engaging lectures, other educators make it a repository of every idea of the lecture in bullet-pointed form. The former potentially enhances the classroom experience while the latter creates a scenario in which teachers merely read their own bullet points and students spend more time copying the PowerPoint slides than listening and thinking.
   

To illustrate further the danger of DH in the classroom, one may read an article written by Olin Bjork advocating integration of DH into the first-year college writing course.3 Bjork suggests that one course project could consist of each student digitizing a speech or essay from public domain using software called Sophie. Sophie handles the heavy lifting by copying the text directly into itself and then students may annotate the digital text with “notes, images, audio, video, and/or animation.”4 Although this may be an excellent exercise in the right context, here Bjork intends teachers to replace a writing assignment in a first-year writing course, with students using a DH tool to digitize an already written resource—not even inputting the text themselves—and then gathering already made images, audio, and video to supplement it. One presumes that many students would opt for this project over the tougher job of writing their own essay, yet I would argue that this is an example of the exciting elements of DH actually detracting from the necessary skills-learning of this course.

Another matter besetting scholars of the institute is the issue of accessibility in three areas: personal ability, affordability, and security. In all three of these, DH has the ability to enhance or place a barrier of entry to education. For example, speech-to-text software can allow note-taking for people unable to write otherwise.5 However, requiring advanced software in general education courses (see the Bjork example above) puts an unnecessary hurdle to learning for students not ready for a technology-focused education. Also, many DH software programs and the hardware to run them are not cheap, adding a financial burden to the already bloated price of college education. The other hidden cost is compromised personal security. For example, every project that requires Google Docs for collaborative work is also demanding that a student submits one’s personal information to a corporation notorious for its evasive data collection.6 These issues caution us that implementation of DH into education should suit the college major or the particular purpose of a college course in order to alleviate some of these concerns. Moreover, it should be implemented insofar as it fits reasonably into course textbook costs and be limited to software that does not require students to compromise their personal principles of privacy.


My summer at Digital Humanities Summer Institute also led to the realization that DH certainly will expand and change the broader humanities but it will not save the humanities. So many arts and humanities departments across universities are feeling the tightening belt of fewer interested students, and we are all looking for that new thing which may reinvigorate our student numbers and department budgets. Some hope this thing to be the Digital Humanities, but I am not as convinced. First, at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, I found a thriving and excited community, but they were not attempting to invigorate their humanities departments. Instead, they were attempting to emerge as their own field. They spoke of humanities departments as the old, tired, analog horse which needs putting down. All the while, these digital humanists had their sights on becoming something new and more closely associated with STEM departments (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).


Second, as for their contribution to humanities research, the DH community is impassioned by the horizons of technology as well as what these promise to personal research and human convenience. Yet little was offered in the ways of new and substantive contributions to actual humanities research propositions, whether in literature, politics, religion, arts, or philosophy. To sum their work in a statement, it often was “now we can do what others have already done, but using computer assistance for greater ease, speediness, and visual style.”


Third, until recently, the basic goal of the humanities has been to preserve and to interpret human output, yet as a discipline DH has little to offer this pursuit in a digital way not already covered by the field of Information Science. Information Science is already a well-established field, deeply entrenched in collegiate STEM, and exploring all human information and output, including anything traditionally considered a matter of the arts and humanities.7 Recognizing both this and that DH has neither a common discipline nor a clear definition,8 Henry M. Gladney questions the value of a DH professor unable to define one’s field to a student. For him such a vague expertise is suspect of being “an unneeded invention” by “an interest group that is promoting their activities for funding and for inclusion in university faculties.”9


Therefore, it seems a misplaced hope to think that DH is the savior of the greater humanities, at least not at this time. Instead, a more sober outlook would be to view the DH scholar as a valuable niche interdisciplinarian bridging humanities departments and the preexisting field of Information Science. Doing so immediately clarifies this scholar’s work: the digital humanist is an information scientist in method and a liberal arts humanist in application.

All of the above begs the questions of whether DH should be implemented in broader liberal arts education of colleges, and if so, how might it be done responsibly. In short, my answer is yes but only when it results in valuable or previously unavailable learning.10 Considering this, the growing dominance of STEM education is highlighting the greatest weakness of liberal arts college education: the lack of direct vocational objectives, training, and direction. It is becoming increasingly normal for students to graduate from liberal arts colleges with zero direction towards a career.11 The common defense of the liberal arts is that they train people in how to think, which I affirm as the most valuable human asset. However, this defense alone is unpersuasive for convincing an individual to accept four or more years of student loans with a liberal arts school.


I recommend that DH is a unique asset that may more directly connect the strengths of liberal education—reading, writing, creativity, interpreting, problem-solving, etc.—to vocational objectives. Writing courses should still stick to writing, but a liberal arts college curriculum may implement new courses which build on those essentials by exercising digital tools that real world careers use daily, from the mundane Excel sheets to the more exciting ArcGIS StoryMaps which produces interactive displays found in leading museum exhibits. A liberal arts curriculum must dare to go beyond theory and get busy with practice: doing activities that involve more than moving fingers across the keyboard and which end with citable projects good for résumés. This idea is not new but remains largely ignored by some liberal arts colleges despite reports of a growing trend among students to take digital humanities electives in order to secure internships at libraries, archives, publishers, and museums.12 In other words, Digital Humanities courses provide the practice and the citable results which prepare for interesting jobs. The market is signaling a way forward for liberal arts: integrate DH-based vocational skills because it leads to jobs. Perhaps DH’s best opportunity for a liberal arts student is a real paycheck.


WORKS CITED


Battershill, Claire and Shawna Ross. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A
Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.


Berry, David M. and Anders Fagerjord. Digital Humanities. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.


Bjork, Olin. “Digital Humanities and the First-Year Writing Course.” Pages 97-120
in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics. Edited by Brett D. Hirsch. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012.


Bonds, E. Leigh. “Listening in on the Conversations: An Overview of Digital
Humanities Pedagogy.” The CEA Critic 76, no. 2 (2015): 147-157.


Gardiner, Eileen and Ronald G. Musto. The Digital Humanities: A Primer for
Students and Scholars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.


Gladney, Henry M. “Long-Term Digital Preservation: A Digital Humanities Topic?”
Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 37, no. 3 (2012): 201-217.


Hockney, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” Pages 3-19 in A Companion
to Digital Humanities. Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.


McCarty, Willard. “Becoming Interdisciplinarian.” Pages 69-83 in A New Companion to
Digital Humanities. Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.


Student Voices. “67% of College Grads Don’t Have Jobs Lined Up Yet.” Accessed
12/9/2022: https://mystudentvoices.com/collegegradjobs-e581bdc078d2


Pannapacker, William. “No More Digitally Challenged Liberal-Arts Majors.” The
Chronicle of Higher Education. November 8, 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/No-More-Digitally-Challenged/143079/>


Schmidt, Douglas C. “Google Data Collection.” August 1, 2018.
<https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/>


Yan, Xue-Shan. “Information Science: Its Past, Present and Future.” Information 2
(2011): 510-527.


ENDNOTES


1 Susan Hockney, “The History of Humanities Computing,” pages 3-19 in A Companion to Digital Humanities (eds., Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 4. Other surveys of the history and development of DH include: David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord, Digital Humanities (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 25-59; Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto, The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1-13.



2 Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, “Digital Humanities: the Expanded Field,” pages ix-xvi in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein; Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2016), ix.


3 Olin Bjork, “Digital Humanities and the First-Year Writing Course,” pages 97-120 in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics (ed. Brett D. Hirsch. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 105.


4 Bjork, “Digital Humanities and the First-Year Writing Course,” 105.


5 For text-to-speech advancements and other ability-enhancing opportunities in DH, see Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 41-59.


6 For more information on Google’s personal data collection, see a 2018 report by Douglas C. Schmidt, professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University; a summary, full report, and updates are available at <https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/>. Also see Bjork, “Digital Humanities and the First-Year Writing Course,” 101-102.
 
7 Xue-Shan Yan, “Information Science: Its Past, Present and Future,” Information 2 (2011): 510-527.


8 Willard McCarty, professor of Humanities Computing at King’s College London, identifies DH as a field with “a centre all over the disciplinary map and a circumference that is at best uncertain.” Willard McCarty, “Becoming Interdisciplinarian,” pages 69-83 in A New Companion to Digital Humanities (eds., Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth; Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 79.
 
9 Henry M. Gladney, “Long-Term Digital Preservation: A Digital Humanities Topic?” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 37, no. 3 (2012): 201-217


10 Battershill and Ross offer practical advice for integrating DH into student learning objectives and course policies. Battershill and Ross, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom, 70-77.


11 This trend is captured well in a survey conducted by MyStudentVoices.com, see https://mystudentvoices.com/collegegradjobs-e581bdc078d2
 
12 William Pannapacker, “No More Digitally Challenged Liberal-Arts Majors,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8, 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/No-More-Digitally-Challenged/143079/> Also see E. Leigh Bonds, “Listening in on the Conversations: An Overview of Digital Humanities Pedagogy,” The CEA Critic 76, no. 2 (2015): 147-157.


Submitted by
James Yuile
Motal Doll Scholarship Intern