NATS 1700 6.0 COMPUTERS,  INFORMATION  AND  SOCIETY Lecture 17: Computing in the Humanities and in Education | Previous | Next | Syllabus | Selected References | Home | | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |   Introduction The Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London, hosts   The Humanist. Under the editorship of Willard McCarty, it is "an international electronic seminar on the application of computers to the humanities. Its primary aim is to provide a forum for discussion of intellectual, scholarly, pedagogical, and social issues and for exchange of information among members. Humanist is allied with the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. It is an affiliated publication of the American Council of Learned Societies and a publication of the Office for Humanities Communication (UK)." The Centre has an extensive collection of Working Papers: "an interdisciplinary series of refereed publications on computer-assisted research. They are a vehicle for an intermediary stage at which questions of computer methodology in relation to the corpus at hand are of interest to the scholar before the computer disappears into the background." Visit also the Humanities Computing pages at Intute: Arts and Humanities. Intute represents the fusion of two previous projects, Humbul and Artifact, which for a long time contributed substantially to the field. Volume 4, issue 2 of the Stanford Humanities Review is a special "issue devoted to the exploration of convergences and dissonances between Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities." Take a look at Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities. Read Willard McCarty's important article    What is Humanities Computing? Toward a definition of the field, and ponder the epigraph by Michel Serre (from his Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1995), 34)           What philosophy worthy of the name           has truly been able to avoid the link           between poem and theorem? New York University has a very interesting Humanities Computing website, which includes a fairly comprehensive list of links to other Humanities Computing sites. So do Queen's University's Humanities Computing Repository, and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. This Institute's "goal is to explore and expand the potential of information technology as a tool for humanities research. To that end, we provide our Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications programming, and networked publishing facilities. We also cultivate partnerships and participate in humanities computing initiatives with libraries, publishers, information technology companies, scholarly organizations, and others interested in the intersection of computers and cultural heritage."  A very original site is LOOKSEE: Resources for Image-Based Humanities Computing, the work of Matthew Kirschenbaum. It is "hosted by the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky...LOOKSEE's long-term goal is to serve as a community focal point for the collaborative development of open source image analysis tools."  Read also the American Council of Learned Societies' Occasional Paper No. 37 on    Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship: Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges—The United States Focus. Willard McCarty (King's College London) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Kentucky) maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date review of Institutional Models for Humanities Computing. Check the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. Visit    CETUS, a consortium comprising the State UNiversity of New York, the California State University System, and the City University of New York. It was "formed to explore a variety of initiatives in technology-assisted teaching, learning and research." It is worthwhile to quote here its objectives: "CETUS will seek public- and private-sector partners to aid the consortium in pursuing the following objectives, as well as others that will be identified in the future: helping students, in both the K-12 and the university areas, improve their academic achievement and become more productive learners; empowering faculty by providing resources that will increase their instructional and research options; encouraging the development of technology-mediated courseware; providing commercial suppliers/developers and others with beta test sites; acting in concert to negotiate favorable purchasing contracts; developing and promoting appropriate methods and standards for evaluating the pedagogical efficacy of existing and future methodologies and products; exploring and clarifying issues related to the sharing of information resources and the protection of intellectual property." The European point of view is expressed in the recent Report from the COM(2000) Commission to the Council and the European Parliament entitled   Designing Tomorrow's Education: Promoting Innovation with New Technologies. The Introduction states: "The first part describes how difficult it is to get actual practice and technology to dovetail when the situation is unsettled and diversified. The second part examines the conditions conducive to more harmonious development of actual practice and technologies: the progressive emergence of a market; action by the public authorities; training and the development of services for teachers. The third and last part is given over to recommendations in order to create these conditions. The annexes give a summary of the main initiatives in the Member States and at Community level, accompanied by statistical information." David Garson at North Carolina State University examines The Role of Technology in Quality Education. Read also Reed Hundt's    The Telecom Act, the Internet, and Higher Education. which appeared in Educause. Another good article is Todd Oppenheimer's The Computer Delusion which appeared in the July issue of the Atlantic Magazine, where the author argues that "there is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs--music, art, physical education--that enrich children's lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of 'computers in every classroom' with credulous and costly enthusiasm." For a more balanced view of these issues, see for example Ed-Tech Looks for Answers, an article by Katie Dean on Wired News, where you will also find several related links. Finally, you should read an ongoing series of famous articles by David Noble, professor of social science at York,    Digital Diploma Mills. We should not forget the social sciences, which in many ways find themselves in a position not unlike the one faced by the humanities. A recent article by Dirk Nicolas Wagner,    Software Agents Take the Internet as a Shortcut to Enter Society: A Survey of New Actors to Study for Social Theory,  argues that "from the perspectives of social science and computer science, the time has come to truly examine the social dimensions of machines...No longer is there a dedicated effort to craft artificial humans, but instead a move to create machines that specialise in certain functions. In other words, 'computers are organised much more directly around what electronic circuits are good at than they are around what people are good at'."   Topics By now, there are few academic, and not academic, areas where computers and computing have not penetrated and left their mark. Even in the fine arts, if you search the Internet, you will find a large number of sites where this influence is strongly felt and advocated. But, insofar as computers are tools, it is not so easy to find works of art which truly justify the application of this new tool. As it is raised by Ursula Franklin, Gordon Graham, and many others, the question of the purpose and value of computer technology must be asked: what artistic purpose does this new technology serve? Not just in the fine arts, of course, but in the humanities and in education as well. The academic and research environment, furthermore, raises other problems, which reflect the academic preoccupation with the foundations and the methodologies of the various disciplines, and not just their results. Willard McCarty, for example, tries to address the question of "institutional recognition of work in humanities computing." This is really the kind of question that Kuhn and Lakatos have in mind when they speak of 'research programs' as practically defining the value and worthiness of scientific research (see Lecture 4. "The question before us...rests with the relationship between computational methods and humanities scholarship," says McCarty. "What matters is whether we can regard it as an essential part of our academic self-definition. If so then we give it the resources and protection necessary for pure research, include it within our degree structure, establish standards for its evaluation and work out its collegial relationship with the other departments, centres and institutes.." We must therefore first find out if there are new results in at least some areas of the humanities where computational techniques and tools have yielded results not otherwise obtainable. McCarty himself, and many others, claim this is indeed the case, and their evidence is often impressive. In the readings suggested above you will find many such examples, from linguistics to textual analysis. from media studies to library science, etc. Now, is there a sense in which these results have substantially changed the very nature of the humanities? After all there are still many neo-luddite humanists who reject the computer even for preparing their own manuscripts, and make it a point to communicate with their colleagues and their students by 'snail-mail' or by phone, publicly spurning e-mail. Their research still takes place in library cubicles, where they have a physical relationship with ancient and modern manuscripts. This is different, for example, from physics or astronomy, where quite often the researcher runs his laboratory equipment or his telescope from his office, or even his home. Clearly the humanities camp is still divided on these issues, and it is a matter of controversy whether such divide will ever disappear. There is, however, a locus where the debate is much hotter and has a growing degree of urgency: the teaching of the humanities, the curriculum. Should the curriculum include, not just electives, but foundation courses in humanities computing? This, perhaps unfortunately, is no longer an exclusive 'academic' question. Education has become more and more competitive, universities find themselves under the pressure to deliver 'relevant' curricula, and to prepare students who can find jobs. This of course is a problem that goes well beyond the humanities, and that indeed seems to characterize education at large. And the funding of education has become more and more dependent on the private sector, as governments reduce their deficit (and soon their debt) by 'downloading' most social services to the local institutions, including universities, and to its citizens. Read again the list of objectives that CETUS set for itself, and notice the significant absence of any preoccupation with the social, philosophical and methodological issues mentioned here. Humanist Discussion Group Logo This is the right moment to study more closely the work of some of the critics of this new way of conceiving education. I suggested the articles by David Noble, but there is also a great book by Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking (2nd edition, University of California Press, 1994). By way of concluding this lecture I will quote from the final pages of this disturbing and stimulating book. Although the following paragraph was written with K-12 children in mind, I believe it applies equally well to university students. "Introducing students to the computer at an early age, creating the impression that their little exercises in programming and game playing are somehow giving them control over a powerful technology, can be a treacherous deception. It is not teaching them to think in some scientifically sound way; it is persuading them to acquiesce. It is accustoming them to the presence of computers in every walk of life, and thus making them dependent on the machine's supposed necessity and superiority. Under these circumstances, the best approach to computer literacy might be to stress the limitations and abuses of the machine, showing students how little they need it to develop their autonomous powers of thought." (p. 242)   Questions and Exercises How necessary is, and how much pressure is brought to bear on you to have, computer literacy in the courses and programs you are taking? In Chapter 2, p. 38, Gordon Graham says that the Internet "has brought into existence a degree of internationalization which is without precedent. By subverting national boundaries it calls into question the power of the state as the dominant force in social life and thus permits the reconfiguration of human communities in line with individually chosen grounds." What would you personally lose, if such internationalization were to characterize the world? What is your reaction to the statement I quoted from Roszak?   Picture Credit: Humanist Discussion Group Last Modification Date: 23 February 2010