@Boone: I just know you swing harder than Truman ever could have…

My first fake book was a third-hand, bindered Xerox of the Real Book. It was given to me, very ceremoniously, by my jazz teacher in middle school, who also happened to have married my uncle earlier that year. I’ve added my own layer of annotations and dog-ears over the past 20 years, and it’s still sitting on my bookshelf. Would be fun to compare my charts to Truman’s!

Thanks for sharing.

And what a radiating character name, “Murray Sunshine”

thanks luke, a gem.

Peace Ibrahim

@Grant: great to meet you too… Thanks for the energy and good vibes. And for, you know, wiring this whole thing together. Absolutely genius.

(Sad to have missed it last night — thanks for posting the videos!)

My question is, how much of that radicalism is due to things that weren’t a part of earlier schooling? Tuition fees (that the students pay themselves), animal testing etc, these are things unique to the university setting, issues that they have not been trained to ignore for the past 13 years. Systems like Blackboard however fall under the 13 years of “just do whatever gets you the highest test score, no matter how shitty it is” training.

The parts of the systems and structures that resemble the rest of the student’s schooling are they ones that they are inherently blind to. I think one would need a very powerful motivator to overcome that blindness at this stage of the game.

I think you’re right on about this. At the same time, there’s a long history of radicalism on college campuses, and you’d hope the college experience opens students’ eyes open to the systems and structures into which they’re entering. This of course goes far beyond ed tech solutions, which students may really not care much about. We’re concerned about them, and understand those choices as symptomatic of broader ideological processes. It’s less important to me that the students recognize the symptoms than that they engage with the notion of the system.

http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2011/08/move-over-tea-party-young-americans-are.html

You think this is the case? Or do they need a more focalized push? Maybe we need some Blackboard memes that are fun and also bring this shit to light. Anyway,
great to see you at it again, and Boone’s post in relationship to yours is an amazing combo—-CUNY for the win.

I spent a lot of time at UBC asking students what they thought about their educational technology. The vast majority hated the Blackboard tools used (yay for UBC just resigning their Blackboard contract). The issue was though, that when asked “what would your perfect software be”, the students I interviewed found it hard to even start thinking of an answer, simply because they had never thought about it before.

I think the reason is the same as the reason for why students (in general) don’t ask questions about the other crazy things that universities do (grade curving, unreasonable prerequisites, lectures as the norm etc). It’s because by the time they get to university they have 13 years of not having a choice over how their learning happens, or what tools are used, so it never occurs to them to start actively looking for those choices.

But your point remains that there has not been any movement parallel to what’s going on in Europe and in some parts of Latin America, namely, Chile and Puerto Rico. La lucha continua….

But you’re right– students certainly aren’t happy about this stuff, and there’s tremendous pressure on them that really cuts against their ability to do more than complain (though there seems to be some disagreement about students at GMU). That’s a real concern that helps explain not only the dearth of student radicalism on our campuses, but also the dearth radicalism in society at large. It definitely ain’t easy.

When I was a student I always complained about Blackboard, but that’s not true for everyone. My impression is that students don’t feel comfortable complaining about Blackboard to professors because they worry that doing so may result in penalization, it would be like complaining about the homework.

I’d have to disagree with you about student objections to tuition hikes. I know they are frequent, vocal, and often in print at GMU and a quick look shows the same is true for CUNY.

Just look at the lede from this article in Baruch’s The Ticker:
“Anger, outcries, and protests plagued CUNY students after the battle for a tuition hike finally reached a conclusion. Left at the battlefield feeling disappointed and outraged, CUNY students must lick their wounds and submit to the new tuition increase.”
via http://www.theticker.org/about/2.8215/board-of-trustees-approves-tuition-hike-for-cuny-schools-1.2616682

There’s the debate over activity fees covered in CCNY’s The Campus – http://ccnycampus.org/2011/05/25/activity-fee-goes-down-in-flames/

Then there is Queens College’s The Knight News, which covered protests by students outside of CUNY’s headquarters and what they call the “farcical formality” of a public hearing on the tuition hike. http://www.theknightnews.com/2011/09/06/the-rise-of-tuition-and-the-fall-of-opportunity/

As part of my job at Student Media at GMU I monitor, amplify and reply to students across a variety of social media sites. I can tell you that reactions to tuition hikes and Blackboard are frequent and extremely negative.

Students are upset about tuition hikes at universities all across the country, I suspect the same could be said about Blackboard. But they don’t feel empowered to do something about them. As tuition goes up, so does the pressure to get a degree, and they don’t feel that there is anything they can do.

Then I became a parent and discovered a new myth that I had to disentagle: that to “win” at parenting you must always, unconditionally (irrationally) adore your children.

In a way, the fact that both of these myths are present in my life is a testimony to how stable and loving and rather idyllic my childhood was. But, in the end, learning to understand that love and parenting are far, far more complicated was a long and often tremendously painful process.

My oldest is five. From the moment she was born, it was like an organ had been ripped out of my body and was now beating and pulsing next to me (well, in a way, I guess that IS what happened). The love I had was all-encompassing and terrifying. Then I spent a couple of nights with a sleepless, screaming, horrible infant. Then it was less about all-encompassing love and more about wanting to punch a hole in the wall. Repeatedly.

It took a while to realize that this was NORMAL. That everyone I knew could admit to feeling this way upon (sometimes frequent) occasions. I couldn’t believe it! What!? I was allowed to feel sorry for myself? I was allowed to be furious at this precious, innocent child?

The first time my daughter told me she didn’t like me and I wasn’t her friend anymore, I thought my heart would break. Now when she says it (sometimes frequently), I think, “Awesome! I’m doing my job!”

I’m adamant about talking about this stuff publicly — because I think we need to push back on these myths a lot more than we do. It’s okay to hate your kids now and then because, let’s face it, they can be pretty hateful! And the sooner you get on with it, the sooner you can get past it and get back to loving them.

Here’s a link to Samuel L. Jackson narrating Go the F**** to sleep on the YouTubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjgV0aACAMc

There’s a quote from Bill Murray’s character in “Lost in Translation” (a movie we both loved and saw pre-kids) that makes more sense to us all the time. He describes how basically your life is over when have kids, but then as they get older, “they turn out to be the most delightful people you will meet in your life.”

We think our kids are getting more interesting all the time and imagine we’ll even want to hang out with them at some point.

BTW, you can get Samuel L Jackson narrating Go the F**** to sleep for free n Audible.com http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00551W570 at least for now.

(and, whoa — the blog lives!!)

I’m sure you’ve saved many of us a couple of hours (at least) of major trauma some day in the future.

Let’s keep in mind this guy is a director in the longest form motion picture medium. A certain amount of narcissism and absolute certainty are written into the job description.

Being personable and giving good interview, maybe not so much. For me it’s important to separate any artist personally, from their work. If I didn’t, for example, I don’t think I could listen to Miles Davis, who was not a stellar human being. And I really want to be able to listen to Miles Davis and watch David Simon shows.

Peeling away the arrogance, I think I understand Simon’s POV re: plot arc and certainly the quotes re: nuance in his characters…

NYC bashing… it’s funny, I’ve lived here in the NYC area (this time) since 1989, and I’ve always found the sort of arrogance Simon describes to be imported from places like Ohio (I am a mid-westerner myself so I’ll try for a pass on being read as bigoted). Seriously though I believe this is a self-perpetuating myth – people come to the “big, bad city” from elsewhere. They’re scared and think they have to be tough and selfish to survive when actually they just have to be tough, and not scared. Toughness and arrogance do not equate. Most people who haven’t spent some time in neighborhoods inhabited by native New Yorkers base their impressions on what they’ve experienced… on TV and in the movies! Ironically this may include David Simon.

Re: 9/11, I was here and while I couldn’t think about much else for a while, I don’t talk about it all the time or try to feel too special about it. It was horrific, a mass murder. It would have been worse if the criminals who did it could have made it so, but in the greater scheme of atrocities against large numbers of people, let’s face it, it’s kind of a minor blip on the radar.

The thing that gets me is that, per this blog post, everywhere I go, I experience attempts by people who were not here, to appropriate the experience of this crime for their own ends. That drives me craaazy.

Back to Simon, I think his basic thing is that he is very passionate about what he does, that what he does is social criticism, and that 2 things drive him to behave in the ways we are discussing:

1. anything that might get in the way of his work (like uh, criticism), scares the shit out of him.

2. any story that does not provide fertile ground for his work is of no consequence to him.

He is not interested in NYC as fodder for his work, and therefore to him NYC is not interesting – basically, the city has become too safe, at least partially via paying the awful price of putting practically a whole generation of young lower income men in jail. I’m sure that isn’t lost on DS and that it has some bearing on his behavior re: NYC.

This is really cool, and you mentioned their work, and I like the featuring of content as a mechanism of community through this publishing platform. Plus, how cool is a site like this:
http://historicalphotos.pressible.org/

What the whole thing is designed for. I like this streamlined community, and now that UMW Blogs has pretty much gone enterprise, and by extension has forced us to mellow out on the experimentation (no BuddyPress for us) and just work on the maintenance. Maybe it is time to take out something like Pressible, that seems even more lightweight and experiment with it. I like the single theme as well.

Very cool.

* There’s a pragmatic aspect to declaring DH as distinct and new. That is, if one accepts the arguments that the Humanities is a dying planet (Fish, Edelstein, for 2 recent pieces) then the best thing to do is to go off and found a new colony.

* +1 to calling pedagogy “the ugly stepchild in the university, overall”. My work in supporting language instruction at an R1 reminds me of that every day. Ignorance of the value of language (and, necessarily, culture and identity) learning as an end in itself informs everything our instructors face.

* Somewhat as an addition of these two things, DH has a kinship with Christian liberation theology (not that I’ve ever studied it, just come into contact with people who have). DH can be, in my brief experience, to be a way for teacher-focused Ivory Tower dwellers to come out of the closet, to emancipate themselves from the shackles of traditional academic paths. However, for many, leaving a traditional path and traditional tools it doesn’t have to mean that they wholly divorce themselves from all traditional academic activities. (When I do woodworking, I use some power tools and some hand tools. To each task the appropriate tool [or theory].)

I’d say what characterized both the ASHP & the ITP was our clear and unrelenting focus not only on developing and perfecting new digital formats for the presentation of scholarly ideas and information, but also on pedagogy (on the importance of improving teaching and learning) as related (twinned?) ways to confront the limitations and traditional frameworks of academia. What strikes me to date about the Digital Humanities movement is that while there IS a strong emphasis on scholarship, there isn’t a similar, strong emphasis on pedagogy. It’s much more about finding ways in which digital technologies and techniques can improve, extend, and facilitate academic scholarship, both in terms of the subject matters that can be considered and the formats in which they can be presented. I support the DH effort to push the boundaries of traditional scholarship. But I am a bit concerned that questions of pedagogy still play a relatively small role in the movement (although, to be fair, pedagogy is still the ugly stepchild in the university, overall, too). This doesn’t have to be a binary between scholarship and teaching. But we do have to make a much better effort to talk about the ways in which digital technologies can and should reshape what happens in the classroom (whether that classroom is a 300-seat undergraduate lecture hall or a 15-seat doctoral seminar room). Here I’d point not only to the pioneering work of my colleagues at ASHP and at CHNM, but also Randy Bass’s interventions on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (especially the Visible Knowledge Project), and Matt Gold’s innovative recent efforts in his “Looking for Whitman” DH project. ASs these project’s demonstrate, I think we should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Shit. You have really raised the bar for CUNY DHI talks. How am I going to clear this when I visit in December. Great post.

A couple things. I guess you’d say that I’m a key voice for both nice and non-ideological DH, things which reasonably give you pause. For my part, however, I advocate both things not as ends in themselves, but because I find they help in advancing a third value, which you support and for which I hope I have also been a key voice, namely, getting things done. In this I think DH and EdTech are coming from different directions. It seems to me that right now, to innovate, the humanities need more consensus and less politics and EdTech needs less consensus and more politics. Too often innovation in the humanities has been dragged down by endless ideological hand wringing and knee jerk criticism (because that’s what we’re taught to do in grad school, right?) and not enough getting new things done. Conversely, the EdTech establishment has been so focused on pacifying administrators and meeting narrow needs by the easiest means necessary (i.e. vendor contracts) that it hasn’t been able to do anything really interesting. I haven’t thought this through fully, but I’m guessing these different recent pasts has something to do with the different tone and rhetoric of the two movements, which really share so much.

Tom

Want to wrap up my end of what has been a great back and forth. Having met you it is no surprise to me that you of course have the healthiest and most open approach and opinion towards the notion of Digital Humanities and its possible openness to multiple perspectives and a broad range of methodologies and tools. But what I have been trying to elucidate is the very specific rhetorical steps that ultimately close down that openness, particularly with the deployment of the phrase “Digital Humanities” as an agent of change in the academy.

I think you missed my snark a little with the whole Postmodern/Deconstructivist Humanities comment. Those methodologies were of course deployed in all the different fields we have mentioned but there was never really any substantial push to signify disciplinary difference. Postmodern and poststructuralist approaches became tools for humanists to change the developmental course of their disciplines rather than a way to stand outside of and apart from traditional humanities. As Larry wrote in his comment there really is a feeling that Digital Humanities is being couched by many as a new discipline separate and apart from traditional humanities and that is where I find the term the most perilous. In toto, the move of shaping DH as a new discipline is tied into not only a requestioning of methodological approaches but often in also positing the field against structural and political economic changes across the academy. This disciplinary flag planting is political beyond the question of field of study and methodology and as such the most vehement proponents of a kind of Digital Humanities discipline often try to co-opt the approaches of other fields such as Media Studies and Ed Tech. If I am reading them right, this is what Luke and Jim are resistant to as well as they see those political moves as also being necessary, but across the academy and not the province of a discipline or movement necessarily tied to the humanities.

I think that this is actually where the politicized action of Digital Humanists and the big tent approach can be troubling because the questions go beyond the humanities and often have less to do with things being digital and more about flows of capital, neoliberal politics (as a commenter on Jim’s post noted), and American perception of the benefits and role of academia as a whole in society. So, in that sense while Digital Humanities welcomes that conversation, there are many people who feel that these movements have been going on for a while across many realms of scholarship and academia and that the Digital Humanities is not necessarily the best place to find solutions, nor is it a place they feel represents their view on the situation or understands the broadest of academic implications. Social scientsts, natural scientists, and yes even lowly staff and administrators have an investment in these shifts and often feel no relationship to the academics within Digital Humanities trying to lead a charge. I think it is actually telling how little you hear about Digital Social Sciences or Digital Natural Sciences. Maybe it is because the kind of algorithmic and tool based analysis has always been a part of those forms of study so the advent of digital tools has not shaken the foundations of their work as much as it has expedited it and allowed it to grow in new directions.

So, in the end it really is the political move of discipline building and the presumption that any discipline holds the answers for all the ills of the academy that rubs people the wrong way about Digital Humanities. I personally find such a move particularly problematic in an era where we are trying to break down disciplinary walls and encourage interdisciplinarity across all fields. Antonio says “I am tired of the dual vision Humanistic vs Other disciplines and the disdain with which some look at the field of the other”. To paraphrase that I would say that I am growing weary of the Digital Humanities vs. Other disciplines and the desire of many for institutional change to happen behind an artificial disciplinary banner rather than through the actions of the individual agents and institutions that are responsible for the political economic development of the academy on a real basis.

Look forward to more back and forth,

Thanks for stimulating a great conversation Luke!

In the new order of the world -the Google order- we should think differently.
Darwin considered Shakespeare dull -he had no time for it: he was busy building new knowledge. The Google founders may be the prototype of the new Barbarians, but if they possibly didn’t read Flaubert it was because they were busy building the new world!

I don’t want to be taken into this discussion now, however, but only want to suggest that perhaps :

(0- the general assumptions on the Humanities’ role should be discussed and revised;)
1) it seems like you map the world of investigation and reflection over learning and technologies over the Humanities, and by so doing you seem to view the world as dual (or tri-al?)
2) If Digital Humanities is the projection of the Humanities onto the Digital (or viceversa), I don’t see this automatic link between the Digital Humanities and Ed Tech, that you and Jim portray. The problem is that you cannot really put a label over Ed Tech and freeze this discipline as belonging or being tied to the Humanities -or any discipline.

I am tired of the dual vision Humanistic vs Other disciplines and the disdain with which some look at the field of the other. Like Downes wrote: “we [must] focus our attention on the needs of learners, all learners”, not on disciplines, or departments, or academic traditional areas. We may discover we may need to destroy the current state of affairs at our universities and, instead of talking about Humanities (or Sciences), study how to solve the dramatic puzzle of how people learn best!

That earlier generation of Digital Humanists – - DH 1.0? – - started from disciplinary problems, issues, and projects and looked to technology as a medium to think through and practice disciplinary change. From my own experience, it was pretty marvelous to participate in VKP as it shifted from a “technology” project to a “teaching” project, and more particularly as the conversations shifted from “technology” to the problem of learning. It’s also interesting to note that much of DH 1.0 began within a broad progressive movement that included both rethinking disciplines and institutions.

One of the really interesting things about the current Digital Humanities formation is that it seems to be trying to fabricate a new discipline – - this is after all the canonical route to institutional juice (cf. debates within Composition Studies over the past couple of decades). We all want to be free, and disciplines can be constraining, but they can also be generative. My opinion: DH 2.0 would be much more powerful if it engaged with existing disciplines, with “disciplines as problems” rather than disciplines as codified knowledge etc. But . . . perhaps this takes us over to Jim Groom’s recent, provocative post – - “Say What You Will about EdTech . . . “

I have to confess that I haven’t really come across that rhetorical move among the DHers I know. Chances are I’ve just been lucky, because based on some other convos I’ve seen on this topic I have no reason to doubt that that is taking place. Let’s face it, there are plenty of scholars who thrive on overstating their position and importance. I also suspect that somewhere along the line, administrators buy a crappy line like “the type of humanities that is ahead of traditional humanities” and convince the school that they have to start a digital humanities initiative. I’ve no doubt that ignorance does fuel plenty of political and monetary decisions at universities.

Your question:
“If Digital Humanities really was a subset of the Humanities then wouldn’t we have to consider the Postmodern Humanities, Deconstructive Humanities, Structuralist Humanities, and Formalist Humanities, because these are other alternative methodological approaches to the field of study. ”

is exactly right. And, within each individual discipline (literature, history, art, maybe theater?), that has happened. That’s why we have literature scholars who do deconstructionist readings, and avant-garde performances of Hamlet. It’s just that each discipline as done it in it’s own way. Maybe that’ll be one way we go with Digital Humanities — letting each discipline develop its own understanding of what that means.

And you are exactly right that lots of DH is has predigital and nondigital history as it’s object of study, and is using the new tools to present, study, and understand in new ways. That’s exactly what I’m saying — there are a lot of people in Digital Humanities arguing that that is part of Digital Humanities, not just the study of games or youtube. The convo I linked to in my first comment exposes exactly that tension within DH.

And so, the upshot is that I think, if you take the entire range of people calling themselves digital humanists, you’ll probably find that you have more in common with us than you think. That’s why I take the “big tent” approach. Especially when I look at the practice-oriented digital humanists, I see lots of commonality with the goals, principles, and ideals you, Luke, Jim, and others are espousing.

Patrick

The problem is that Digital Humanities is often deployed rhetorically as “the type of humanities that is ahead of traditional humanities” in a political move that does separate and alienate. Perhaps because of the soap box and broadcast nature of blogging and Twitter there has been much manifesto writing and posturing that in fact situates the Digital Humanities as different and “other” than Humanities as a whole and it is in that spectrum that the binary gets formed.

I also find that the Venn Diagram analogy, although possibly effective in theory, is somewhat tenuous in practice. If Digital Humanities really was a subset of the Humanities then wouldn’t we have to consider the Postmodern Humanities, Deconstructive Humanities, Structuralist Humanities, and Formalist Humanities, because these are other alternative methodological approaches to the field of study. In the end working with digital media and algorithms is just another set of tools and an alternative methodological approach that hasn’t changed the nature of Humanities inquiry all that much. In fact, much of the self-avowed DH work is in fact studying pre-digital or non-digital history as its object of study but is using simply using these new tools to compile research and data differently.

I think that my personal position definitely flavors my take on all of this doing media studies and coming from theatre history. First of all I consider myself a digital media historian/scholar because I am actually studying the Internet, video games, digital content delivery systems, and contemporary popular culture. In that work, my object of study is the digital whether my approach and scholarly production is practiced using pen and paper or blogging, Prezi, and interactive experience. But while I comfortably consider myself a humanist and social scientist, I feel uneasy about calling myself a digital humanist because of the connotation of separation it often implies from a legacy of knowledge production and other humanities scholars not necessarily yet engaged with digital media. I also work in theatre history, and when performance studies evolved and tried to consume theatre history as a discipline there was a strong rhetorical politics which caused unnecessary tensions between the two field. I often see this trend mirrored in a lot of the Digital Humanities handwringing about definitions, futures, fields of study, and progressive scholarship. In the end performance studies became a methodology theatre historians welcomed into their broad approach to theatre and performance as an object of study, and the overt political move many in performance studies were trying to assert sputtered and fell short, leaving many still uncertain exactly as to what parameters performance studies defines itself by.

As far as “digital” being considered irrelevant, the sooner the better. Unfortunately usually the question of relevance sometimes comes from a “when the rest of the humanities catches up” and all humanities will be like DH rather than a better situating within the world view of academia and the relative historical arc of such disciplinary shifts. Although this all seems like semantics, it is those semantics that define discourse and shape the rhetoric that is deployed and how it is received and that is what I think is of concern to many people within proximity to but uncertain of the future of DH.

On the question of whether using the term “Digital Humanities” sets up a binary, I can’t see that it does. I see the term/field as a specialization within humanities, a subset. As a subset, there are points of difference that differentiate it from the rest of the set, but that doesn’t mean that it is a binary. Quite the opposite, a subset or specialization is by definition not a binary. It just has some distinguishing additional features. Or, conversely it might lack some of the features found in the rest of the set. The conversation about what “digital humanities” is is just an effort to think through those additional or lacking features, not at all to segregate.

In a Venn Diagram, DH is still a circle inside Humanities. In another Venn Diagram, I think there is and should continue to be a lot of overlap between DH and EdTech.

I should say, too, that I’ve heard people in DH wonder whether, or for how long, the “digital” term will indeed be relevant. It might be that before long it does become a superfluous qualifier.

Patrick

You have eloquently elucidated a number of thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head and have similarly frustrated me at DH gatherings and while following twitter. I think that the different perspectives of Ed Tech and DH often arise from the amount an individual is forced to deal with people who haven’t necessarily bought into the shifts in academic and pedagogical practice that digital media have brought about. The mandate of my position (and I guess I am an Ed Tech guy although I don’t necessarily identify that way) is to convince an entire faculty and student body that digital media have merit in scholarship and in the classroom. Then I must make sure that the implementation goes smoothly enough with convincing enough results that uptake becomes voluntary rather than enforced. This forces me be diplomatic and political and use different tactics than if I was just digitizing my own scholarly work and classes. Rather than being frustrated with and dismissing less eager colleagues I have to adapt and shift tactics until they realize the value. It is a dance that the Ed Tech person must master, finding ways to circumvent and breakdown misperceptions and deal with resistance head on through practice and process rather than merely through discourse and commentary. I imagine that with Blogs@Baruch you and Mikhail face the same challenges and are more attuned with what plain old Humanities people think about all of this and how the shift to the digital is challenging not only for the implementers, but also for the resistant people who often have just not been shown why these practices are worthwhile and how to start using them on their own.

My own frustration with Digital Humanities stems from a mindset that embodies itself even in its disciplinary connotation. By calling it “digital” humanities it seems to overdetermine the role of the digital and unnecessarily segregates itself from other work done in humanities. I am surprised at how many traditional humanities scholars have no idea what digital humanities means and often consider it silly terminology, and I have to say that I agree in many ways. The humanities is about a certain worldview and methodological approach that at its best is tool neutral. The digital may enhance that study, but not any more than any other tool or set of tools, whether they be discursive or material. This brings me to Patrick’s comment. The problem with DH is that it is actually setting itself up as a binary to the humanities because it is labeling the type of work done as different from traditional humanistic work, no matter what rhetoric to the contrary is being deployed. You may say that DH is open and boundary-less but when it causes other scholars to feel alienated and camp themselves as “traditional” humanities scholars, well then you have created a binary whether intentional or not.

It is ironic that a movement that seems compelled to politicize its goals has made a choice that goes against its own traditions and history and ultimately disempowers itself. I think a much healthier example has been demonstrated by the certificate program in Interactive Technology & Pedagogy at CUNY. That program was not set up as a political counterposition to a discipline it felt opposed to. Rather, it was established to augment the practice of multiple disciplines and to provide an outlet to students studying across CUNY who wanted to learn about interactive technologies (whether they be digital or otherwise) for use in both scholarship and pedagogy. This was not a Digital Social Science program or a Digital Humanities program or a Digital Sciences program, but one that understood the need to integrate these new tools in the daily lives of its students so that they could then go back to their respective disciplines and change the from the inside out and discover in their own ways how best to shape the academy.

The academy is a slow-moving, top-down, traditional institution. That needs to change, especially as the world is changing around it. But change rarely comes from creating a new island and declaring openness, superior methodology, and difference. It comes from talking with the outright most resistant factions embedded most deeply in the institution and working tirelessly to convince them why change is inevitable. This can only be done by helping them to understand why they will ultimately be compelled to shift their practice because their scholarly and pedagogical work will be more successful by embracing these new possibilities. I feel that is what educational and instructional technologists are constantly face to face with and why I am worried about how the rise to prominence of Digital Humanities may ultimately polarize a crisis situation in the academy in a non-beneficial way.

@Patrick: thanks for the comment, which gives me lots to mull over. I do here want to say though that I never intended to assert a binary relationship between the two, but rather to highlight what I see as some important points of difference (which is not the same thing). Of course they’re not  necessarily opposed, which was why writing the post was a challenge. How can something without a boundary be oppositional in any meaningful way ? Still, aren’t the efforts to define what the digital humanities is and what it isn’t the assertion of a binary? Isn’t the very fact that folks who call this is a “field” seek to qualify the phrase “humanities,” and then when confronted on what lay behind that thrust say “we’re all humanists!” a bit divisive?

Those are things I’ve seen repeatedly, and you have too. FWIW, I’m far less interested in definitions than action and in theorizing than doing (though there are moments for all of it). I also know full-well there are plenty of people who consider themselves DHers who are as well. That’s where the best conversation and work is happening.

As for the DHNow and ProfHacker comments… note that I argue that these publications represent BOTH progress AND the reentrenchment and reinscription of power along traditional paths. DHNow as canonical, I probably wouldn’t double down on, though it does represent the assertion of some kind of authority, distributed though it may be… ProfHacker, I think I probably would. But not now. I have some code to wrestle with.

There’s a lot here that DH and Ed. Tech. need to address. And yep, I am espousing the “big tent” principle you reject. Call that my idealism about universities and humanities in general.

There’s a good conversation at work about what DH is. Similar issues and tensions have come up there.

I’m going to argue that it is too early to assert a strong division between Ed. Tech. / pedagogy and DH. To do so would be to assert, a division between pedagogy and the humanities, which no good humanist, digital or otherwise, would espouse.

The discussion that I liked to also looks toward tensions about production, and the status and form of what is produced. I can’t argue that there are some people who want to assert that DH needs to exist in the old forms and structures. But, I think that the convo there signals that there are plenty of people in this nascent field that think that should not be the case. Instead, plenty of people do want to see DH push for changes in institutional structure, hierarchy, modes of production, modes of acceptance and valorizition.

And, I do have to say that I think your characterization of ProfHacker as being “established authority” is far off base. Yes, there were difficult decisions about the move to the Chronicle. But, from what I glean, there was a trade-off between reaching more people, and in doing so being able to nudge change in a fruitful direction that they weighed heavily. It is not perfect, nor pure. But I don’t think that any successful revolution can really claim to be pure in the end.

Nor can Digital Humanities Now be in any way regarded as establishing a canon. “Digital Humanities Now is a real-time, crowdsourced publication.” That’s hardly a canon. Yes, the messiness is that it is drawn from a finite list of people:

“Digital Humanities Now is fully automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from this digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on this site, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.”

I don’t think that hundreds of Twitter feeds, automated to produce a list of what is in active discussion, can be called a canon, any more than the list of trending topics over all of Twitter can be considered a canon of what is relevant. It’s a snapshot, and a way to signal what is in active discussion at the moment. It embraces the ephemerality of Twitter. Ephemerality and canonicity, I think, really don’t go together.

Conversely, Digital Humanities Questions and Answers (the site of the convo linked to above — and fired up by Julie Meloni, who started ProfHacker) is a site that identifies itself as by and for Digital Humanists, however they define or view or characterize themselves. That, I think, is part of the point, and part of the desire to make DH specifically NOT the binary that you see. Like I said, I see the evidence that supports your position. But I think that you might not be seeing the evidence contrary.

This is not the time for moving so quickly to binaries. You are not — you cannot be — “in or out” of something that has no solid boundaries. We’re humanists. Binaries aren’t our thing. It’s up to us to assert and put pressure to resist that, not succumb to it.

Patrick

Seriously now, you should meet (or “meet”) Jo Guldi if you don’t know her already. She is a digital historian at Chicago/Harvard with similar interests. http://www.joguldi.com/contact

I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to make a new (working, stable, developed, regularly-updated) version of userthemes available this year. It’s too useful to lose.

It’s an option in the theme I’m using, not buddypress itself. We’re using the buddypress fun theme (modified by using a child theme).

That theme has this option in the theme options section of the dashboard
“Do you want to enable privacy for all members profile
* only logged in user can view members profile and members directory. ‘disable’ by default”

If you set that to “enable” it blocks the member profiles for anyone not logged in.

I feel pretty sure, from a quick look at the code, that you could take this option and add it to just about any buddypress compatible theme. Seems like something that will, eventually, be handled by a plugin or built into the core, too.

I’ll keep checking. There must be some setting or some plugin that I’m not figuring. This might be a question for Boone!

I’m going to try and mumble through some of the things we’ve been doing at UBC:

We are looking to roll BuddyPress out on blogs.ubc.ca by the end of the summer. We are looking at many of the same issues as you are and will probably be developing some plugins to help make some of the issues less difficult.

Issue one: current members. We have over 3000 current members. The plan is to default their profiles to private and email them telling them how to change it. New users will be given the choice when signing up, with the default being private. I think this is a bit heavy handed and may kill the community, but privacy scares a lot of people these days (thanks Facebook!)

Issue 2: We are leaving the admin bar as is. We are removing the members list from the home page as well (although have just had student feedback that they want the members page). As for after logging in, we haven’t finalized anything, but have had feedback from students that defaulting to an “activity page” (like Facebook) would be preferred.

Issue 3: I’m not sure what our current system is for adding users. I know it works well, but we do not have the plugin listed on our WordPress page. We are also thinking of using the BP group blogs, but are still deciding how exactly we are going to handle things.

That’s all I have for now. I’ll DM you the email of our project lead so that you can maybe get some more specific and official answers, as well as access to the custom code that we are writing (it will probably only go on WordPress.org in September).

But for a BuddyPress install for newly-admitted students (hence minors–and hence folks we don’t yet have access to for discussion of privacy), I did make it so all of it is private–the whole network is closed with even the homepage blocked from anyone who is not logged in with an account. There aren’t any blogs there–it’s just a social network–and it’s been fairly heavily used and enjoyed.

Free range/walled garden issues–you have to watch for them and talk of them!

No the less, she’s awesome, and the book quote is one for the ages.

His erroneous comparisons just screamed “I’m making intelligent tv and people are criticizing ME? Just fuck off and watch your stupid spoon-feeding trash like CSI!” It would be exactly the same if a prominent literary writer responded to every single question with “hey, you don’t like my amazing works? Too bad for you, because you’re the one missing out on this intellectual experience that no other writer could provide you with, ever. Then again, you probably don’t have the attention span nor the brain cells to properly enjoy let alone understand my work. Just stick to your trashy romance novels and whodunits.”

Imagine the (justified) outrage among literary circles. Yet Simon gets away with drawing a complete black and white conclusion: Art – Me vs. Junk – Everything Else. I think his “The Wire” fame rose to his head (or he’s always been like this). Alan was way too kind in this interview (probably because he’s such a huge fan of Simon) even after Simon attacked him twice, and personally nonetheless. When I read the comments on his blog and saw they were all “whoa, good interview” and “God bless David Simon” I scoffed.

Thank you for being the first journalist to proclaim that Simon’s behavior is that of a self-righteous pompous ass.

@Jim: Thanks! Credit for the pics goes to @paulasaha. And, I agree… it’s wonderful to have kids to remind me of the pure joy of learning that’s always available.

And, that’s a great sentiment for a little one to understand.

(I hate the Yankees too even though my Tigers are no longer in the East).

As for the Bava? This.

Loving your blog and I hope you keep blogging the World Cup. Someone needs to show the Bava what the Summer of Love should be all about

You and other Spain fans are in for quite a ride the next month…

Sadly, a part of the World Cup we hate to think about is such instances of injustice. Don’t even get me started on the South Korean run in 2002!

A good write up on World Cup villains:

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/columns/story?id=791657&cc=5901&ver=us

More seriously, this is a beautiful rundown of the last two decades, and almost gets me excited for whopping the redcoats.

No matter what happens, Crouch sucks.

I mean, what other team would have their #1 defender, who after many years of supreme goofiness had finally developed into one of the best in the world and a bedrock in the back, knocked out of the Cup in a training collision? And by Emile Huskey who, let’s be honest, has no business whatsoever setting foot on the pitch in any kind of international competition. Which, everybody with eyes, except apparently, for two successive England coaches has been able to see.

You need to be thanking your gift-horses. Of all the major contenders, England is the most beatable by the USA, so good for a group play opponent. They, in the form of the Premier League, have done more to make U.S. players competitive internationally than anyone else. Which is why the U.S. is going to deliver a 2-2 whuppin’ (England’s shaky goalie and immobile central defense succumb to the hustle and counterattack of the vastly less skilled US Team, which has its own organizational issues in the back, but thank goodness, Tim Howard).

And that 2-2 is a victory for the U.S., which has everything to play for, and a huge disappointment for England, with everything to lose.