Humanities Computing in the University Curriculum

As a fledgling discipline seeking to establish an identity within the academy, the place of humanities computing in the institution is as multifaceted as the fields which comprise it. Defined broadly, the term humanities computing connotes the application of a set of computer-based tools to assist the various humanities departments in the areas of classroom instruction and scholarly research. Yet, beyond applied computing, it is also a discipline concerned with the effect that computing has on the epistemology of knowledge, that is, how the language, knowledge classification and system design that inform information technology and cybernetics impact the way humanists understand, view and classify their own data. I would therefore situate humanities computing into three convergent areas that have an impact on the graduate and undergraduate curriculum: instructional technology training and support, research potential, and scholarly approach.

As the academic job market for recent Ph.D.s in all areas of the humanities continues to require qualifications in multimedia design and web-based course delivery, and as our undergraduate majors in humanities disciplines seek to compete for private sector jobs in an increasingly technologically-driven economy, it is extremely important to afford them the opportunity to gain these marketable skills through a structured program of courses. At its most basic level, humanities computing must endeavor to impart the necessary digital skills so that the full potential of computer-assisted learning can occur. These skills include the digitization of various media (image, text, video, and sound) and the manipulability of the digitized result, HTML and the fundamentals of web design, hypertext functionality and glossing, as well as training in effective pedagogical use within the technological environment. Far from short courses or tutorial workshops the basic skills need to be learned within the context of one’s own research material or topic of study. Here I envision a brace of courses: on the undergraduate level, a course in which a single text is read and transformed into a hypertext multimedia project, combining text and image-based glosses, audio narration, and video reenactments, and employing hands-on digitization skills to create a collaboratively-produced teaching unit that can be implemented at another point in the curriculum; and on the graduate level, a course which explores digital texts (print texts refitted for the digital environment and digital hypertext fiction) in relation to critical theoretical discussions about subjectivity, identity, physicality, authorship/ownership, and multi-linear and multi-layered narrative forms.

Graduate students and faculty can benefit from a humanities computing approach in the area of scholarly research. This involves promotion of computing techniques to illustrate the potential of the tools, and support in learning and utilizing those tools. The creation of teaching- and research-based projects must also be tempered by the knowledge and understanding of how the computer-assisted learning and research environment influence and transform the content. In other words, how does the mechanization of various learning and research processes affect the way we think about the content/data that is being delivered? Leveraging and adapting traditionally "flat" textual materials into searchable, web-accessible digital projects opens up new avenues of research and promotes interest and access to humanities-based scholarship.

In his essay "What is Humanities Computing?" Willard McCarty focuses on interdisciplinarity and the intersection of methodology and discourses and states: "Like comparative literature it [humanities computing] takes its subject matter from other disciplines and is guided by their concerns, but it returns to them ever more challenging questions and new ways of thinking through old problems."1 Seen in this fashion, humanities computing serves as a nexus between the various vocabularies, approaches and theories that enliven the humanities and the standards, encoding practices and information storage/retrieval/delivery that drive computing and information technology. McCarty’s statement pinpoints literature as a similar type of network interface through which ideas, metaphors and language are relayed and refashioned. In this instance, then, humanities computing in the graduate and undergraduate writing and literature curriculum acts as an approach to understanding, interpreting and writing about the literary field. In thinking about arts and humanities data, the literary, imagistic, filmic and aural components that comprise and inform humanities study and humanities scholarship, we must begin to realize the promise that various digital techniques hold in promoting and preserving these cultural assets. Thus, the work of humanities computing should also be concerned with exploring the broad history of text, image, video and sound storage and the devices that revolutionized such storage and made access to the stored information easier. Humanities computing in a graduate and undergraduate writing/literature curriculum can thus be seen as a touchstone, serving as a demarcation point for an exploration of the pedagogical, scholarly, and theoretical potential of new media technologies.


1 Willard McCarty. "What is Humanities Computing?" <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/essays/what/>, Accessed 03.10.2001.

News | Research | Teaching | Digital Development | Links of Interest | Materials | Home

Daniel Gilfillan
School of International Letters & Cultures
Arizona State University
PO Box 870202
Tempe, AZ 85287-0202

dgilfil (at) asu (dot) edu
T: (480) 965-8245
F: (480) 965-0135

School of International Letters & Cultures
Arizona State University
PO Box 870202
Tempe, AZ 85287-0202

silc@asu.edu
T: (480) 965-6281
F: (480) 965-0135
http://silc.asu.edu