Humanists among their machines. (Perspectives).

TRADITIONAL HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES are beginning to adopt sophisticated digital technology for regular instructional use in colleges. Costs are starting to rise, and organizational structures will soon change in ways that science departments would instantly recognize. Most colleges and universities are unprepared for the changes, but the parallels with science offer a glimpse into the issues that will arise.

As students of the history of technology know, technologies tend to shape the social structures around them. This was true in the Industrial Revolution, when sites of available water power encouraged growth of mill towns. It is true of local work environments such as college science departments, where each professor oversees specific laboratories and experiments; many physical arrangements and work routines are structured so as to make use of complex instruments. At Ithaca College undergraduates perform research with professors and imbibe the same patterns, scheduling instrumentation time or using dedicated fume hoods, insect habitats, or the like. The configurations of space, schedule, and maintenance necessary for conducting inquiry through instruments have evolved over several centuries, and by now are taken for granted. Parallel structures are sure to emerge in the "digital humanities."

The sciences also require skilled personnel to maintain their precious tools--maintenance specialists, experimental technicians, and outside repair specialists. In addition, faculty and students spend significant time, as one chemist describes it, "systematically futzing"--assembling, calibrating, waiting for results, rethinking, readjusting, re-trying. Students who share this bricolage may learn more about real professional work than they could in standard classrooms. The same may prove to be true of humanists clustered around their machines, but time-devouring tinkering, with additional reliance on costly technicians, is unfamiliar to them. The cost of contemporary college science education has been rising astronomically, and one reason is the improvement of instruments that perform familiar tasks more powerfully. But much of it is thanks to new generations of instruments in fields from molecular modeling to astronomy that have opened new realms even for undergraduates. For humanities students, digital tech nology performs familiar tasks like text production better than ever, but the online interdisciplinary multimedia resources now available are pure add-ons. Students in the arts now gather and manipulate images from collections around the world and may synthesize their findings in multimedia compositions. We are only beginning to discern how all these new opportunities may change pedagogy and departmental structures in the humanities and the arts--never mind foreseeing how to pay for them.

The digitally rich classroom

For the last six years, Ithaca College has hosted a series of exciting experiments by faculty humanists whose courses make intensive use of digital technology. With generous help from the W. M. Keck Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, "smart" classrooms with advanced presentation capacity and networked workstations were introduced for use in newly designed, digitally rich courses in our humanities departments. I say "digitally rich" because the courses use computers, networks, and digital materials in combination with in-class discussion, course-related chat rooms for exchanges after hours, and extensive old-fashioned reading and writing assignments. Faculty try to use the new electronic resources to magnify, not diffuse, the reflective personal responses that typify humanistic study. The courses are not aimed at off-campus learners and do not serve large enrollments (the two cases where digital courses are said to cut costs). Rather, they are mostly intermediate and advanced courses, enr olling twelve to thirty students at a time, covering traditional topics imaginatively. The courses "belong" to the professors in the sense that they represent specialties within the department that few colleagues could cover. In each of these "digitally rich" courses the new technologies create learning opportunities that other methods cannot offer as effectively, from collaborative learning to study of hitherto hard-to-obtain texts and images.

Leadership for Ithaca's project came from art history faculty, who foresaw that digitized visual imagery--and Web sites offering access to great collections--would transform teaching in their field. The department found allies in foreign languages, where interactive software and new media were being introduced. They enlisted colleagues from English, anthropology, and history. The writing department was already using workstation-equipped classrooms and networks in multiple courses at several instructional levels and was eager to expand the use of technology. The project had strong support from the academic computing office, the dean, and central administrators. The chance of external funding was a great persuader for moving ahead. That raises concern for the future, because the humanities nationally receive so little federal or foundation funding.

Uses

The range of projects and the participants' enthusiasm have been remarkable. Faculty now take students on virtual tours of nineteenth-century Paris, Japanese temple complexes, and even fourteenth-century Chartres as pilgrims would have encountered it. A Web site on medieval literature offers the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a digital palimpsest, bejeweled with illustrations of medieval objects and costumes, with links to bibliographies and glossaries. Another course asks each student to design, curate, and present to peers a virtual gallery, whose exhibits are drawn from thousands of available digital images. In a writing course, students compare their draft theater and cinema reviews with an archive of previous students' reviews and professional examples, eventually "publishing" for peers online. An English course makes little-known eighteenth century women's and servants' narratives available to students, whose annotations and commentaries will benefit successor classes. In another English cou rse students help to develop a course archive of poetry and photography of the 1920s, drawn from online and print sources; in another, the course archive concerns Oscar Wilde's London. What these courses offer students is deep, complex, and multifaceted. Students "own" their work as they rarely could in traditional modes of instruction, achieving explorations that our library holdings could nor have supported.

Course development

We foresaw that such courses would be extremely time-consuming to develop. What we seriously underestimated was, because such courses are dynamic, how time-consuming and complex they are to sustain. With them, like drafts of poems (to echo Donald Hall's memorable phrase) the process of creation is not so much finished as abandoned for the moment. Both the development and the teaching involve constant refinement, sometimes requiring new technological skills. They challenge the professor's scholarly imagination, elevate the art of classroom presentation, and demand new modes of coaching and mentoring. Yet--an issue that there is no space to address here--we are not sure how to evaluate or recognize the undoubted professional growth involved.

New skills needed

The different new skills required have surprised everyone. When we started our campus "technological revolution," some faculty were self-taught experts, others beginners. What we learned is that (as so often with computer-related matters) when training was offered and skills improved, the work did not really go faster; it went deeper. Such tasks as assembling a group of related visual images, along with a text for students who might view them in computer laboratories or networked dorm rooms, are lengthy exercises in multimedia composition. Both the beginner and the expert will rake a good deal of time on such efforts; the neophyte will attack the tasks more slowly but probably less ambitiously.

Computing and software skills were not part of professional training for any of our humanists, but each one wound up wrestling with software and hardware issues of some sort. And each had to learn how to teach amidst a roomful of helpful machinery, sharing tips and failures with colleagues. "After computer training," said one professor, "take tap dancing lessons for when the system crashes in the middle of class." "Remember to disable Instant Messaging from the classroom workstations," said another, "so that students communicate with the class instead of with friends."

Humanities courses historically have been quite flexible in content from year to year. The new technology brings with it an even greater flexibility in some ways, but it is also true that the professor (or department) may be stuck with what he or she has spent years developing. In the old days, course changes often required little more logistical support than a change in the bookstore order. But digitally rich courses represent multiyear investments in particular content, software, and syllabi. Developing and maintaining digitally rich courses uses personnel time voraciously and increases departmental costs in other ways as well. One of the increased costs in the long run is sure to be training and supporting faculty members other than the enthusiastic, probably self-taught, pioneers in technology-supported teaching (whose enthusiasm was probably at first regarded as a nuisance). Most professors are probably using computer technology already for personal research and writing, e-mailing answers to student quer ies, and so on, but training them for sophisticated use of a chosen common system, and giving access to resources specific to their specialized fields, will be a continuous and necessary process.

And that's just training the teachers. Students also must receive training to participate in digitally rich courses. The skills and software used for digital humanities are specialized, so that some uniform practical orientation, preparing the way for systematic growth in skills, must occur within the departmental curriculum. Today's students use electronic media instinctively, but their individual skills, like those of the faculty, vary widely, and their reliance on the Web is uncritical. Constructing a coherent, articulated curricular structure on the foundation of all these idiosyncratic skills, even as hardware and software continue to change, will be an intricate challenge.

Departmental issues beyond expense will arise. For example, some professors will use time and imagination on digital course preparation that they would have used in conventional research and publication. However, designing and sustaining a Web archive is not recognized as "research" in most colleges, and they may be hard to evaluate as "effective teaching." But leaders in adapting technology will understandably complain if they miss a promotion while the departmental Luddite who kept publishing articles while ignoring the new tools is rewarded. Although Ithaca has certainly not solved this problem, it was helpful that the participants in our projects were senior faculty members for whom assembling a tenure file was not an issue. It was also crucial that the lead departments saw digital technology as central to their future curricula.

New interdependence

The interdependence of faculty will increase. Traditionally, humanities faculty have worked somewhat in isolation, with the library carrel being a second home. But a digital course encourages collaboration and sharing of materials (and problems) with colleagues, and it forces common planning for electronically equipped spaces and staff support--patterns well known to science departments. Traditional humanities courses do, of course, require shared planning, e.g. for purchase of library books. But, a digitally based course may require a specifically equipped classroom, software, licenses, programming, and digitizing of materials.

The digital humanist, like the scientist, needs technical staff. The "connected" classroom and the accompanying software and hardware need technicians to keep them working, and course materials demand software and design support. Using a grant from the Hewlett Foundation, we have experimented with offering each professor access to instructional design specialists for course design and software choices, IT specialists for programming and equipment issues, and computer-savvy undergraduate course assistants for miscellaneous tasks. At first, we thought that a single "humanities course design specialist" would serve most of our needs. We already had established a technology education center for faculty across the college, with high-end workstations and available IT staff, but the humanists felt that they needed a consultant versed in specifically humanistic materials.

As it turned out, our projects and the humanists' computer expertise varied so much that, even if we had found one to hire--as we did not--a single specialist would probably not have worked. Potential humanities course design specialists may well exist among recent humanities graduates who have made themselves software mavens as an alternative to flipping hamburgers. But they do nor typically possess educational credentials in computer fields, and higher education hires by credential. Those who do have formal credentials are extremely well paid--and career mobile. I suspect that most colleges will have to combine professionally trained IT support staff with "growing their own" among interested humanities students and faculty. We did employ as consultants several Ithaca professors in instructional design fields. They advised the "digital humanists" to aim at maximum simplicity and effect on learners rather than the commercial-style elegance.

Not only does the instructor need staff help. Students, who work alone or in groups and at different speeds, need assistance. They may need it in course sessions or in the computer lab. A student assistant with computing skills can help with restarting a balky workstation or writing a Web page. As students work on their own projects, the professor cannot address most of their technical issues, but often the student assistant can help. However, developing a cadre of student assistants means, in turn, developing standard protocols for software or Web pages they may write.

Expansive resources

Despite the difficulties involved, professors and students who have engaged the humanities through electronic resources are completely hooked by the world of resources opened and the new space for creativity. The archives that some professors have developed mirror, in a way that is transparent to students, the rich background knowledge and related exemplars that the learned bring to particular texts or images. The online dialogues among class members and with professors that are sustained beyond classroom hours encourage reflection, and shy students take a greater part. Encountering an expanded world of texts and images to work with, students take greater ownership of their own work. The oldest parts of the humanistic mission--teaching students to read critically, write persuasively, and think clearly about human experience-- are not made easy by technology, for they are not inherently easy. But the technology offers new ways to pursue that enduring mission, even as it offers new distractions. Those who have explored the digital realm and seen its wealth of opportunities to learn would not turn back.

NOTE

Ithaca College's Howard Erlich and Gary Wells will lead a session at AAC&U's Annual Meeting on digital humanities programs.

RELATED ARTICLE

Four principles for digital curriculum development in humanities departments:

1. Departments cannot afford to deliver all courses in digitally rich modes. They are too expensive in equipment, software, and above all in time.

2. Nonetheless, digital materials must be used early and across humanities curricula. If sophisticated skills are to be expected of students they must be introduced by stages.

3. Digitally rich courses imply long-term commitments to specific topics, and thus put a premium on planning. Departments will struggle with the constraints involved.

4. Digitally rich courses demand new skills, warranting evaluation. No one knows how to do this well, but the first step is to recognize the need.

PAUL HAMILL is director of academic funding and sponsored programs at Ithaca College.