Defining Digital Humanities for Community Colleges

NOTE: This project received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for 2013. Read about it here.

Digital Humanities (DH) has emerged on college campuses, libraries, museums and on the Internet as practice, object of discourse, and disciplinary incursion, even as historians and literary scholars are actively engaged in lively definitional discussions about what exactly digital humanities is.  The definitional debates currently surrounding the field reveal the stakes and vitality of the digital humanities as an emerging discursive and cross-disciplinary field; in scholarly and educational orbits such as HASTAC and the MLA the field is, as one digital humanist put it, “hot.”

As a method and set of practices, theories, applications, artifacts, exhibits and pedagogies, DH is becoming a feature of faculty research agendas, historical and literary exhibit partnerships, university course offerings, etc. In fact, a recent tempest in a teacup occurred when one blogger implied that candidates without digital humanities on their CV should not expect a job interview in the humanities. [William Pannapacker, “No DH, No Interview”] But this energy has not extended to community college humanities programs.   A look at the most recent Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) national conference program, for example, entitled “Trailblazing in the Humanities,” suggests that DH has yet to catch on institutionally with humanities programs at community colleges.

At this definitional moment in digital humanities, when its constitutive features, disciplinary boundaries, signature methods and curricula are inchoate and subject to reinvention, community colleges can influence the conversation and help shape the contours of the field.  In particular, educational leaders and community college humanists should be engaged in helping to define the disciplinary entry points for lower-division college students who make up the community college demographic.

Community Colleges Have the Technological Infrastructure to Join the Conversation
Community colleges are poised to begin a systematic inquiry into their role in the development of DH nationally. While DH has yet to take shape at community colleges, technology is already a part of the pedagogical and operational infrastructure at larger institutions. At my institution, Lane Community College (Lane), for example, Online Learning and Educational Resources are a strategic direction of the college; goals include building capacity in faculty and staff to create innovative online learning and educational resources, providing the required tools, infrastructure and professional development to use emerging technologies, and exploring the effectiveness of online learning and educational resources.

Technology’s status as institutional priority at Lane has resulted in a huge leap at the college in five years: courses are being developed using Open Educational Resources (OER), and the exponential growth in online course offerings, e-portfolios to track student learning, and a Knowledge Network “collaboratory” have all helped faculty and staff to create a community of practice with respect to technology across disciplines.  But as the college takes on more of a 21^st century technological character, the question that scholar Alan Liu asked of the field pertains: where is the cultural criticism in our digital projects? Something is missing in the embrace of digital technology in higher education at the community college, and digital humanities offers one way to explore what that is.

Definitional Debates and Disciplinary Uncertainty are Problematic at Two-Year Public Institutions
Why have community colleges been slow to embrace DH, even as they have embraced technology? One reason may be related to the definitional debates currently occurring in DH.  Teaching with technology is being adopted by humanities departments in community colleges. Some community colleges may easily confuse DH with their current adoption of technology for pedagogical purposes and for efficiency or currency in online courses. Online classes, syllabi online, shared curriculum through Open Educational Resources, videos and screencasts integrated into the face-to-face classroom: community colleges have readily adapted these digital media into their pedagogies. While practices of DH converge with some of these innovations, the critical scrutiny that DH brings to the picture may not fit as readily with administrative agendas in a community college setting.  Digital humanists may have to bring this aspect of the technological innovation landscape.

As with humanities scholars in the field at large, community college humanists share an uncertainty about the value of DH methods and technologies. Community colleges are embracing technology across the curriculum in response to the pressure to be lean and fiscally “sustainable,” and traditional humanists are responding in different ways to the resulting changed environment. Some embrace online courses, pedagogical tools and digital methods of production as “cool” (vide Liu 2012) and welcome students’ response to their knowledge work.  Others reject “virtual” learning environments and technologies, proudly claiming Luddite status and defending the printed versions of their Norton Anthologies.

Digital humanities offers an alternative to both of these responses to technology.  It functions as an extension of technology into cultural inquiry and also critique of the technologies that make it possible. As a field, digital humanities is itself an object of inquiry, a teaching tool and a participatory medium that joins graduate students, senior scholars, curators and librarians in an engagement with essential digital competencies for 21^st century community college students. Elite colleges and universities may debate the definition of digital humanities, but its culture of collaboration and its critical interventions into the dominating power of technology itself lends it an indisputable value in a world searching for ways to comprehend what James Gleick (2011)  calls “the information.” The DH approach to the current forms of power in information society could enable community college students to critically engage with technology in a new way.

Importance of Communication outside the Collaborative but Specialized World of Digital Humanities
Community colleges are not alone in confronting the uneven development of digital humanities.  Because of its interdisciplinarity and fluid definition, digital humanities has not been uniformly welcomed or understood outside the immediate boundaries of the field.  For example, Ryan Cordell describes his  experience introducing a digital humanities course through his college’s institutional committee structure and notes the institutional lag between hiring specialists with DH expertise and research agendas such as his own and the reception of that expertise institutionally (he eventually renames his course “Technologies of Text” and the course is approved). This is one consequence of the term “digital humanities” lacking an agreed-upon referent. Some have argued that this fluidity is part of its strength and reach.  But at community colleges, the challenges posed by inchoate definitions may be more striking. Community colleges are under more careful scrutiny for fiscal accountability and relevance to the labor market, and undefined outcomes and aims make it vulnerable to dismissal by wary boards of education and even deans with an eye on the bottom line. For DH to take hold, it will take an intentional, systematic and collaborative approach.

The lag in DH among community colleges is not only unfortunate for community college students but for four-year programs to which they may transfer.  At Lane, for example, transfer programs make up the college’s largest service population, and all degree-seeking students take Arts and Letters courses.  Community colleges provide foundational humanities courses for transfer students seeking a four-year degree and for two-year-degree-seeking students through the general education requirement.  Engaging community colleges in the digital humanities conversation could pave the way for community college humanities programs to provide introductions to the field and to the skills required. Without such engagement, community college students of the humanities will only learn of DH as a discipline and practice if they continue to four-year colleges and may not be prepared when they arrive there.

Community colleges are often the gateway to degrees for low-income, first-generation students, returning adult students, students of color, and students with disabilities. If they miss the opportunity to engage these and all students with the methods, objects of inquiry and in some cases revolutionary ways of seeing that digital humanities offers, they risk falling short of their mission.

Indeed, Matthew K. Gold’s makes this point in his essay, “Whose Revolution? Towards a More Equitable Digital Humanities.” The lag in full entry of community colleges into the digital humanities “revolution” is an inequity that needs to be addressed:

As digital humanists, the questions we need to think about are these: what can digital humanities mean for cash-poor colleges with underserved student populations that have neither the staffing nor the expertise to complete DH projects on their own? What responsibilities do funders have to attempt to achieve a more equitable distribution of funding? Most importantly, what is the digital humanities missing when its professional discourse does not include the voices of the institutionally subaltern? How might the inclusion of students, faculty, and staff at such institutions alter the nature of discourse in DH, of the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of answers we accept? What new kinds of collaborative structures might we build to begin to make DH more inclusive and more equitable?

One way to address the lag in community college engagement is to find out what digital humanities could look like at the lower-division level, and to place digital humanities at the center of any educational reform efforts occurring at community colleges.

I am also pursuing a grant which, if we are funded, could help develop a community of practice among community college humanists. At CCHA in October 2013, I am planning an interactive workshop for faculty interested in developing projects that engage students in digital humanities.