On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Dan O'Donnell wrote:
I'm wondering if there perhaps is not a need for a more conceptual approach: what is Unicode? what is XML? structural vs. display markup? how the web works. database design.
As a graduate student who is both a medievalist and a technorhetorican (I'm even on the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication), I would say yes, all humanities graduate students need an introduction to humanities computing, and I've long been thinking that the conceptual approach you suggest is a good way to start.
As we all know, digital tools are both changing the way we do work in the humanities and they are creating new methods, theories, practices, and opportunities. I'd argue, actually I have been increasingly arguing both locally and in other forums, that to ignore the issue of humanities computing and the increasing role of digital technologies and digital culture in graduate education is quickly shifting from being an issue of not being on the cutting edge to being an issue of negligence on the part of that program. In other words, it's rapidly becoming not an issue of humanities computing and the disciplinary subject, but humanities computing becoming one of the various methods and practices of engaging the disciplinary subject.
But I'd go farther too (this is the technorhetorician and the Ongian in me). It shouldn't just be about digitizing material, but also the production and consumption of native digital texts, and understanding of digital culture, digital noetics and practices, and the logic of new media. In other words, not just how to digitize primary sources, but how digital technologies can change the way we do scholarship.
But I'd go farther too (this is the technorhetorician and the Ongian in me). It shouldn't just be about digitizing material, but also the production and consumption of native digital texts, and understanding of digital culture, digital noetics and practices, and the logic of new media. In other words, not just how to digitize primary sources, but how digital technologies can change the way we do scholarship.
For instance, how can the logic of new media -- the cut-up, the mix and remix, juxtaposition, association and linkage, to name a few -- change the ways we can make arguments, explore our subjects, and share and preserve information? In what ways might the mediated experience of a virtual recreation of an archeological dig change the way archeology is done (for one, would the added financial and physical constraints of creating a real-time virtual reality model of the dig outweigh or be outweighed by the possibility of future archeologists (or the original archeologists) reexploring a dig in much the same way architects create virtual reality models to "walk" through? Or how does our understandings of digital culture help us rethink our understanding of past cultural processes a la orality and literacy studies and book history? Or, for that matter, how can our understanding of earlier cultural processes help us understand digital ones (see, for instance, John Miles Foley's Pathways Project, or the work being done in textual and bibliographic studies).
John
John Walter | walterj@slu.edu Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English Walter J. Ong Collection Archivist, Pius XII Memorial Library Saint Louis University