Category Archives: teaching

Syllabus: ENGL581: Digital Tools and Critical Theory.

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This syllabus is indebted to just about everyone who has posted a syllabus for a DH course, and especially to Paul Fyfe, from whose draft syllabus I borrowed several readings.

The syllabus itself is here as a .pdf file.

As you’ll see if you download it, this is not a general digital humanities course. At Urbana-Champaign, John Unsworth has been teaching an introduction to digital humanities in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and there’s no way I could hope to replicate his breadth of knowledge. Instead I’ve focused on literary and historical applications of text mining, because that’s an area where I feel I can teach skills that a wide range of humanities graduate students will find immediately useful.

I realize the choice of focus may seem odd, since text mining is a relatively controversial subfield of DH, and a technically challenging one. There’s no way to duck the technical challenge: I am going to try to teach enough coding (using R) to empower students to define their own questions and visualize their own results. But I don’t think controversies about quantification need to be a problem, since I approach text mining largely as a discovery strategy. I hope it will turn up insights and clues that students find useful, without necessarily compelling them to add a lot of numbers or graphs to their arguments.

The “tools” and “theory” in the title of the course are not meant to be pitted against each other. The title instead flags a working assumption that practice and theory are fused: our interpretive theories are already shaped by the social/technical infrastructure we use to find and read texts, so reflectively reshaping that infrastructure is a way of “doing theory.”

A course description.

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I thought I would share the description of a graduate course I’ll be teaching in Spring 2012. It’s targeted specifically at students in English literature. So instead of teaching an “introduction to digital humanities” as a whole, I’ve decided to focus on the parts of this research program that seem to integrate most easily into literary study. I want to help students take risks — but I also want to focus, candidly, on risks that seem likely to produce useful credentials within the time frame of graduate study.

I think the perception among professors of literature may be that TEI-based editing is the digital tool that integrates most easily into what we do. But where grad students are concerned, I think new modes of collection-mapping are actually more widely useful, because they generate leads that can energize projects not otherwise centrally “digital.” This approach is technically a bit more demanding than TEI would be, but if students are handed a few simple modules (LSA-based topic modeling, Dunning’s log likelihood, collocation analysis, entity extraction, time series graphing) I think it’s fairly easy to reveal discourses, trends, and perhaps genres that no one has discussed. I’ll be sharing my own tools built in R, and an 18-19c collection I have developed in collaboration with E. Jordan Sellers. But I’ll also ask students to learn some basic elements of R themselves, so that they can adapt or connect modules and generate their own visualizations. As we get into problems that exceed the power of the average Mac, I’ll introduce students to the modular resources of SEASR. Wish us luck — it’s an experiment!

ENGL 581. Digital Tools and Critical Theory. Spring 2012.

Critical practice is already shaped by technology. Contemporary historicism emerged around the same time as full-text search, for instance, and would be hard to envision without it. Our goal in this course will be to make that relationship more reciprocal by using critical theory to shape technology in turn. For example, the prevailing system of “keyword search” requires scholars to begin by guessing how another era categorized the world. But much critical theory suggests that we cannot predict those categories in advance, and there are ways of mapping an archive that don’t require us to.

I’ve found that it does make a difference: when critics build their own tools, they can uncover trends and discourses that standard search technology does not reveal. The course will not assume any technical background, although it does assume willingness to learn a few basic elements of programming and statistics. Many of the tools/collections we need are already available on the web; others I can give you, or show you how to cobble together. We will often take time out from building things to read theory — like Moretti’s Maps, Graphs, Trees (2005), corpus linguistics, and influential critiques of or definitions of the digital humanities. But we will not mostly be writing about digital humanities. Instead I’ll recommend writing an ordinary critical essay about literary/cultural history, subtly informed by new tools or new models of discourse. (Underline “subtly.”) Projects on any period are possible, although the resources I can provide are admittedly richest between 1700 and 1900.

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By the way, it would be churlish of me not to acknowledge that I’ve learned much of what I know about this topic from grad students, and especially (where methodology is concerned) from Benjamin Schmidt, whose blog posts are an education in themselves and will certainly be on the syllabus. “Graduate education” in this field is a very circular process.

It’s okay not to solve “the crisis of the humanities.”

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I read Cathy Davidson’s latest piece in Academe with pleasure and admiration. She’s right that humanists need to think about the social function of our work, and right that this will require self-criticism. Moreover, Davidson’s work with HASTAC seems to me a model of the sort of innovation we need now.

However, Davidson says such kind things about the digital humanities that someone needs to pour in a few grains of salt. And since I’m a digital humanist, it might as well be me.

To reimagine a global humanism with relevance to the contemporary world means understanding, using, and contributing to new computational tools and methods. … Even a few examples show how being open to digital possibilities changes paradigms and brings new ways of reimagining the humanities into the world.

Reading this, I find myself blushing and stammering. And what I’m stammering is: “slow down a sec, because I’m not sure how central any of this is really going to be to our pedagogical mission.”

I’m going to teach a graduate course on digital humanities next semester, because I’m confident that information technology will change (actually, already has changed) the research end of our discipline. But I’m not yet sure about the implications at the undergraduate level. Maybe ten years from now I’ll be teaching text mining to undergrads … but then again, maybe the things undergraduates need most from an English course will still be historical perspective, close reading, a willingness to revise, and a habit of considering objections to their own thesis.

I’m sure that text mining belongs in undergraduate education somewhere. It raises fascinating social and linguistic puzzles. But I’m not sure whether we’ll be able to fit all the puzzles raised by technological change into the undergrad English major. It’s possible that English departments will want to stay focused on an older mission, leaving these new challenges to be scooped up by Linguistics or Computer Science. If that happens, it’s okay with me. It’s not particularly crucial that all the projects I care about be combined in a single department.

I’m dwelling on this because I feel humanists spend way too much time these days arguing about “what we need to do in order to keep the discipline from shrinking.” Sometimes the answer offered is a) return to our core competence, and sometimes the answer is b) boldly take on some new mission. But really I want to answer c) it is not our job to keep the discipline from shrinking, and we shouldn’t do anything purely for that reason. Our job is to make sure that we keep passing on the critical skills that the humanities develop best, at the same time as we explore new intellectual challenges.

Maybe those new challenges require us to expand. Or maybe it turns out that new challenges are relevant mostly at the graduate level, whereas at the undergraduate level we already have our hands full teaching students social history, close reading, and revision. And maybe that means that departments of English do end up shrinking relative to Communications or CompSci. If so, I hope it doesn’t happen rapidly, because I care about the fortunes of particular graduate students. But in the long term, it would not be a tragedy. Ideas matter. Departmental boundaries don’t. Intellectual history is not a contest to see who can retain the most faculty.

UPDATE Dec. 30 2011: I have to admit that my mind is in the process of being changed about this. After participating in a NITLE-sponsored seminar about teaching digital humanities at the undergraduate level, I’m much less hesitant than I was in September. Ryan Cordell, Brian Croxall, and Jeff McClurken presented really impressive digital-humanities courses that were also deeply grounded in the context of a specific discipline. Recording available at the link above.