Integrating the Digital Humanities into the Second Language Classroom

A Practical Guide

Melinda A. Cro

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781626167773
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Second language classrooms provide unique opportunities for intellectual growth, cognitive skill development, and cultural exchange. In Integrating the Digital Humanities into the Second Language Classroom, Melinda A. Cro makes the case for bringing the digital humanities (DH) into that sphere, strengthening students' language skills while furthering their critical thinking and research abilities. Written as a practical guide for language instructors new to DH, Cro addresses practitioners' most common questions: What are the benefits of DH for language learning in particular? How can DH be used at different levels of instruction? What types of DH tools are out there, and what kinds of knowledge must students and teachers bring to the table? Integrating the Digital Humanities into the Second Language Classroom is filled with real-world examples and concrete recommendations, making it an ideal introduction for language teachers intrigued by the potential of DH.

1

The Digital Humanities: Definitions and Debates

THE HUMANITIES HAVE undergone a shift recently, wherein scholars seek to take advantage of the advent of new and increasingly accessible forms of technology to facilitate the collection and analysis of big data. Tom Scheinfeldt has likened these new technological approaches in the humanities in which information is evaluated in new and unanticipated ways to the desire of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars to catalog the expanding range of information made available through advents in technology and science (P. Cohen 2010). Other scholars see the move from print to digital as analogous to the “flowering of Renaissance and post-Renaissance print culture” (Burdick et al. 2012). Notwithstanding the numerous articles and entries proposing to define the digital humanities, a clear and concise definition remains elusive, in part due to conflation regarding the purpose and nature of the practice itself. This chapter proposes an understanding of the digital humanities as a transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary endeavor characterized by a specific methodology that is particularly well suited for adaptation and use in the second language classroom.

Background

The digital humanities, as a practice of humanistic endeavor, is far older than one might assume given the current hype surrounding the field. The origins of what is today classified as the digital humanities may be traced to an early computing project undertaken by an Italian Jesuit priest, Roberto Busa, who, in 1949, embarked on an effort to create a concordance of St. Thomas Aquinas and related authors’ works. The total was around 11 million words of medieval Latin. Busa hypothesized that a machine might facilitate the process and reached out to IBM for support. The texts were transferred to punch cards and then a concordance program was written to sort and organize the words under their dictionary headings (a fuller, more detailed account is given in Hockey 2004). This is the earliest example of computers being utilized for humanistic purposes.

Originally called “humanities computing,” the discipline was born from the desire to capitalize on advances in computer sciences to facilitate complex statistical and computational tasks in textual analysis (for example, lexical analyses in various texts inputted into the system). While disparate projects utilizing machines and computing in the humanities may be documented in the 50s and 60s (the journal Computers and the Humanities was founded in 1966), it was not until the subsequent decades (from the 70s to the mid-80s) that the field began to consolidate, as Susan Hockey (2004) puts it. At this time, numerous associations rose up (for example, The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, International Conference on Computing in the Humanities, and most recently the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, which welcomes under its umbrella six different international organizations, including the Association for Computers and the Humanities). Such organizations provided more regular opportunities for communication and interaction between digital humanists and ultimately led to greater institutionalized support for its practitioners. In the 80s, questions were raised over whether students should be taught humanities computing, but challenges such as accessibility, affordability, and need for institutional support (both in terms of infrastructure and funding), coupled with the challenges of memory storage, made humanities computing prohibitively costly.

With the dawn of the internet in the 1990s, the potential for the digital humanities and its possibility of widespread dissemination became more tangible, lending a greater urgency to developing standards of practice while simultaneously training humanists to participate in the rapidly expanding field. Not coincidentally, the increase in memory available on modern computers also helped to shift and expand the scope of the digital humanities. While research universities have begun in the last fifteen to twenty years to launch digital humanities centers in partnership with their libraries and various departments, federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities recognized the potential that digital humanities represented for facilitating its own mission of “making the humanities available to all Americans” (“Strategic Plan” 2018), launching the Office of Digital Humanities in 2008.

Today, the digital humanities is far more than a collection of markup languages, text encoding practices, and computational tools to be accessed by faculty and instructors interested in harnessing technology in the classroom. Rather, DH is most effective when used as a methodological approach to the discipline under study, such as content-based courses in a target language. Such an approach necessitates, however, a slight shift in perspective. The content studied (for example, a literary survey or cultural course) may be explored through freely accessible DH tools that permit visualization and analysis of the texts in ways that offer multiple means of approaching them. The union of “big data” methods (i.e., statistical analysis, distant reading) with close reading and visualization, helps students to explore the textual from a new perspective that enriches the possible learning outcomes. However, DH extends beyond the textual realm. For example, Gardiner and Musto (2015) outline “elements” that they propose are constitutive of humanistic study: text, document, object, artifact, image, video, sound, and space. This chapter will explore a few definitions of DH that are particularly useful in framing a DH-inflected pedagogy in the L2 classroom.

Definitions

Defining the digital humanities has occupied a particularly large swath of the literature in the field, so much so that it has almost become a genre unto itself. The fascination with ontological questions has been, in part, a response to various pressures from disparate segments of the profession, ranging from dubious peers in the humanities suspicious of the use of digital methods in traditionally material- and text-based disciplines to college administrators intrigued by the potential to attract interested students but reticent to invest funds in new endeavors. Perhaps most challenging of all has been the preference in the academy and in various institutions of higher education for traditional, recognizable forms of scholarship (i.e., article, monograph), particularly when it comes to questions of promotion and tenure (Burdick et al. 2012; Gardiner and Musto 2015). Hence the urgency to define and problematize the work being done in the digital humanities and the primacy of discussions related to research and publication. Numerous manifestos have been published exploring definitions of the discipline, both in traditional print form (such as the anthology, Defining the Digital Humanities: A Reader assembled by Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte 2013) and online through openly accessible journals, like Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ). Indeed, in the face of the call to participate publicly and openly in the question, there are an increasing number of practitioners’ own blogs and websites wherein individuals contribute their own definitions of the discipline and how it informs practices in their own research; consider, for example, either Ted Underwood’s (Underwood n.d.) or Katherine D. Harris’s blog (Harris n.d.). The Chronicle of Higher Education has featured several articles on the digital humanities, examining the multiple sides of the discipline, including critiques that question the validity and import of the field and responses to the same (Brennan 2017; Long, Bond, and Underwood 2017; Weiskott 2017). All this activity has helped to tease out the finer points of the discipline.

While I do not propose to rehash all the various perspectives on the question of purpose and function in DH, there are certain shared characteristics among definitions of the field that are particularly relevant for L2 instructors and for establishing the methodology inherent in DH. First and foremost, DH is about making or building. As Stephen Ramsay (Ramsay 2013b) notoriously affirmed in a talk at the MLA that sparked a great deal of controversy in the community,

Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things. I’m willing to entertain highly expansive definitions of what it means to build something. I also think the discipline includes and should include people who theorize about building, people who design so that others might build, and those who supervise building. . . . But if you are not making anything, you are not . . . a digital humanist. (241)

Put another way, it is an applied practice that focuses on projects and production or fabrication, tempting comparisons with artisanal culture:

We should be able to be clear about the importance of project management and thing knowledge—the tacit knowledge of fabrication and its cultures—even if the very nature of that poesis (knowledge of making) itself cannot easily (and shouldn’t have to) be put into words. . . . We should be able to explain that there is real knowledge in the making and that that knowledge can be acquired by anyone genuinely interested. (Rockwell 2013)

Continuing along these lines, the authors of Digital_Humanities affirm the purpose of DH in similar terms:

Digital Humanities represents a major expansion of the purview of the humanities, precisely because it brings the values, representation and interpretive practices, meaning-making strategies, complexities, and ambiguities of being human into every realm of experience and knowledge of the world. It is a global, trans-historical and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-making. (Burdick et al. 2012, vii)

Burdick et al. continue by describing DH as “conspicuously collaborative and generative,” which challenges the traditional model of humanities research (consisting mainly of single-authored monographs), opting for cooperative endeavors that necessitate plurality in design and execution (3). What comes through clearly is the importance of intentionality and the emphasis on conscientious and open engagement with materials and questions of research design.

While some have underscored building in conceptions of DH (Ramsay 2013a, 2013b), Mark Sample (2011) has focused on sharing:

The heart of the digital humanities is not the production of knowledge; it’s the reproduction of knowledge. . . . The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge. We are no longer bound by the physical demands of printed books and paper journals, no longer constrained by production costs and distribution friction, no longer hampered by a top-down and unsustainable business model. And we should no longer be content to make our work public achingly slowly along ingrained routes, authors and readers alike delayed by innumerable gateways limiting knowledge production and sharing.

The focus on design and the open nature of many DH projects leads naturally to considerations of accessibility and the potential for immediate, public engagement. Matthew Kirschenbaum (2010) underscores the social nature of DH that lends not only to the cooperative character of the discipline but to the visibility of the same in public spheres beyond traditional, academic outlets (i.e., specialized research journals obtainable only through institutional access). DH-ers utilize social media in concrete and effective ways, and the projects that DH-ers design are often freely accessible to the public. Sample’s observations regarding the immediacy and interactivity that DH offers do not negate the importance that Ramsay and others have identified in building; in essence, they are two complementary sides to the same coin.

One question that is central to the debate is that of inclusion or exclusion. In attempting to define the field, several have also attempted to limit it in an effort to delineate what its practitioners do as distinct from conceptions of the humanities as a whole. This tendency toward limitation has led to a schism between more inclusive stances (such as those taken on by “big tenters” who see DH as open to an array of possible configurations) and those that are more exclusive, offering specialized descriptions and alluding to specific skillsets that render the field less accessible to the non-specialist. In an all-inclusive view of the field, there is concern that it may be too all-encompassing. This position reflects Melissa Terras’s concern that big tent ideology reduces that which distinguishes DH from other forms of scholarly pursuit (Terras 2013). Burdick et al. (2012) propose, in their “Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities” (the final pages of their larger monograph on the subject, Digital_Humanities), to define both what is and what is not digital humanities, echoing as they do so John Unsworth’s consideration (2002) of what does (and does not) constitute humanities computing. In Burdick et al.’s definition, they challenge the primacy of text and print in humanistic inquiry:

Digital Humanities marks a move beyond a privileging of the textual, emphasizing graphical methods of knowledge production and organization, design as an integral component of research, transmedia crisscrossings, and an expanded concept of the sensorium of humanistic knowledge. It is also characterized by an intensified focus on the building of transferrable tools, environments, and platforms for collaborative scholarly work and by an emphasis upon curation as a defining feature of scholarly practice. (2012, 122)

Some have read in Burdick et al. and others a tendency toward exclusion, particularly when they affirm, “The mere use of digital tools for the purpose of humanistic research and communication does not qualify as Digital Humanities” (2012, 122). That is, without coding or programming skills, or graphic design capabilities, one may not actually fully participate in DH.

Perhaps one of the most cohesive and convincing rebuttals of this exclusive stance is Katherine Harris’s cogent arguments that underscore the institutional realities in which many DH practitioners find themselves. Harris (2013) asks why the use of digital tools for humanistic research is not part of DH. She explains that the way in which her institution is set up does not lend itself to DH as conceived by Burdick et al. The emphasis on coding, programming, and design over use of digital tools excludes a large swath of practitioners from the field. Rather, in her view, her students gain insight through serving as “the advisory board or the editorial board of a project” (2013, 22). She asserts,

Teaching at a non-R1 and doing Digital Humanities requires a certain do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos. But, DIY also implies uncompensated and often-times un-credited work. For the longest time Digital Humanities has advocated going out and doing. Being plucky. Taking the initiative. At a non-R1, this means teaching classes, writing traditional scholarship, then, and only then, adding some Digital Humanities sauce to everything else. There just isn’t time. The only way to combat that encroaching workload is to engage students in Digital Humanities—basically to throw them in the deep end of Digital Humanities with some guidance to see how they break it. And break it they do. (2013, 21)

For Harris, one of the core benefits and characteristics of DH is that it shifts thinking away from linear textuality and embraces process over product. She contends that DH-based approaches permit and encourage empowerment and that her students engage in active and creative ways with technology, a much-needed activity in today’s ever-increasingly technical global landscape. Conversely, Ted Underwood admits that he entered the field assuming that he would be able to use the publicly available extant toolsets for text mining, like Voyant, before realizing that they did not necessarily correspond to his needs, and before long he was learning to program to facilitate his research plans (Underwood 2012). However, this is perhaps the distinction between teaching and research as well as the acknowledgment of varying levels of engagement in DH. One may absolutely utilize the tools readily available, and I will propose this as the primary means for pedagogical engagement in DHL2 (a shift from Pitman and Taylor’s conception of DHML to focus on the pedagogical aspect of second language learning and acquisition). Nonetheless, there may come a time in a researcher’s agenda when designing and building takes on a different meaning, and it would be disingenuous to suppose that programming would never come into play. While Battershill and Ross (2017) affirm optimistically that the debate regarding coding as a central aspect to DH is over, that seems an exaggerated claim; after all, the issue was presented as central in Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte’s reader (2013) and continues to be examined in various venues, including blog posts on HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory). Perhaps the tenor of the discussion has changed, however; rather than seeing coding as a means for exclusion, programming, or at least a basic awareness of how programming functions, is presented as an opportunity to enhance and facilitate research in a useful and accessible way in recent HASTAC blogs (Hunter 2016; Pottroff 2015; Faith 2013).

Core Characteristics of Digital Pedagogy

Ultimately, there is no single definition of the digital humanities that may incorporate all the varied characteristics of the field. However, one may identify certain values that are shared by DH practitioners. Lisa Spiro (2012) identifies the core values of the digital humanities as open...