Language in the Digital Era. Challenges and Perspectives

Daniel Dejica, Gyde Hansen, Peter Sandrini, Iulia Para, Daniel Dejica, Gyde Hansen, Peter Sandrini, Iulia Para

• Editorial: De Gruyter Open Poland
• Año: 2024
• ISBN:
  9783110470727
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Linguistics

This collected volume brings together the contributions of several humanities scholars who focus on the evolution of language in the digital era. The first part of the volume explores general aspects of humanities and linguistics in the digital environment. The second part focuses on language and translation and includes topics that discuss the digital translation policy, new technologies and specialised translation, online resources for terminology management, translation of online advertising, or subtitling. The last part of the book focuses on language teaching and learning and addresses the changes, challenges and perspectives of didactics in the age of technology. Each contribution is divided into several sections that present the state of the art and the methodology used, and discuss the results and perspectives of the authors. The book is recommended to scholars, professionals, students and anyone interested in the changes within the humanities in conjunction with technological innovation or in the ways language is adapting to the challenges of today's digitized world.

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Part I: Humanities Gone Digital

Mary P. Sheridan

1 Recent Trends in Digital Humanities Scholarship

1.1 Introduction: Concerns and Possibilities That Give Rise to the Digital Humanities

Education is changing, and digital work is both reflective of and instrumental for these changes. Yet, whereas digital technology has long been central in many academic arenas, it has received mixed reviews by those in the humanities. The past decade, however, has introduced several factors that have been giving technology a more prominent role in these ostensibly less-technical forums.

One factor has been an anxiety that US higher education is not preparing students for today’s changing workforce. As US jobs continue to be off-shored due to global market conditions or automated due to technological advances, many have asked if higher education is appropriately preparing US students to be future workers and leaders in an economy that demands innovation and entrepreneurialism for quick adaptations to global systems in flux. This anxiety about student preparation, coupled with rising student debt, has led citizens, businesses, government officials and policy makers¹ to question what students are receiving for their increasingly expensive higher education. More, such questions have nudged academic institutions, programs, and departments to explore how globally networked digital media can keep universities relevant in today’s changing contexts.

A second, related concern that has helped fuel increased interest in technology relates to funding for higher education. For years there has been an ongoing withdrawal of US governmental funding, with 48 of the 50 states continuing to cut financial support (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 2014) to the point where some argue that the government will all but de-fund these universities within the coming decades. As universities scramble to fill that budgetary gap, they rely on a series of measures, including the controversial courting of business sponsorships. University athletic divisions have solicited and maintained corporate alliances for years, but expanding that reliance, critics fear, makes universities beholden to these companies beyond their ubiquitous advertising at university sporting events or their names on campus buildings, facilities, or academic positions. Donations that have explicit strings attached (e.g., about research agendas, curricular choices, hiring practices) can compromise the intellectual freedom that universities champion,² yet, as long as these economic conditions remain, cash-strapped universities have few options for funding and will, therefore, need to negotiate new sponsorships and the incumbent responsibilities that go along with such relationships.

Among the many concerns facing higher education, these two—anxiety about student preparation and concerns about sponsors who fund and shape that preparation—show higher education’s twinned problems of needing to do more with less. In that difficult spot, universities are learning to do differently, and technology is increasingly touted as a means both to prepare students for the digitally saturated employment world of today and to develop partnerships beyond the traditional ones. Not surprisingly, many in higher education have pinned their hopes for emerging educational practices on the use of digital media throughout higher education, including the humanities. Fortunately, this shift is becoming easier in the classroom, in part because of the world in which we live today.

According to the Pew Charitable Trust, digital media is ubiquitous in many students’ lives (Lenhart, et al., 2008), and teachers across the university are tapping this interest. For example, the annual Educause list of the top 100 technologies teachers report using in their classrooms indicates that teachers are bringing high-end and everyday technology into their classrooms (Dahlstrom and Brooks, 2014; Purcell, et al., 2013), and they are using that technology in various ways, whether to teach rhetorical strategies with social media, efficient data management for research projects, or effective collaboration in digitally mediated forums. This interest in using digital communication in the classroom is shared by university presidents as well; when asked what higher education will look like in the year 2020, the majority of university presidents responded that higher education will be quite different, with more digitally mediated teaching and learning than exists today (Anderson, et al., 2012). In fact, most university presidents anticipate a significant rise in online teaching and learning, with half of those responding that digitally mediated teaching will be important to how a majority of students receive their education (Taylor, et al., 2011).³

This general interest in and acceptance of digital technology in academia today is also evident in parts of the humanities. As technology finds a stronger foothold in the humanities, a conventionally less-technical arena than other parts of universities, more resources are becoming available to illustrate and explore the possibilities of the Digital Humanities, including: the US government sponsored National Endowment for the Humanities has a special section called the Office of the Digital Humanities; established book series have Digital Humanities collections, such as Blackwell’s A Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth, 2004); and, academic conferences, disciplinary specializations, and academic jobs are devoted solely to the Digital Humanities.

Such markers highlight that the digital and indeed the Digital Humanities have arrived, yet the actual definition of the Digital Humanities is less stabilized. Many see that the term can push scholars to explore possibilities beyond what has been traditional inquiry. Others contest the term altogether; noting that the digital is infused in the sciences, engineering, and medicine (areas that do not use the “digital” modifier), this group pushes scholars to focus on defining the humanities in contemporary contexts. Still others use the term Digital Humanities to mean just about anything that uses digital media. Despite the diversity of views, the Digital Humanities generally refers to a set of methods and projects that investigate how the pairing of the terms “digital” and “humanities” extends one another. In other words, definitions coalesce around investigations into what it means to be human in the digitally networked information age. As such, these definitions tap traditional humanities strengths—such as synthesis, analysis, creation, and curation of artifacts with social/cultural significance—within digital networks to respond to cultural, economic, and global changes (Burdick, et al., 2003, p. 82).

In sharing their work, Digital Humanities scholars not only build upon but also extend humanities knowledge, making their arguments in both traditional, longer academic forms (e.g., academic papers, research reports) and in innovative, shorter forms (e.g., data visualizations). These scholars also pursue novel methods that, among other things, open new forms of scholarly inquiry, assess and organize knowledge in different ways, and facilitate collaboration across both traditional disciplinary silos as well as academic and non-academic participants. While scholars have been asking new questions, providing inventive assessments and collaborating for years, the degree to which these practices are the norm in Digital Humanities scholarship is distinctive. It is still too early to definitively state what exactly can come in this context, but already Digital Humanities scholars are charting several key paths, as the following examples illustrate.

1.2 Examples of Digital Humanities Projects

There are many ways to describe the diverse Digital Humanities projects that infuse long-standing traditions of humanistic inquiry into rapidly changing technological possibilities of today. Below are examples of three types: the digitization of information, which makes information widely and often freely available to a far greater range of stakeholders; the born digital projects, which call for multimodal, often interactive and immersive, engagements afforded by digitally mediated technologies; and, the creation of tools that allow for new ways to research and represent that research. Fostering collaboration and opening the possibility of innovative methods and questions, each of these projects extends humanities research by encouraging new ways of creating and representing knowledge.

1.2.1 Digitization of Existing Materials

One type of Digital Humanities project is the digitization of existing materials, which makes historically static material easily available and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. While not an entirely new practice—scholars have had access to archives in the past—increasing access to this information radically changes the scope and possibilities of such work. Consider, for instance, Devon Elliott and William J. Turkel’s use of early 20th-Century periodicals for stage magicians as way to develop image processing techniques that extract, classify, and visualize imagery. They did so both to better understand practices and changes in the field of magic, and to suggest ways that similar image mining processes might help scholars efficiently identify and analyze themes across digitized visual collections. Just as individual scholars may find the digitization of existing materials of value, nations and global groups can, too, as evident in the Woodrow Wilson Center Archive making available recently declassified documents on various themes, such as The Cold War, The Korean Conflict, and Nuclear History. Providing de-classified global communications, this free, digitally accessible archive changes who can easily do research, from scholars and public intellectuals to curious global citizens. The European Commission’s Digital Agenda For Europe: A Europe 2020 Initiative also seeks to expand who can participate in important conversations, in this case by “improv[ing] the framework conditions for digitization and digital preservation” of key cultural material (n.p.). In short, the mass availability of shared documents allows for new degrees of openness and of collaboration among interested groups, regardless of their participants’ status.

Digitizing data clearly has its rewards, and as more people, organizations and nations become interested in the possibilities, we will see more information and a greater range of people engaging with this information. Still, there are challenges that go beyond simply converting materials into .pdfs and .jpegs and posting them online. Researchers continue to struggle with finding and accessing texts that may exist in various formats (articles, reports, diaries, newspaper clippings, photos, recordings), securing or clearing copyrights that may be held by groups with competing agendas, digitizing materials for archival purposes, coding files for organization and retrieval, managing and maintaining archives in ways that others can readily access, and providing the means to expand these systems as more information becomes available. Such efforts require expertise, time, and money, and the demands for these resources will only grow as the frameworks and infrastructures supporting the resulting datasets become more complex. But the work is already being done, and the re...