“The printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution” announced Matthew Kirschenbaum in DH Debates in 2012. Five years earlier, N. Katherine Hayles had observed that a generational shift in the way people produce, distribute and interpret knowledge was taking place and causing cognitive shift (“Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”). The ubiquity of television, cell phones and computers in the United States and in Europe bear both Hayles and Kirschenbaum out, but digital technologies have replaced the printed word to a much lesser extent in more economically challenged hemispheres. In Colombia, for example, although television and cell phones are probably the main channels through which people consume current news, institutions of higher education and government agencies still rely heavily on the printed word. I understand therefore that Hayles and Kirschenbaum frame their posthuman subjects within geopolitical and socioeconomic boundaries particular to the technologically equipped world but do not specify these boundaries in the cognitive shifts they discuss.

In twenty-first century North America, technologically driven changes in modes of thought are most pronounced in the younger generations, wrote Hayles, predicting that the full effects of the “generational shift in cognitive styles,” would probably be felt when kids who were twelve in 2007 got to college (187). Eleven years later, these kids make up the most part of undergraduate classes in the United States today. To respond to the different approach to knowledge new generations of college students would take, Hayles warned that we needed to be aware of the shift that was taking place and devise new strategies appropriate to new cognitive styles (187). Have we done this? I think we can find some answers to this question in Cathy Davidson’s The New Education, which examines the forces that shaped North American higher education in response to the mechanized industrial revolutions of the 19^th century, argues that these educational methods/models no longer serve our transformed needs and calls for a revolution in our approach to teaching and learning.

Again, my mind goes to Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla, Colombia, where I taught for two years. Universidad del Atlántico is one of the largest public universities in the Caribbean, and it is overcrowded, underfunded, and low-tech. Most of its students are from the lowest economic “stratas” (Colombia has an institutionalized caste system allegedly based on the value of one’s home) any many do not have cell phones. Neither faculty nor students multitask like we do here. In the university the printed word – usually in photocopied books – is the main medium for knowledge production and distribution. Outside the university private television and radio stations dominate the information pond. The Colombian Ministry of Education is directing funds for technological development in public universities (sadly, a lot of this funding is stolen before it gets near where it should go) and private universities are investing heavily in technology, so I think we can safely say in Colombia too technology has caused and is causing generational cognitive shifts. As we devise new strategies for responding to the shifts we see in North America, we should also think of how such strategies can be implemented globally, in universities with very little means, and how we could help people with less means recycle hardware we no longer use.

Works Cited

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” DH Debates, 2012

Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” PMLA, 2007

Cathy N. Davidson. The New Education. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

So I have had some experience with Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work in the past, but only recently have been able to apply his theories in a practical way. In reading his article What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? I have decided to use this blog post to not only address the hostility and retaliation towards the digital humanities (towards the beginning of its existence as we know it today) but also how English departments have grown to open their doors to it. As time has gone by, the digital humanities as a field have not stopped growing. The name for all of the subcategories within DH is “The Big Tent” because the boundaries are essentially non-existent. However, in the beginning, there was some serious pushback to accepting the digital humanities as a field of study within English departments and academia as a whole. People considered it to be an incredibly exclusive field, and I recently learned that  University of Nebraska scholar, Stephen Ramsay, had really scrambled the field when he made his “Who’s In and Who’s Out” speech at the Modern Language Association Convention in 2011 (Gold). If you would like more direct information on that, you can find it in the same book’s (Debates in the Digital Humanities by Matthew K. Gold) introduction. Anyway, Ramsay’s made that speech essentially saying that if you did not know how to code, then you were not ever going to be a digital humanist.

At the time, digital humanities were in the midst of a flurry due to that statement (amongst others). It really helped to promote this cliquish culture in DH, something that took a long time to overcome. Some may still be fighting it. The reason I brought up Ramsay and the start of digital humanities was because of how much of a boys club it once was and where we are now. Kirschenbaum lists half a dozen reason English departments were so compatible with DH. However, he doesn’t dive very deep into any of the points, which is why I want to interpret them and explain what they mean to me. Starting with his first point:

“First, after numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments.” (Kirschenbaum) 

This first reason converges with his second point regarding computers and composition as well as his final point discussing e-reading. These three points can be brought together using a single word, archiving. A hefty motivator for students and professors of English to embrace this technological aspect of academia is the drive to digitize information and make it more accessible for curious minds. Look at the tragic loss in Rio, Brazil. They lost countless years of history and culture in one accident. As a result, they are trying to replicate the museum by digitizing it, archiving the data and mapping it out online so that their citizens and tourists can still have some kind of experience. I myself had the pleasure of working on an archive in undergrad when my professor, Dr. Annie Swafford, introduced us to DH. Working with Dickinson University, we created a Victorian Queer Literature archive for people all over to access online. This is where I first realized that this was something that could really connect people rather than keep them apart. Fields associated with text have so much potential in terms of technology, Kirschenbaum was well aware of that.

One last point I’ll unwrap was his fifth point where he stated: “Fifth is the openness of English departments to cultural studies, where computers and other objects of digital material culture become the centerpiece of analysis” (Kirschenbaum). I really enjoyed this point because from what I learned, English is a subject rooted in the human experience. Understanding stories of life through others’ experiences is what reading is about. So there is a very deep cultural aspect to English, something that we could use through our current and future technology to interconnect cultures and even academic disciplines. Technology is very much so a bridge between worlds that we can mold to bring everyone together rather than separated into cliques. Kirschenbaum saw this as an opportunity to use digital resources for reasons other than collecting data and analyzing statistics. For example, we can learn Brazilian culture through their digitized museum once it is complete. Ramsay may have had a point back in 2011, but the digital humanities have spread so widely across multiple disciplines. I feel as though Kirschenbaum was correct, but didn’t anticipate that English would act as a gateway like this way back in 2012.

*I apologize for the lack of page numbers! The Debates in the Digital Humanities online edition doesn’t have them to utilize.

Contributing to a blog has been a core requirement of all the classes I’ve taken so far at the Graduate Center.  So has following and reading various blogs.  I picked up early on how important blogs were to the digital humanities and my academic studies, and I recognize that they are an important tool for sharing and discussing ideas and having an online conversation around those ideas.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t come super easy to me and it’s not my favorite form of communication, but I will do my part to dispense my thoughts and to comment on those of my classmates.  I still relish the face to face discussion and sharing of ideas (thankfully, this class is taught in a classroom and not online).  Perhaps that’s my bias of age showing and I am resisting the “generational shift in cognitive styles” that has been hypothesized due to the rapid development of today’s “mediascape” as Hayles explores in the essay “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Mode” (p. 187).

I know for sure that I get super frustrated when my young nieces and nephews would rather play on their devices than read a good book, but I also know that being connected is an imperative in today’s world and they’d be somewhat at a disadvantage without access to networks and devices (I want them to prefer the solitary enjoyment of escaping into a good book over the rewards of beating their friend in a game of Fortnite, but I might be asking too much?).  What I really hope is that they are able to strike a balance in their development as citizens to be both able to deeply focus and to critically engage (with a book) while also navigating the constant bombardment of information from many directions and screens.  I use the word citizen intentionally here because I was particularly struck by the “Community Reading and Social Imagination” essay’s discussion of civil society and the role that community reading has played in ensuring a civil society.  The authors write:

In coming together to listen to, write, or discuss literature, we ideally develop and hone the skills (of listening to, evaluating, and critically engaging others’ arguments and articulating rhetorically effective positions of our own) that make civil society pleasurable and productive. (p.422)

This leads me to thinking about how some feel that the internet is the “great democratizer” of our time.  Web 2.0, as Liu introduced, allows anyone to be an author or creator or commentator or contributor (if any and all contribute, isn’t that the democratic ideal?).  We can now all come together and write, discuss, and listen online (given that we have internet access and a tool to write with).  Despite my reticence to blog, I still recognize it as a useful platform for communally participating and sharing ideas (although I will still prefer the in person discussion).  I’m not quite sure that the internet really is the great democratizer, but it definitely allows us to have more conversations and to write socially once again.

I struggled through Alan Liu piece From Reading to Social Computing. His technological analysis on how we got to today’s social computing and his explanation of social reading is beyond my paygrade, so ill have to take his word for it. There is something he says in the introduction that doesn’t sit well with me, however –“Social computing encourages literary scholars to remember and repurpose the long history of social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting.” Is social computing, just a continuation of people sharing literature socially or is it something completely different and incomparable with the way we did things in the past? I feel that, for all its benefits, we could be massively underestimating the negative effect social computing can have on literature.

In a social computing manor, I searched Wikipedia for insights into the history of social writing. There wasn’t much to be found there, so I turned my query over to Google. The top result is a book by Tom Standage called – Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years. The description informs us that “Social media is anything but a new phenomenon” and goes on to give examples of how people in the past sharing information mirrors today’s social networks. Maybe so, but there is one fundamental difference between the past and now. In the past, we didn’t have much information about an author beyond his or her work. The work was what mattered first and foremost. Status and reputation came later.
Mysterious or unknown people often wrote words that led to revolutions or made us think differently. Nowadays there is anonymous social computing, but for the most part, we can easily find out way too much about who is writing, publishing, reading and interpreting literature. We now judge authors work increasingly with other aspects of their life and not just what they wrote.

Regardless, social computing is here to stay, and Liu thinks we should embrace/dissect/research it academically. For instance, he addresses why contemporary literary scholarship should take an interest in contemporary social computing: “If one loves literature, I think, one now has to be willing to go speculatively where the language of passionate life goes, especially among the young, who will carry on the cool literary adventure.” Being cool is great in all, but not if it’s for cool’s sake. Could it be that trying to be cool is our first real intention when engaging in some social computing? I fear that superior or lasting artistic merit is lost in the quick gratification social computing gives or worse encourages.

I agree with Liu in that “social computing and literary activity are both aspects of a single communicational phenomenon: the contemporary form of the human need to say something well (memorably, persuasively, movingly, beautifully, wittily, and so on) to someone else.” However, he then goes on to say that “Conceiving of such a unified field of literary and social communicational study will require significant methodological work.” Why does our need to say something well to someone else have to be such hard work? If what we are reading fits this criterion, then it’s just good writing – no matter who said it or how it comes to us.

The article concludes that social computing allows us to “seek knowledge and experience wherever it is vested and most easily accessed.” This is undeniably true- we can access knowledge like never before with computers. The danger with social computing is it gives us access to unknown worlds around literature too that maybe should remain unknown. Often this only shows us the messiness of human life and removes us from the work itself.

My favorite quote from this week’s readings comes from Alan Liu’s “From Reading to Social Computing”:

In essence, Facebook became a platform for character role-playing. It allowed students to study the play as if they were directors staging it in alternative medium. All the world, as it were, is not a wooden “O” but a digital Friend Wheel.

This metaphor contains multitudes. Dating from 2013, it inevitably dates the project and makes it impossible to replicate on the same terms: Liu refers to a Facebook feature that came and went like so many others it has offered over the years (I don’t remember the Friend Wheel; I hardly remember the social graph it once debuted, and never made use of it). Nevertheless, this one-off aspect captures something of the nature of a “great work” of art or literature.  In addition, Facebook is no longer the social network of choice for the student age group he was working with; and he describes his class’s use of the platform in a way that, according to Facebook’s guidelines, would surely be considered abuse of the platform.  In many ways, this makes Facebook perfect for such an experiment. Unlike Instagram – which was just getting started – Snapchat, the now-defunct Vine, or even Twitter, Facebook requires a primarily narrative-based creation and performance of personae (I have two accounts myself) for reasons surely examined by many other studies in social science, rhetorical theory, and psychology. The suspicion with which many users view it only encourages a less-than-absolutely-faithful reflection (as if this were possible) of who its users “are” in “meatspace.”

I imagine that this experiment not only enlivened Romeo and Juliet and brought it to life, but also must have enlivened the social networking experience altogether and brought these other issues to light for the participants. And, although it was probably a closed group, I love thinking of the potential “lurkers” watching the goings on and wondering, but unable to participate. Facebook, in Barthes’s terms, provides a fundamentally “writerly” experience of self, others, and social connections in which authority is decentralized; through posts, likes, and responses, readers and writers (users and friends) mutually build and interpret each other’s online selves (often through misreading). Like Liu’s other experiment with The Canterbury Tales and blogging, the social world of R&J has a remarkable affinity to today’s social networking platforms “even to the point that the rudeness, “flames,” baitings from “trolls,” and other apparent debasements and provocations of language typifying the extremes” of social networking have a performative, dramatic ethos. In ways seeming to build on Hayles’s use of Facebook as a pedagogical tool (“Hyper and Deep Attention, ”196), Liu’s use of Facebook also highlighted the reader’s role in (recon)constructing a literary text’s own voice and meaning: it “allowed the students to study the play as if they were directors staging it in an alternative medium.”  As Liu posits elsewhere in his essay, a “successful online reading environment would integrate social networking tools in a way that extends readers’ existing strategies.” Moreover, Liu reminds us that this approach is fundamentally orthodox: knowledge and experience are, as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested in How We Became Posthuman (1999), distributed phenomena . In the case of texts, Liu explains that these are accessed “through combinations of authors, documents, readers, and scholar-critics—that is, in the social networks of all of the above.”

Because I am no longer in the loop when it comes to typical classroom pedagogy in a literature course (as opposed to somewhat still-nascent interactive, technology-based pedagogy) I don’t know if Liu’s experiments with Facebook have been widely adopted. They would have to be adapted to the platform’s changing features and its stricter guidelines for the creation of accounts. I hope it has been adopted more widely, or—sooner rather than later—will be. Like the MLA Commons and other developments in crowd-sources peer review, which have not quite yet transformed—but promise to—the stale rigmarole of academic publishing, and with it the institutions of academic authority and tenure and promotion procedures, “it may be that social computing will change the whole paradigm of literary reading and research to make central the social environment of literature…scholarship, equipped with Web 2.0, becomes a fully social act.”  I wonder what will happen when “Web 3.0” arrives.

In “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” N. Katherine Hayles urges professors to anticipate a shift in the way rising, media-steeped students think and to evolve accordingly. She presents her argument in unambiguous, binary structures, with two types of attention, two generational sides, and ultimately, two inevitable solutions: “change the students to fit the educational environment or change the environment to fit the students” (195). Perhaps out of rhetorical necessity—she is, after all, writing in 2007 to the largely deep-attention readers of the MLA’s Profession magazine—she oversimplifies both the “divide” and the research that evinces it, obscuring some of her keenest observations and their pedagogical import.

She defines deep attention with a direct connection to the discipline of her peers and an example likely to be beloved by many: “Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times” (187). By contrast, she defines hyper attention more clinically, as “characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (187). Her audience, both by generation and occupational predilection, might place greater value (even ascribe superiority to) deep attention. But she argues that there is merit and weakness in both. Deep attention, she notes, while essential for solving complex problems, lacks awareness and the ability to adapt quickly to change—skills her audience may need to recognize this generational shift and accommodate it. Inversely, hyper attention is great for navigating quickly evolving environments but struggles to sustain energies when the task demands it—energies a student might need to read an article like this one.

Again perhaps to placate her audience, she presents the modes as seemingly mutually exclusive, and springing from history and evolution. Where deep attention is the product of luxury, of a society (or a sliver of society) that needn’t battle constant threats to survive, hyper attention was (and perhaps may be becoming again) a survival strategy when humans responded to persistent and unpredictable threats. In conjuring an image to clearly depict the modes, she segregates them almost pejoratively but certainly stereotypically: “picture a college sophomore, deep in Pride and Prejudice, with her legs draped over an easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother sitting in front of a console, jamming on a joystick while he plays Grand Theft Auto” (187-88). Of course, life requires both: from the hyper attention needed to drive in traffic to the deep attention that solves moral dilemmas. And the college sophomore is as likely to be glued to her phone later that night as the ten-year-old is to enjoy a bedtime book.

Further, the root of the generational shift lies in kids’ unfettered, unchaperoned access to a wide variety of media that gives rise to a hunger for multi-channel stimulation which, at its extreme, presents as AD/HD—a term likely to instill fear in deep-attention readers.

But within her pared-down and somewhat alarmist model are exciting revelations that present real opportunity. Analyzing a study of the effects video games have on executive function in kids, she concludes, “The results suggest…that media simulation, if structured appropriately, may contribute to a synergistic combination of hyper and deep attention—a suggestion that has implications for pedagogy” (193). This seems huge. To wed the two types of valuable and desired attention is not only a goal for the rising generation, but educators themselves and serves as a true call to investigate ways to scaffold the use of media in the classroom.

She also references a study of older gamers who “found the opportunities offered by the games for achievement, freedom, and in some instances connections to other players even more satisfying than the fun of playing. Stimulation works best, in other words, when it is associated with feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness—a conclusion with significant implications for pedagogy” (195). The study reveals that these games require “active critical learning” (195) to progress, motivating players to learn new things incrementally. Designing curriculum with these natural incentives seems less modern age than just plain effective.

Hayles’ Facebook example is wonderfully prescriptive, as students use an accessible, relevant example (societal forces at work that shape online personas) to tease out truths they can immediately apply to a more deep-attention piece, The Education of Henry Adams. Greater still, students can reinforce this insight every time they encounter a digital profile or read another novel. Harnessing that “active critical learning” also engages learners in their own assessment, giving them a stake in their education. While creating audio books, Allred’s “students also noted issues of readerly competence and affect: one student noted, ‘I came across a few words I had never seen in my life nor had I known how to pronounce them out loud’” (Allred, 121), something she may have dismissed in reading simply to write a paper.

Both approaches help students harness hyper attention in service of deep attention. Both harness digital relevance to bring students to more remote, but perhaps equally universal or resonant texts. The 2007 readers of Profession who missed this insight may be among the very faculty that Brian Croxall described as the “absent presence” (Kirschenbaum).

Regarding the remediative practices that constitute the digital humanities, I am drawn to the ebb and flow of the private and social that seems to pervade their discussion. In Berube et al.’s “Community Reading and Social Imagination” there is an insistence on an inherently social tradition that helped to establish the novel. Tracing the genre back to the “…coffeehouses, literary salons, reading clubs, reform associations, tea tables…where people read, and listened to others read, together,” (Berube et al. 422) they argue that the practice of reading has a far more public nature than that dictated by contemporary conceptions. Such an argument is happily seized upon by Liu and Allred to argue for the use of digital humanities in ‘recapturing’ the novel’s social nature and using remediation to realize modern instances of public reading and literary discussion.

While I agree with this championing of the novel’s social past (indeed, I was dismayed they did not go even farther and include instances like town readings of Pamela), the (to borrow Liu’s use of the term) “margins” of their argument suggested a resistance to the novel’s supposed public nature. Regardless of origins, the novel did eventually serve to construct the “…illusion {italics self-inserted} of participation in wide social networks…” (Ibid 421) and did not remain a traditional item of the ‘public sphere.’ That is, the novel may possess an aspect “…which does not lend itself…” (Benjamin 258) to the social. In a certain respect, this may simply be a consequence of the obvious necessity of individual reading even within a group setting. Though these events had individuals reading and reciting in solidarity, it does not seem as if they could not avoid the act of an initial private reading of some form. Indeed, in Allred’s comments on Rubery regarding public readings, we see that while the dominance of the original text was not so absolute a reading became a “passive reproduction,” the products of such social phenomenon were ultimately confined to the shadow of their origin in text and became “new editions” or “textual variants.” (Allred 123) Such classification would suggest that one would require a prior familiarity with the original text to fully appreciate the variations involved in this social occasion.

Ultimately, I suppose my critique can be paraphrased as remarking that books must simply be read prior to remediation and that the act of reading limits the remediative act. Albeit simple, I doubt the consequences to be of themselves simplistic. Consider Allred’s writings on audio recording in pedagogy. He recalls a student who, “…lamented that even her best-prepared peer ‘struggled with pronunciation of outdated words, and everyone managed to either switch words to constructions we were familiar with, or changed words to do the same.’” (Ibid 121). Note that the struggle occurs not from the act of reading itself but from the act of “pronunciation” required for a “compelling performance of the text.” The issue arises from the very act of realizing her private act of reading in a social environment. Whereas the antiquated lexicon of the text was of little issue in the interior world of “silent reading,” now it cannot help but clash with the individual idiolects and dialects that dictate societal needs for communication. As a result, we see a public choice for the “familiar;” portions of the text must be rejected because of their failure to realize themselves effectively socially.

This rejection is my rationale for my previous mention of Benjamin. This rejection of the text’s language due to its inability to “lend itself” to the social needs of the audio recording is reminiscent of the translator’s task. Just as the tools of digital humanities allow us to understand the text through what they successfully ‘translate’ the text into, so may they demonstrate what lies at the “nucleus” of the text by identifying that “…which does not lend itself…” Truly, the latter may lend greater significance due to its ability to identify aspects of the text unknowingly reinforced in remediation. (e.g. Candide 2.0’s required “scaffolding” to limit a completely free public reading, Allred’s admission that a better mastery of material would assist Looking Glass 2.0, Liu’s moderation of annotations on “From Reading to Social Computing” to assert some authorial control over his paper.) That is, the negative results of the digital humanities suggests as much literary insight as its successes.

Just a quick note to welcome you to the course. You can browse the site, but note:

• I’ve left some old posts below. I’ll occasionally resurface them, but they’re from an old run of the course
• We’ll communicate and share documents via a CUNY Academic Commons group, to which you should have received an invitation.
• The syllabus is the most relevant thing for now, so check it out.