Digital Literacy for the Dumbest Generation

May 21st, 2010 |

The scholarship done by the digital humanities community demonstrates that inquiry enabled by modes of research, dissemination, design, preservation, and communication that rely on algorithms, software, and or the internet network for processing data deepen and advance knowledge in the humanities. Marc Baeurlein argues that undergraduates now and undergraduates to come soon are “the least curious and intellectual generation in national history.”  Dubbing them “the dumbest generation” and “mentally agile” but “culturally ignorant,” Bauerlein decrees that The Web hasn’t made them better writers and readers, sharper interpreters and more discerning critics, more knowledgeable citizens and tasteful consumers” (Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation 110). Baeurlein complains that undergraduates are passive consumers of “information,” that they convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information,” information that becomes, quite simply, “material to retrieve and pass along” (“Online Literacy”). In contrast, Wendell Piez and other digital humanities scholars insist that when we study “how digital media are encoded (being symbolic constructs arranged to work within algorithmic, machine-mediated processes that are themselves a form of cultural production) and how they encode culture in words, colors, sounds, images, and instrumentation,” we are “far from having no more need for literacy;” in fact, the cultural work done by and through digital media requires that students “raise it to ever higher levels.”
So, why isn’t there more discussion within the DH conference and publications about this essential aspect of undergraduate study?

That undergraduate studies are not well discussed within the DH community is part and parcel with the fact that it is a field that engages a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and it is a field that is represented by programs of study that are inflected by, but not necessarily called, Digital Humanities.  Already, I have created an online list of undergraduate programs generated through an informal survey conducted on Twitter, the Humanist Discussion List, and @ palms (my blog) see www.palms.wordherders.net/wp/2009/11/digital-humanities-inflected-undergraduate-programs-2/
The fact that the list already includes a broad range of programs encompassing information science, digital cultures, new media, and computer science reflects the difficult nature of training an undergraduate student in the “methodological commons” (McCarty 131) of the digital humanities, but it also reflects the provocative nature of describing what that curriculum might look like. What is important to teach these students? What is the core knowledge base needed? Who gets to decide?

When discussing current models, it is equally important to make transparent the institutional and infrastructural issues that are specific to certain colleges or universitie, large or small. What works for one institution will not necessarily work for another. By the same token, simply providing examples of existing programs would belie the extent to which scholars and administrators shape these programs (whether they grant degrees, certificates, or nothing at all) according to the needs of their specific communities.

In order to make these matters transparent and broaden discussion about the broad range of issues that underpin the formation of an undergraduate curriculum, I want to discuss UNDERGRADUATE DIGITAL HUMANITIES at THATcamp.

Oh, and I am disseminating a survey to the digital humanities community (Please take it! at www.surveymonkey.com/s/X3H8YQH asking basic questions concerning how an undergraduate program inflected by the digital humanities has been and might be developed within a variety of university settings. These questions are based on previous conversations (Hockey 2001; Unsworth, Butler 2001), but this previous work has focused primarily on graduate (or post-graduate) work.

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6 Responses to “Digital Literacy for the Dumbest Generation”

  1. Rob Nelson Says:

    This is a great topic. A number of people–including myself–have expressed interest in having a session to exchange ideas about designing a digital humanities course. I’d definitely be interested in a companion session on digital-humanities or digital-humanities-“inflected” curricula. Being an active, engaged, and critical reader of texts rather than a passive consumer of information is (obviously) very much at the heart of the humanities and the liberal arts. Given the ubiquity of new media, how central is the digital humanities to that aim of the humanities more generally? After reading your post I’m wondering how much the “dumbest generation” is a challenge for humanists and the humanities generally to teach general skills of critical interrogation of texts and how much that poses a challenge and an opportunity for digital humanists and the digital humanities specifically. Is talking about “texts” too general and generic, and a digital humanities “inflected” curriculum necessary to teach students to engage particular kinds of texts–i.e. new media texts–or to approach conventional texts using new techniques and tools like text mining?

  2. Jeffrey McClurken Says:

    I’m with Rob. This is an essential conversation for us to be having at a place like THATCamp.

    I wonder if a session or sessions related to DH teaching/classes/curriculum might produce a document (or if that’s too grand an idea, a list) of what we see as the core competencies/content areas for an undergraduate DH class/curriculum. Such a document could then be submitted to Tom and Dan’s Hacking the Academy volume.

    Beyond what you (and Rob and I) proposed, we need to link this with the other sessions proposed in this area, including those by Dave Parry, Bill Ferster, Brian Croxall, as well as the work done by Amanda French at NYU.

  3. burmamusic Says:

    new undergrad program at Arizona State: ame.asu.edu/

  4. Jeffrey McClurken Says:

    UPDATE: Rough notes from this session (co-led by Tanya Clement, Ethan Watrall, Brian Croxall, Jeff McClurken and many others) can be found at docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddz3r8kz_65ggjm74f3

  5. Cactus Acide » » L’observatoire du neuromancien 06/07/2010 Says:

    […] THATCamp 2010 » Blog Archive […]

  6. thuyanh Says:

    A friend and I have actually made a video response that defends the “dumbest generation” and we make points that Baeurlein overlooks:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHw716ptwBg

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