In a recent blog on Inside Higher Ed, Bethany Nowviskie makes some strong recommendations on blowing up the current methods courses in graduate education in favor of something more focused on digital humanities. I wonder what this would look like on the undergraduate level. From Nowviskie
First, kill all the grad-level methods courses.
Kill them, that is, to clear room for something more highly evolved — or simply more fruitful — to take their place. Think: asteroids clobbering dinosaurs. Choking weeds ripped from vegetable gardens. The fuzzy little nothings and spindly cultivars in this scenario, squinting cautious eyes or uncurling new leaves into the light, are:
- those research methodologies and corpora (often but not exclusively gathered under the banner of the “digital humanities”) that address hitherto unanswerable questions about history, the arts, and the human condition;
- and the new-model scholarly communications platforms we can already recognize as promising replacements to our slow and moribund systems for credentialing and publishing humanities scholarship and archiving the cultural record on which it is based.
What do these critters need to grow up? The same thing our colleges and universities so desperately need: a generation of faculty and alternative-academic scholar-practitioners who have been trained to work in interdisciplinary contexts and who can not only take advantage of computational approaches to their own research, but who have been instilled with enough of a can-do, maker’s ethos that they feel empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.
Reading this I wondered whether we ought to ask whether our methods courses on the undergraduate level need an overhaul that recognizes the increasing centrality of digital methodologies in all our disciplines. Since the premium here is on interdisciplinary, could we imagine a central methods course that all humanities students would be required to take in the digital humanities? If engaging this stuff is actually not optional for the future, as, indeed, I think it is not, it may not be enough to create certificates or discrete concentrations in digital humanities, a class here or a class there. Maybe it is something every humanities major must be requires to take.
This, of course, would imply that all of our curricula need to address the questions that a central introductory course in the digital humanities is raising. Otherwise our students would be engaged with the current and future possibilities of our disciplines in a way that the rest of us aren’t.
dpettegrew
bamichae
johnfea
Peter Kerry Powers
David Owen
pk1170
