digital digs

(digital) humanities and darkness

I am crawling out from under the #mlasick illness I and so many others picked up in Boston. If you followed the Twitter stream during the conference, it is likely you encountered the conversation surrounding the session "The Dark Side of the Humanities." I wasn't able to attend the session, but the participants have uploaded their comments here. In The Chronicle William Pannapacker summarized the critique offered by the roundtable participants (Richard Grusin, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley)  this way:

That DH is insufficiently diverse. That it falsely presents itself as a fast-track to academic jobs (when most of the positions are funded on soft money). That it suffers from “techno-utopianism” and “claims to be the solution for every problem.”  That DH is “a blind and vapid embrace of the digital”; it insists upon coding and gamification to the exclusion of more humanistic practices.  That it detaches itself from the rest of the humanities (regarding itself as not just “the next big thing,” but “the only thing”).  That it allows everyone else in the humanities to sink as long as the DH’ers stay afloat. That DH is complicit with the neoliberal transformation of higher education; it “capitulates to bureaucratic and technocratic logic”; and its strongest support comes from administrators who see DH’ers as successful fundraisers and allies in the “creative destruction” of humanities education. And—most damning—that DH’ers are affiliated with a specter that is haunting the humanities—the specter of MOOCs.

In short, DH is an opportunistic, instrumentalist, mechanized response to the economic crisis—it represents “the dark side of capitalism”—and, as such, it is the enemy of good, organic humanists everywhere: cue the “Imperial March” from Star Wars.

Reading through the presentations onilne, this summary strikes me as defensive (Pannapacker clearly sees himself as a digital humanist) but accurate. In an online addendum to her presentation, Raley responds to the negative reaction the roundtable generated: "The upset seems in part to derive from a misunderstanding about our critical object: though our roundtable referred in passing to actually existing projects, collectives, and games that we take to be affirmative and inspiring, the 'digital humanities' under analysis was a discursive construction and, I should add, clearly noted as such throughout. That audience members should have professed not to recognize themselves in our presentations is thus to my mind all to the good, even if it somewhat misses the mark." OK. Maybe. But I think it strikes me as unrealistically naive to imagine that such attacks on the "discursive construction" of DH are not also unavoidably an attack upon the people who do the work. After all, the argument is that the digital humanities needs to act differently and does this not necessitate that DHers act differently?

Part of this is a well-covered methodological shift where digital humanities work tends to rely less upon traditional critical theory. This perceived "rise" of DH is thus seen as a threat, and I think this is the source of the greatest hostility: the idea that DHers might not view critical theory as a master discourse for their work. After all, it doesn't really make much sense to conflate DH, which in the end is a fairly narrow and specialized form of research, with the larger digital cultural revolution. It may not even make sense to conflate the emergence of digital technologies with the rise of neoliberal, global capitalism. However those are the links that are being made here. DH=digital culture=neoliberalism. Of course that's not an attack on DHers. No, of course not, because DHers can still accept critical theory as their personal savior; they can still be saved from the dark side. That's not an attack on critical theorists though; that's just an analysis of a discursive construction.

In this talk Wendy Chun makes an interesting observation: "The humanities are sinking—if they are—not because of their earlier embrace of theory or multiculturalism, but because they have capitulated to a bureaucratic technocratic logic."  This observation comes out of this talk about DH "saving" the humanities and appears to imply that DH saves the humanities by moving away from theory and multiculturalism. I actually see this a little bit differently. I agree that the humanities aren't sinking because of theory or multiculturalism. I actually don't believe either have had much impact on the humanities outside of the relatively narrow sphere of graduate studies and scholarship. It would be difficult to find an English undergraduate major where theory plays a visible role and multiculturalism in most cases has meant the addition of a "nonwestern" class requirement.  When the humanities, English in particular, thrived in the US (up through the 1960s), I would think it was precisely because the curriculum was aligned with the bureaucratic, technocratic logic of the day. Would we not aruge that the Eurocentric, patriarchal, canonical curriculum of literary studies supported our mid-century Anglo-American nationalist ideology? Certainly it was not offered as a critical resistance. As far as that goes, that curriculum continues to chug along, probably 80-90% unchanged on a national level (same courses, same books, same assignments). It's just less appealing now to students who have more choices, especially women who now have far more freedom in their choice of major than 40 years ago.  In a similar vein, I was struck by Richard Grusin's observation of "a class system within DH that generates an almost unbridgeable divide between those on the tenure-track, those in what have come to be called “Alt-Ac” positions, and those in even more precarious and temporary positions." I agree with him that there's a complex problem there. These DH projects require a different kind of infrastructure, including employees in new kinds of positions. And there is a connection to be made with the emphasis on what we might euphemistically term "flexibility" in labor practices. However, in my view, this dh class system is dwarfed by the pyramid scheme that characterizes English Studies. All this "critiquing" stands firmly on the backs of TA and adjunct labor. We all know that. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. 

On a more positive note, Grusin wants to put an end to the division between production and critique, and Chun wants to forge better relations with science and engineering. Raley similarly wants to break down divisions between theory and practice. However, it seems odd to me to point to the DH community as the obstacle to such goals. To the contrary, I would think it is the traditional humanities that have the deepest antipathy for science and engineering. Certainly it is the traditional humanities that have the most invested in maintaining the separation between production/practice and critique/theory with the latter being the master term. All one has to do is look at the treatment of writing instruction in English to see how the humanities have denigrated production/practice over the decades. If DH rejects the role of critical theory as its master discourse (or, heaven forbid, turns to other theories), then it is only because of the way in which the traditional humanities have long established these hierarchies. 

So, yes, let's put production and theory on a level playing ground in our curriculum and our research. Let's reshape our faculty and our discipline so that an interest in making is equally valued with an interest in critiquing. Let's embrace the DIY culture, as Raley suggests, that doesn't recognize elitist hierarchies that forbid makers from building their own theoretical views. But we should recognize that this isn't about reforming DH, it's about reforming the humanities. 

 

what is the topic of composition?

Here is the familiar double-bind of composition pedagogy. A composition course is, of course, intended to teach students about the writing process, which includes learning rhetorical principles and reading rhetorically (i.e with an eye toward the rhetorical/compositional strategies at work in a text). At the same time, the students' compositions must be about something. As such, composition courses often imagine themselves as having secondary subject matter (topics). As writing is rarely a favored topic of students or composition instructors (who generally are not rhetoricians either), that purportedly secondary material can come to dominant the time and focus of a composition class. Traditionally that material has been literature. You can still google composition syllabi and find many with schedules that indicate weekly readings of literary texts interspersed with a few writing assignments. Perhaps more common today are courses that make use of the many composition readers produced by textbook companies (or that have some DIY version of the same). Such courses may focus on a single theme (e.g. media images) or cover a variety of such themes. I have taught many such courses, typically around science and technology themes. My early teaching career parallelled the rise of cultural studies in composition, a shift that clearly subordinated the teaching of process to the teaching of critical-rhetorical methods. However, in more recent years I know that I have (and I believe the discipline has) come out of that view to focus once again on writing and composition practices rather than critical reading (though such matters will always need to be balanced). There are disciplinary-historical reasons for these shifts that I won't go into here except to say that I see these shifts as matching the maturation of rhet/comp doctoral programs.

So what do we do today?

For example, the second course in our sequence is focused primarily on writing a research paper. Obviously the research paper must have a topic. One option would be to allow students to research and write on a topic of their own choosing and thus focus the course entirely on the subject of rhetoric and library research practices. The other option is to offer some topic area for research, which requires introducing the topic with readings and discussion to some extent. But then one must ask "how does one define that topic?" and "to what extent should it become a focus of the course?" It is obvious and commonsensical that, as an instructor, one would begin answering the first question with identifying topics in which one has interest and expertise. (It doesn't make sense to try to teach something you know nothing about.) Given the way universities judge expertise, the obvious choice would be related to one's own research. In our program this would mean almost exclusively literary topics. But then, one also has to consider the interests and expertise of the students who will be writing the papers. Very few of them will have literary interests or experience. To ask students to write about literature would require teaching them some literary interpretive methods. Suddenly the topic also becomes the methodology and the possibility for addressing the actual goals of the course greatly diminish, which is what we see in the traditional, literature-oriented composition courses. However, what we should realize from our foray into considering literature as a topic is that it is not unique in causing these problems. All subjects/topics can introduce their own disciplinary methods and genres. In introducing literature into a course, you are introducing primary research material. Any such primary material whether it is an archeological artifact, a historical document, a group of students in a classroom, or a chemical substance points to a disciplinary method of analysis that is beyond the scope of the composition classroom. And as Warlde and Downs have argued, since disciplinary writing practices are really part of systems that include those primary materials, research methods, and the various object-networks that support that work, one can't really do that kind of writing either.

As such, the answer becomes fairly obvious. The topics in a composition course are its primary source material. They are akin to the dissected frog, or perhaps more closely, the dissected poem. One learns rhetorical-interpretive methods, and one learns about the rhetorical practices of a particular profession, genre, or issue, not unlike the way one learns literary interpretive methods and about the literary-cultural practices of a particular author, genre, or historical period in a literary studies class. The important difference is that literary analysis does not have as an objective identifying practices for the purpose of adopting them. For the most part, literary scholars do not aspire to write literature. On the other hand, rhetoricians are clearly practicing rhetorical arts. For this reason, in addition to this "rhetorical analysis," a composition course also teaches "compositional analysis." This is the analysis of compositional practices: the study of how texts are composed.  It's very difficult to do this with published material (short of doing extensive archival research beyond the scope of a composition course), but it is certainly possible to do this with one's own writing practices and those of one's classmates. One can learn about compositional practices in general (e.g. what successful writers say they do; what our research suggests is often effective), but one can also learn methods for analyzing one's own practices, which then opens opportuntities for intervening in that practice. In this way a composition class more closely resembles a class in the arts than the humanities: creative writing, painting, photography, etc.  

Now let me return to my original question. The topic of a course might therefore be like the poem in a literature course or the frog in a biology course. There is a reason to pick a poem rather than a novel or a frog rather than a fish. You study poems to learn about the anatomy of poetry and frogs to study the anatomy of amphibians; either way one learns some introductory principles of dissection. For the purposes of rhetorical analysis, one could identify important public-civic discourses to become acquainted with: scientific, political, economic, media/entertainment, news, educational, legal, technological, etc. So you pick an area and conduct rhetorical analysis within it. The rhetorical analysis of scientific discourse (e.g. climate change) no more aspires to teach one to be a climatologist than a poetry course aspires to teach people to be poets (or a biology class aspires to teach people to be frogs for that matter): it aspires to teach how one conducts rhetorical analysis and to teach something about what the rhetorical analysis of scientific analysis shows us (just as a poetry course aspires to teach us to study poems and to teach us what the literary study of poetry shows us).

So students should be practicing rhetorical analysis in their writing, but that doesn't predetermine the genre in which they might write. Yes, one option would be some introductory version of the academic articles written by rhetoricians: an analog of the way undergrad literary essays correspond to the articles written by literary critics. But rhetorical analysis happens in many genres: blog posts, newspaper editorials, policy memos, political speeches, legal briefs, etc. Really anywhere that one makes an argument and must address the arguments of others one is engaged in some rhetorical analysis. Now one can argue that without the entire object-network that supports such genres that one cannot really write in them. This is certainly as true for undergraduate attempts to write in the genre of an academic journal article as it is for them to write a newspaper editorial. As I see it, the exercise of writing in a different genre is about putting compositional analysis to work. It asks students to think about the rhetorical and compositional features and practices of a given genre and how they intersect with their own writing situation. 

I'm not teaching one of our research-driven composition courses next semester, but if I were, I would probably take up social media as a topic. It's obviously an area in which I have expertise, but it is also an area with which my students have familiarity. Furthermore it is a subject that is addressed widely in our culture by journalists, academic researchers, businesses, educators, politicians, etc. We could study and practice the rhetorics of social media themselves. We could study the rhetoric of some of these discourses by looking at social media scholarship, business reports on social media, and current media issues. Students might write in one or more of these genres. They would also write an analysis of their own compositional practices as they intersect with social media. Their culminating assignment would require them to do independent research into a particular area of social media that cited both academic and nonacademic sources and demonstrated a rhetorical analysis of these. The piece would either take the form of a kind of policy proposal or remain, more neutrally I suppose, in the realm of rhetorical analysis, making some interpretive claim about the rhetorical practices at work. The latter would be more akin to literary analysis. 

In the end, I would have to say that part of my course's success would depend on whether or not the students learned about social media in the way that biology students learn about frogs. That is, they would need to learn the rhetorical-disciplinary features of social media as they need to learn the biological-disciplinary features of frogs. So the topic is not irrelevant. As such, not any topic will do. Here are a couple questions I would ask about any topic I might select for study in such a course:

• Do I as the instructor have some previous knowledge/expertise with it?
• Do I believe the typical student at my institution would have some previous experience with it?
• Can I identify at least one, but preferably multiple, academic disciplines that study it? (n.b. if your discipline is the only one, then your topic might be too narrow)
• Does the topic have kairos? I.e., Is it a matter of current concern in the news media? (i.e. can you find feature articles and/or editorials from the last couple years on it?)
• Is it addressed by businesses, politicians, educators, lawyers or some other professional sector? (i.e. how do people write about this in non-academic professions?)
• Is the issue addressed in non-professional public-civic discourses? (i.e. Do people discuss this in social media? Are there political interest groups or movements?)

You should be able to answer yes to all of these questions. It's possible to have a workable topic without all positive responses, but it probably means that there are better topics out there. The intersection of the first two answers will almost certainly give you something viable and then answering the rest of the questions will help you figure out an appropriately generic way of describing the topic (as opposed to being caught only in one's own disciplinary rhetoric).

My final piece of advice to instructors (in what has turned out to be a very long post) is that I would resist topics where I strongly believed there was only one correct position to hold. Almost tautologically a course on rhetorical analysis will address a subject on which there is disagreement and thus persuasion is called for. Obviously many strongly political issues operate this way. For example, I have certain views on social media (as this blog indicates), but it would not be a problem for me if students adopted opposing views. I would not teach the course for the purpose of persuading students to adopt my view. This is the most salient way this approach differs from the cultural studies pedagogies of the 90s, which clearly viewed themselves as a political project. Some might suggest that to make one's class a political platform is unethical. Those who might undetake such pedagogies would not view it that way; they would suggest all classes are already political whether supporting the status quo or working against it. Maybe so. My view, 20 years into the cultural studies thing, is that such pedagogies are just ineffective at their own goals but also ineffective for the purposes of teaching rhetorical and compositional analysis. If you can't study the rhetorical and compositional practices of a corporate think tank white paper without immediately judging such a thing to be inherently evil, if you can't read scientific reports without immediately jumping into some knee-jerk humanistic critique of naive realism, then you can't really do the work of the course. Pick a topic where you can be more measured. After all, most composition students will end up in business or science or engineering, and many of our own colleagues are in such fields. It's a little pathetic how we will denounce large swathes of the campus and then expect them to come to our defense now in our hour of need, but that's a different matter. I guess my final piece of advice comes down to teaching a topic that won't distract you from the primary task of teaching the disciplianry practices of rhetorical and compositional analysis.

academic cynicism, social media, and the fate of the humanities

There's some conceit in the humanities, or at least in English, that one must love the object one studies. It almost feels like an elementary school playground: "if you love social media then why don't you marry it?" I don't believe I've ever been a technology apologist. I actually don't make much personal use of social media. I guess I don't get enough enjoyment out of Facebook or Twitter to spend much "free time" there. I do however find productivity in these tools: i am introduced to people; I encounter new ideas; I get involved in new projects; and I find colleagues to work with on projects of my own devising. Still I understand the skepticism, even cynicism, regarding social media and its proponents (e.g. Clay Shirky). No one finds the conversation regarding MOOCs less surprising than I do, and I have certainly raised my concerns about them. However, it strikes me that we are only at the very start of a networked society. The problems we identify are challenges to address not reasons to turn away.

But that's not the humanities' way. I agree with Levi Bryant's recent post on the matter of cynicism. We have every reason to be skeptical of social media. There is no doubt that ideolgical and capitalistic motives lie behind the arguments for social media. Hell, in most cases, such motives are front and center. Should we be skeptical of Instagram or Facebook or Coursera? I think so. But should we be skeptical about the premise of networked sociality in itself? Or should we be looking to adapt/invent practices for this environment? Levi writes that as a result of cynicism "We thus strangely find ourselves in the same camp as the climate change denialists, the creationists who use their skepticism as a tool to dismiss evolutionary theory, and those that would treat economic theories as mere theories in the pejorative sense and continue to hold to their neoliberal economics despite the existence of any evidence supporting its claims.  We critique everything and yet leave everything intact." It's a bold argument perhaps, as it equates what we imagine as the height of intellectual behavior (critique) as functionally equivalent to some of the more blantant examples of what we would term anti-intellectualism. However, I think the same thing could be said for our treatment of social media.

So here's another piece of information to critique. The McKinsey Global Institute produced a report earlier this year on "the social economy." Yes this institute is a think tank for a global consulting firm. I won't go into too great detail about this report as I don't think the findings are too surprising. One interesting statistic indicated that knowledge workers spend 28 hours a week writing emails, searching for information, and collaborating internally. While these may be online activities, they are typically not done via social media, and the report argues that these activities might be done more efficiently if social-media functionality was enabled. So that's their argument. Another argument/analysis that they offer identifies different industries in terms of the value a social media approach might have and the ease of realizing that value. Education comes out looking ripe for such activities, which I don't find so surprising either.

This leads me back to a position I've been arguing for some time (in fact, you can find it in my chapter for the Design Discourse collection) that we should be looking to integrate social media into our pedagogy. Here are four examples.

1. Next semester we will have around 2500 students and 80 instructors teaching composition courses at UB. No they aren't all following a common syllabus, but nevertheless they are encountering common tasks. About 3/4 will be in a second-semester course where they will be writing research papers. Could our students and instructors be more productive if they collaborated in this way? Could they get feedback faster? Could they get answers to questions that are stalling them out? Could they get support and encouragement when they hit writer's block or need to stay on schedule? Could they find an audience for their work and peers who have similar research interests? 

2. On a smaller, but more diverse scale, we'll have around 60-70 other graduate and undergraduate courses in English with 40 or so different faculty and instructors. What kinds of conversations and collaborations could arise among them? Would we discover consistent and persistent challenges running through the curriculum that we might collectively address? Would we develop a sense of purpose and communicate that to our students?

3. And what about among the faculty, say all the humanities faculty at UB? Let's just say we did the following. Each semester, you would post in your profile a description of your current research project, courses you were teaching, and particular service project you were undertaking(if any). These could be driven by keywords and include lists of books and articles being used (in both research and teaching). Out of this, you could find colleagues across the humanities that might be potential collaborators. Administrators could see trends that might shape policy and budget decisions. One could generate a kind of ground-up vision of what we are doing. The sad thing is that we already do this in a far more pedantic way for our annual reports. However that information is retrospective (i.e what we've done rather than what we plan to do) and is not socialized. 

4. As far as that goes, why not do this with MLA? You could start just with the convention. In a rudimentary way, you could start by just having participants add some keywords to their proposals (key terms, major authors, etc.). Then you could link these people together and create some recommendations. Not just among those who were accepted, but everyone who applied. I wouldn't mind a list from MLA of other scholars "who appear to be studying related issues" that I might then seek out on Twitter or Fb. Eventually though we'd need to build a platform to facilitate disciplinary collaboration.

Anyway, I think you get the point. The common workplace concern is that social media is a distraction. It is the common classroom concern as well. This is the perhaps counter-intuitive argument that social media could make us more productive workers and learners if the applications were properly designed and we adapted to use them in this fashion. The argument I made in that Design Discourse article (freely available here, pdf) is that one shouldn't make rules up front about how to use the technology. That is, rather than building the paths and forcing people to stay on them, one could wait to see where people move and build paths to facilitate that movement. 

In the long term (say a decade out) this shift might not only be in the degree of productivity but also in the nature of productivity (which is more interesting to me). That is, our notion of the kind of work we should be doing will change as the means by which we do our work shifts. By facilitating large-scale collaboration among students, across the curriculum, institutionally among researchers, and through professional organizations, the relatively solitary labor of the typical humanist (a consequence of 20th century technology) will change. Maybe that change will not be for the better. It depends on what "better" means. If by better one means keeping things as they are, doing the same work as we've done in the past, and asking the same questions in the same ways, then this will obviously not be better. For those of us that are congenitally skeptical, as Bryant suggests, then there can never be a better, which results in a de facto argument for the status quo. For me, better for the humanities means increasing our capacity for producing knowledge and practices that have meaning and value beyond our specialized communities and that can speak (at least) to the shape of education and (hopefully) to the concerns of public, democratic discourse on a range of issues. But that's just rhetorician speak I suppose. 

MLA Roundtable on the state of middle-state publishing

Related to my previous post on the Digital Humanities Interview Project, we will holding an MLA roundtable conversation on bring and early on Sunday morning. Here is our proposal and so related information, though if you are interested in our topic, I suggest you check out our DH interviews site.

Participants

• Richard Miller, (website) Rutgers
• Eileen Joy (website; related article), Southern Illinois
• Matt Gold, (website; dhdebates.org) CUNY
• Daniel Schweitzer, SUNY Buffalo
• Heather Duncan, SUNY Buffalo

I will be chairing and serving as a respondent. 

the strange world of antonyms

My 11 year-old son gets these strange assignments where he's asked to come up with antonyms for real world objects (e.g. this morning he was asking "what's the opposite of 'astronomer'?" We said geologist but it could have been astrologer or how about elbow?). I don't really mind the assignment. I suppose it is asking the students to think poetically, which is how you would have to think to oppose the sky to the earth and then extrapolate to astronomer/geologist. At the same time though we might say that astronomers and geologists have much more in common than astronomers and dancers. In the end the antonym business is a playful correlationist exercise, particularly when it comes to objects; it really depends on the individual's perceptions and valuations. 

After all, what is the opposite of toaster?  Apparently the answer is "materialism." Alex Galloway makes this point quite clearly in his recent piece on "The Poverty of Philosophy:"

There are two basic options when it comes to the task of the political. One is an aligned politics and the other an unaligned politics. An aligned politics is a politics tethered to a moral yardstick and equipped with an ethical mechanic able to pursue it. The moral sphere refers to a law or goal that must be attained, while the ethical sphere refers to a set of practices governing action that, when observed and put into play, may tend toward certain ends (moral or not). One may inhabit an ethos, therefore, without having a morality; likewise one may be linked to a morality, but fail in ethical practice. Thus, an aligned politics is the name given when the vectors of ethical action aim directly at a specific moral outcome. By contrast, an unaligned politics is the name given to those projects unencumbered by the moral law. Guided solely by the force vectors of the ethical sphere, unaligned political projects may still gain formidable inertia, territorializing and deterritorializing entire domains. Unaligned, they exist as mercenaries, often jumping the gap between friend and enemy. If Badiou’s project is the quintessential aligned political project, his moral truths scaffolded by a precise ethical mechanic, then Deleuze’s is the quintessential unaligned political project, an absent moral superstructure overshadowed by a massive vector field of physical forces. 

Realism is an unaligned politics. The issue thus is not that realism is good or bad but that realism is dangerous. In its very unalignment, realism ultimately lacks a true relationship with the absolute because it abdicates the political decision. 

I believe I agree with Galloway's analysis here, though not his ultimate conclusion. I even agree with the notion that "realism is dangerous." On the flipside, who would deny that "aligned politics" are also dangerous? Colonialism, fascism, racism, sexism, capitalism, totalitarianism: would these not all be aligned politics? Galloway's preferred aligned politics is materialism, which he defines as "an aligned politics because it identifies something like an absolute moral sphere (history, the social totality), and buttresses such an absolute with the necessary tactics governing practice (demystification of the commodity, ideology critique, the dialectic, and so on). What does materialism ultimately espouse? That everything should be rooted in material life and history, not in abstraction, logical necessity, universality, essence, pure form, spirit, or idea." In the realm of aligned politics, everything is dangerous and immoral except for what one happens to believe. Personally I find Galloway's description of materialism as both accurate and contradictory. How can "everything be rooted in material life and history, not in abstraction" and simultaneously identify "an absolute moral sphere"? Isn't an absolute moral sphere already an abstraction? Furthermore, this is an argument grounded in antonyms, which are necessarily abstractions, like aligned and unaligned politics.

From a realist-ontological perspective, what does one want to say about moral spheres? Presumably that they are rooted in material life and history, though maybe not in those words. At least from my perspective, a law or a goal is a thing that exists. All that a realist ontology argues is that there is no particular moral law or goal that is ontologically essential. E.g., it is not necessary for the world to be just or end up in justice or even move toward greater justice. If justice is a historical and material thing, then it can change over time. It is possible that the concept may cease to exist, just as it is certain there was a time when it did not exist. To deny this would be to claim that justice is an essential and universal idea. Clearly one can make that claim, but not as a materialist. My understanding of the way a politically aligned materialist position works is that one believes one knows how the world should work. What is the basis for this belief? At the foundation I think one must belief in the material existence of antonyms. 

Contrary to Galloway's argument, it would seem fairly obvious that the most dangerous and destructive human actions have not come from politically unaligned positions but rather from those who believed that reality must conform to their political views. When one looks at how Christianity becomes Crusades and Inquistion or Marxism becomes Stalinism, how can one possibly believe that aligned political positions are not likely to exist as mercernaries or jump the gap between friend and enemy? A realist ontology does not accept that antonyms like friend and enemy exist in some absolute sense among real objects. Perhaps a realist ontology makes it more difficult to make the judgments that make political belief comfortable. If you want to argue that a realist ontology provides no grounds in itself for opposing genocide, I think you could make that argument. By the same token it provides no grounds for genocide, which is where politically aligned positions almost inevitably tend to go.

 

digital humanities interview project

Over the past summer, with the support of UB, two graduate students (Heather Duncan and Daniel Schweitzer) and I began an interview project and the initial results are now available here at dhinterviews.org. We will be discussing the interview project along with three of our interviewees (Richard Miller, Eileen Joy, and Matt Gold) at MLA.

The project formed in my mind about a year or so ago out of a couple intersecting questions or concerns.

1. After having made a couple scholarly videos, I began to realize how hard it is do undertake the rhetorical equivalent of quotation in video format. What should one do? Read aloud from a book? Have the words scroll across the screen? Clearly what typically happens (on tv and in documentaries) is that one does an interview with the author in question. So I started thinking it would be great to have a reposistory of scholars on video discussing various matters that could at least partly address this rhetorical challenge (even though it would never fully substitute for conventional citation).
2. Following on Digital Humanities Now and the larger conversation about middle state publishing and digital humanities in general, I was interested in talking to scholars who had situated themselves strongly in the midst of these debates. This interest then became the central subject matter for the project.
3. I realized I could probably conduct interviews on my own, but I decided to broaden the project to involve some graduate students for a couple reasons. First, I thought it would be a good experience and opportunity for their professional development (I hope it has been that so far; they certainly have worked hard.). Second, I was interested in having some other folks perspectives on what questions should be asked

In short, the project started in what I would term a quasi-scholarly fashion. We were going to conduct and publish interviews with the idea that they might be remixed in the future to from the basis of other scholarly video. 

After having conducted six intitial vidoes (Liz Losh, Jamie Skye Bianco, and Levi Bryant in addition to the three listed above), a more conventionally ethnographic project has begun to form. We are in a watershed moment, so this seems like a valuable moment to capture in relation to the digital humanities as it moves from being a series of sub-specialties into relation with a far broader humanistic requirement for digital literacy from the undergrad level right through the professional-academic ranks. What we saw in our interviews (and you can see as well if you watch them) is that these scholars (ranging from assistant to full professors from two-year schools to R-1 universities) express views of their disciplines, the humanities, and universities as a whole that are quite divergent from those of scholars with more traditional paths. Maybe that isn't surprising. However, if this is generally the case regarding faculty that had moved very heavilty into middle-state and digital media as scholarly modes of production, then that would strongly indicate that the digital transition will be intertwined with a substantive, paradigmatic shift in the humanities. So this project then becomes a way of trying to characterize those shifts not only through an analysis of the scholarship that is produced but through interviews with the scholars that produce them.

As I have written here many time before, there is nothing natural about the 8000-word journal article or the 300-page monograph or whatever. Humanists don't like to talk about "impact" or track citations because those measure don't put our work in a good light. Instead, once one reaches a certain minimal quality threshhold (via blind review at a respectable press or journal), all the really matters is quantity (how many have you published? And the longer one's monograph is the better). But what I begin to see in these interviews (and the hypothesis I suppose I am seeking to investigate) is that the shift toward the digital is a shift toward impact and rhetorical effect. 

I am often asked if writing this blog helps me be more productive in terms of articles or a second book. I always say, "yes, to some degree." But actually I think about it the other way. Doing the kind of sustained research that is necessary for produce an article or especially a book makes me more the kind of academic blogger I want to be. That is, the larger scholarly and philosphical discoveries of my research lead to better insights on the issues I address here. I would be very happy if I had more readers of my book than readers of my blog. I think that's unrealistic. I would be ecstatic to have more people cite my book than my blog, but that's unrealistic for much the same reason. 

In a recent post, Clay Spinuzzi talks about publications as a kind of exhaust from research activity. We have commodified our scholarly exhaust and attributed an imaginary, symbolic value to it: as in, monograph equals tenure and two equals full prof. Publications are coins, and we have forgotten about their intrinsic value, which has clearly diminished in general terms in part because of over-production but mostly because intrinsic value and relevance aren't important for coins. We could easily detect different kinds of exhaust from research activity via middle-state publishing and possibly revive some emphasis on the notion that scholarship ought to do something. I think this is one of the clear messages that comes out from scholars that have shifted toward digital media and middle-state publishing: they want to have an impact and an audience. For some reason, the desire for an audience is practically villified in the humanities: to me this is the primary challenge we face in reinventing ourselves.

competencies and the learning experience

At this point I have no doubt that there is a whirlwind of conversation about MOOCs. Here are some of the more recent ones I've been reading: Clay Skirky, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Ian Bogost, and Alex Halavais. There's no doubt that MOOCs are making some strange bedfellows, such as linking the efforts of edupunkers with large scale edTech companies. In part this is misleading because there are many different possible MOOCs out there, but it is also partly accurate in a shared rejection of some of the traditional values and practices of higher education. It's also clear to me that MOOCs will be intertwined with badges in this shared venture to rethink learning.

As I see, disagreements over MOOCs begin in an older debate about what constitutes education. Put simply, am I "educated" if I can demonstrate mastery of certain knowledge and/or expertise in particular skills or activities? Or am I educated if I can certify that I have had specific experiences? Typically we might say that education is a mixture of all of this, which only begs the question of what kind of mixture? A college education (really all traditional education) is heavy on experience. One needs 120 credits for a BA. One must meet certain general education and degree requirements. Yes, a certain level of demonstration is necessary, which becomes the grade and the GPA. But I think there are not many students who manage to show up for all the courses, do the readings, and complete assignments in some fashion that do not end up getting a degree. My sense is that when students don't graduate it's usually because of extenuating circumstances (sometimes beyond their power to control) that prevent them from getting the full experience. Maybe you graduate with a 2.0, but you get the certificate. 

In the MOOC/badge world, its not that you don't need to have experiences, but the nature of the experiences are less controlled and more varied. What instead you need to demonstrate are competencies. So, for example, if I wanted a "web design" badge, I could take a college course or demonstrate that I've been working as a web designer or show some portfolio of my work or maybe take a MOOC. As long as I can demonstrate the requisite abilities and knowledge, then I'm fine. As I've written before, this represents a commodification of knowledge that is troubling.. in part because I think it represents a fairly superficial concept of what knowing is. Of course, one could level the same complaint against traditional education: that it represents a very narrow view of how learning might happen. Choosing between narrow and superficial doesn't seem like much of a choice.

In any case, the MOOC/competency model is a real challenge for the humanities, starting with writing instruction. To make it work I think you'd have to completely decouple oneself from the course-credit model. That is, I would be unwilling to establish an expected competency for a composition-student writer, but I think I could establish a writing competency for a professional writing BA or more generically for an English major. We could also imagine some mastery test (like a subject GRE) that students could take. Unfortunately, that's not really what the degree is about. Sure, English majors spend a relatively large amount of time writing and they do learn about literary periods, interpretive methods, and so on, but the whole concept is based around having the experience of developing those competencies in certain ways: having class discussions, meeting with faculty, getting feedback on writing, participating in the culture of the department, and so on. As an English/History undergrad major, I can't say I developed any worthwhile competency that one could measure. However I had many valuable experiences.

I can see a certain kind of education that is defined by competencies and there is good reason to explore such programs. Maybe some portion of the students who now attend college (and others would attend if they could) will find such competency-driven learning to satisfy their needs.. and this might mostly be the case because their needs are being determined externally by the job market. However, I think there is a reason why the experiential based model of education is hard to acquire, because the learning it offers, whether online or face-to-face, takes time and effort. That is, it is not arbitrarily hard. There may be some attendant factors, such as cost, that make access unnecessarily difficult and there may be certain practices that can be improved (I'm sure there are), but fundamentally, a college education represents a kind of learning that takes time to experience and will never be something that can be captured in a model of measurable competencies. 

Now is it the case that what one gets from the experience model vs. the competency model is worth the time, effort, and cost that former requires? That may be an individual decision. Will these diferences create new educational class hierarchies? Maybe. But I find it hard to believe that the challenging competencies of becoming an Electrical Engineer, for example, will be any easier to attain than they are now at a university, just as it would be difficult to replicate the kinds of experiences liberal arts majors receive without having those students closely involved in a scholarly, intellectual community similar to the one that is currently found in colleges of arts and sciences. 

I suppose where this gets me is that to be successful, MOOCs will likely need to tie back into the intellectual communities that make them possibile in the first place. A MOOC in World Music or Poetry or Science Fiction makes little sense without the humanities departments that underlie them. And such courses are probably most valuable for people who are already participants in such communities.

 

the composition intercession

Many universities and colleges have "winter sessions:" 3-4 week courses between the fall and spring semesters. UB doesn't have this, but there is a push now to create one, and suprisingly it isn't a top-down push, though I think our administrators are in favor of it. Instead it seems to be about faculty addressing the logistical problems of getting students through the curriculum. Faced with this proposal, I started thinking about the idea of a composition course taught in such a session. A quick survey of the WPA list showed that such courses are offered, but they aren't common. That said, there are four community colleges in the SUNY system offering online composition courses this winter and we would be required to accept those courses as our own. Fortunately the number of sections is minimal so that won't impact us in practical terms, but perhaps the writing is on the wall, or at least in the winter. 

We already teach a 6-week summer online course as a compressed version of our conventional 15-week semester course, but as the post title suggests, to me a composition intersession course seems more like an intercession to me. In a three-week, M-F class, every day is like a week of the regular semester. 

1. Monday (week 1): introduce topic and assignment
2. Tuesday (week 2): rough drafts, workshops
3. Wednesday (week 3): give students feedback, discuss revision strategies
4. Thursday (week 4): assignment due; start next assignment
5. Friday (week 5): rough drafts, workshops
6. Weekend: return rough drafts
7. Monday: assignment due; start assignment 3

You get the idea. The first two weeks are two assignments per week. Week three gets a fifth assignment and then perhaps some opportunity to revise one or two earlier assignments more substantively. As an instructor, you're reading 3-4 sets of student papers per week. That's probably 30 hours of work, plus 12 hours in the classroom (if it were FTF), plus prep and other matters. So it's probably a 50-hour week job at minimum, which makes sense since a full semester course is easily 150 hours of work. We could mitigate that by lowering class size to 15, for example, which would bring the responding to writing load down below 20 hours per week I think. Still it strikes me as a tough load. I know people teach roughly this load on a regular basis when they teach 4-4 or 5-5, but such folks probably need a break in-between semesters. And none of this even begins to mention whether or not such an apporach is effective for students.

All of this thinking brought me to the realization of how means have become the ends in composition instruction (and to a lesser extent the rest of the university). Instead of asking "These are my goals in composition: how can I achieve them in 3 weeks?" I asked, "How can I cram the activities of a 15-week class into a 3-week span?" Maybe the answer to the former question still is that it is not possible to do so, but that doesn't mean asking that question won't at least get different results. The question is further complicated by the fact that this hypothetical course would be online. As I've written in the past, the primary error in moving courses online is that faculty begin by asking "how can I do what I do FTF in an online space?" It's the online variation of the intersession-cramming question. Typically what happens with the online transformation approach is that one gets lecture video plus slides (i.e. the basic experience of the lecture hall). Then you have the textbook, some quizzes or similar online worksheets, and maybe a discussion forum for helping students with questions. All that's left is arranging for some secure testing facility. So lecture-hall style courses easily translate (in fact, so easily that they are the low-hanging fruit for MOOCs). However this easy tranlsation masks the ends/means question. We are still asking how do we replicate the activities in one place into another; the fact that it is relatively easy to do so just means that we fail to see this as a problem. This online lecture course could, in theory, operate at almost any speed, at the discretion of the student. If the typical semester course is 150 minutes in class and 3.5 hours out of class for six hours a week or 90 hours per semester, then that's doable in 3 weeks, maybe even 1.5 weeks if you're really diligent and you find the material easy. What doesn't translate is the Socratic, class discussion model that describes smaller classes, including composition.... that is unless one had a real-time component to the online course, but even then a chatroom-like function would still be a very different rhetorical space from that of a classroom.

All of this led me to realization that I wasn't thinking about a composition winter intersession, but rather winter's intercession of composition. How would this shift in time and (virtual) space intercede in the affairs of composition pedagogy? We have these commonplace rules in composition: that students need to write 20 or more pages, that instructors need to give feedback on drafts, and that students need to revise. Composition without these activities would be like Catholic mass without transubstantiation. Argubaly these pedagogical methods are more than articles of faith; there is some evidence to their effectiveness. However, even if we believed that composition pedagogy worked to achieve its goals, such evidence would not rule out the possibility of alternative methods. And in my view that's what an online, 3-week composition course would require: substantively different methods. Specifcially the tutorial method that underlies composition instruction doesn't scale very well, not only in terms of instructor workload but also in the way that students would write and revise. I think it is unrealistic to imagine students spending more than 15 hours a week writing and have the activity be productive, including informal writing. So you're probably not going to get the same amount of writing in as you would in a normal semester, but I'm not sure if that's necessary. What you are getting instead is an intensification of the writing experience, because in the normal semester you wouldn't get students averaging more than 5 hours of writing per week. 

So I guess the question you'd have to answer is how would you leverage the intensification of the writing experience to meet the goals of the course? The more I write about it, the more it seems like there could be an answer. Obviously one could learn something about writing by spending 3 weeks doing it intensely. The question is how would such an experience relate to our conventional understanding of this course.

 

composition's big gamble

As you may know, rhet/comp's big conference is in Vegas this year. Generally speaking, the conference theme is tied to the location in some way. (Last year's St. Louis conference had "gateways" as a theme.) This year's theme is "the public work of composition" and gestures half-heartedly to the Hoover Dam. Of course it begs the question, why not a theme about risk-taking or gambling? Too obvious? Or just too tawdry. On the WPA-list there has been some recent complaining about holding the conference in Vegas, which in and of itself is not unusual since complaining about the conference site is an annual practice. However these complaints are of a slightly different tenor as they have a moral tone. Whether it's the gambling, the smoke-filled rooms, or the whole tourist-trappiness of it, the complaints focus on a sadness to the whole enterprise. I've never been to Vegas, so I don't have an opinion. I also have no interest in going there, for the conference or any other reason. 

However, Vegas (and my colleague's complaints) are only an occassion for writing this post. What really struck me is how very similar Vegas and composition might be. This might seem a counter-intuitive claim in the way that composition instruction is associated either with grammarian schoolmarms or earnest untenured radicals. The transformation to gambler might seem as unlikely as that of the librarian turned pole dancer in an 80s hair band music video. But really a certain desparation might be shared between the gambler and the composition instructor. There are many other similarities:

• both are really phenomena of post-War America
• both operate on the backs of a large, exploited labor force
• both attract employees who have dreams of something greater
• both serve similar types of customers/students: those who play the system; cheaters; those who sit and pull mechanically at the arm and hope it will payoff.
• both places inspire a willful amnesia. 

Most importantly though, both Vegas and composition are profit centers for large corporations. And from that view, the way online gambling has transformed that industry offers some shady insight into the future of online composition. I don't want to push the metaphor too far, but I don't think I need to in order to see composition as being cheap, tawdry, and sad in the way the Vegas can be, but also glitzy, high-tech, and performative. Vegas and composition classrooms: two great middle-American sites of naked rhetoricity in an agora of the surface fueled by the magic of appearance. Neither the grammarian nor the untenured radical wishes to see composition this way. No one who has made a career of rhetoric and composition would, including me. And yet I think we need to recognize that rhetoric plays this role. Rhetoric is a gamble; it is often a calculated risk, a matter of style and bluffing. Like gambling, rhetoric might offer a lens into the circulation of signs, psychology, and social behaviors.

But the real gamble for composition ultimately comes in shifting from a horizontal mass curriculum to a more vertical and varied one. The mass curriculum reflects that legacy industrial notion of mass production and a homogenized, monocultural literacy of an era long gone (if it ever existed). It also supports the paradigms and interests of a similarly industrialized university system; writing as a homogeneous, unspecialized activity that requires little qualification to teach, unlike virtually every other course on the campus. It can be taught cheaply with adjunct labor; it can fuel graduate programs with TAships. I understand why many constituents at the university would have an interest in preserving composition, but I do not understand why those in rhetoric would share that interest. Perhaps it is the fantasy that rhetoric might (and should) become some master university discourse that is necessary for righting all our social wrongs. This is the lottery ticket the untenured radical buys every semester (and I say untenured because so few tenured faculty ever teach FYC). Perhaps it is the opposite belief, the grammarians' belief, that writing really is low stakes. Or perhaps it is a continuing fear that universites will never allow writing to be anything else, a fear born of decades in the basement. However, these days it is the entire humanities that is in the basement. The finishing school of cultural appreciation that drove the humanities in the last century is no longer of interest. Instead, what is of interest are the so-called "soft skills" that rhetoric develops: creativity, collaboration, and of course communication. It is the facility with digital media, which rhetoric has more broadly embraced than any other humanistic discipline. And finally it is an ability to write in a diverse, global workplace and culture, which rhetoricians have studied for decades. 

Of course such matters cannot be covered in a single, homogenous course. I am not suggesting that universities should abandon their expectation that students develop as communicators; nor am I suggesting that rhetoricians shouldn't lead universities in meeting that expectation. I am only suggesting that we replace the mechanism that we use to try to get there. That's hardly a new suggestion. However, it strikes me, as so many of my colleagues head off to Vegas, that a greater gamble is required here. If, as it appears, higher education is in a state of transistion, if the humanities are under fire, then now is the time for us to insist, organizationally, that composition as a mass educational tool is not viable, that it needs to be replaced by a different model of instruction. One that is perhaps not so susceptible to the mass delivery of online courses. One that does not fall prey so easily to exploitative labor practices.

As I have often said on this blog, my decision, now nearly 20 years go, to specialize in what we now call digital rhetoric was a gamble. It was a bet, at the dawn of the WWW, that digital technology would be a transformational force, perhaps the most significant one of my generation. Now that seems like a no brainer, but not everyone made that bet then. Not everyone in the humanities sees that today. But really, is it even still a gamble today to wager that higher education will be transformed, both in form and content, by digital media networks? Or that future academics will not only require the proficiency to work in such contexts but the expertise to lead in shaping such transformations? This is where composition's gamble must go, toward a diversified and vertical curriculum that looks toward the digital and global future. And Vegas, well as the cliché goes, no one needs to speak of what happens there.

an example of the rhetorical force of objects

Wired UK reports on a new study about the effects of simple scents (e.g. oranges) on shoppers. Pumping scents into stores to affect shopping behaviors is not a new practice, though apparently this is new research on the effectiveness of particular scents. The article reports

According to the researchers, the increase in shopping activity stems from the fact that simple scents are more easily processed. Complex scents take more resources to deal with and therefore interfere with cognitive task performance.

Support for the cognitive explanation for the increased spending came from a second experiment, in which participants were able to solve a greater number of word problems and in less time when a simple scent was present, than when working in an atmosphere with a complex scent or no scent at all.

Should it surprise us that our environment can affect our ability to think on both unconscious and conscious levels? I don't think so. Of course we can be seduced by beauty and by the tones of a voice: we have been aware of the rhetorical power of the sensorium since the dawn of rhetoric. However, I was interested in this explanation about cognitive processing. Here we are looking not only at receiving some particular message from a scent but a change in cognitive operation. Equally of interest to me is the abstraction of the scent here. Oranges do not produce an orange scent to encourage holiday shopping, but the scent does serve an expressive purpose for orange trees. What do we discover when such expression is abstracted from its "original purpose"?

So here's how we begin to move toward this example of rhetorical objects. One might say the following things about the two usesu of orange scent here (in stores and by trees). In the first case, one might object that it is humans (store managers) using the scent to achieve their rhetorical purpose (increase sales) on other humans (consumers). The second case one might argue is a matter of nature and science: scents attract insects because of instinct rather than rhetorical persuasion. Both of these positions can be questioned, but for the purposes of my example they are both missing the point as neither really identifies the object that is at work here: the complex organic molecule that finds its way into your nose.

The human olfactory sense is apparently very complex with ongoing theories and experiments regarding its function, but it would appear that human sensory receptors interact with these molecules to produce sensory data. Does the molecule care if you shop, polinate, develop a thirst, or remember eating oranges as a child? I'm going to guess no. Does the molecule contain a message "orange smell"? Not exactly. It has a certain molecular structure that your nose "reads" as orange. The expression "orange" isn't in the molecule; it arises from your encounter with the molecule. If you have a bad cold, you could be sprayed with orange scent and maybe still not smell it. You have to encounter the molecule in a particular (nasal) way.

Now we can hypothesize that by some co-evolutionary process, oranges and mammals developed so that we would find them tasty, eat the fruit, and distribute the seeds. The particular taste and scent (i.e. the specific orange molecule) formed as part of this process, a kind of rhetorical process whereby animals are persuaded to eat fruit and/or trees are persuaded to produce tasty fruit. In other words, hypothetically one can trace a (pre)history of rhetorical attunement between oranges and mammals that participates in our current preference for oranges and the unconscious response measured in the shopping experiment. While the molecule itself doesn't have a stake in that attunement, it does have this expressive potential, a potential that is autonomous and auto-objective: an expressivity that is autonomous of humans, trees, and molecules; an expressivity that emerges in that olfactory relation but withdraws from the molecule and nasal sensory receptors that produce it. 

Does the smell of oranges tell us to buy home decor (as in the experiment)? No more that it tells us to disperse orange seeds. But it does create an affective state of mind wherein certain behaviors are statistically more likely. This is where a nonhuman rhetoric begins. Take the human out of it and think about the squirrel, the nut, and the molecule that makes the nut tasty for the squirrel. That molecule too has an expressive, rhetorical potential that is autonomous from the reproductive needs of trees and mammals. 

In any encounter where there is expression and hence cognition (and we can define cognition as broadly, as pan-psychically, as you like) there is an intermediating expression-object (a sound, an image, a gesure, a scent, an electromagnetic signal) with an expessivity that is autonomous from the two objects encountering one another through the expression. That same signal can be abstracted and reused with different results because its expressivity is not tied to anything except its capacity to express in relation to an object with the necessory sensors.

Now bring the humans back in and consider this blog post. It is a series of images on a screen. To you they are letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. They are creating an expression in your mind, but they have no more interest in that expression than the orange molecule. They might be reused elsewhere to different effects, like the orange scent in the store. Like our evolved preference for oranges there is nothing intentional about our evolved capacity for symbolic action. It just happens that oranges and humans developed along a path that was mutually beneficial. Other plants interact with other species to reproduce, and some have unsucessful reproductive strategies. Of course it's not wholly random either. Orange trees have evolutionary pressures to develop edible fruit and humans have evolutionary pressures to develop means for figuring out what is edible.  Our capacity for symbolic action is not wholly random either. But, as with the relation between the orange scent and purchasing, perhaps symbolic action is a kind of abstracted expressivity. Perhaps that it is a interesting way to look at how rhetoric develops from the more immediate expression of the scent of a flower attracting a polinating insect to the seductive perfume scent: a kind of increasing abstraction or distancing of expressivity that emerges into symbolic action.