The last assignment of my "Writing as Inquiry" class is a research paper in any discipline of interest, i.e. my students can choose to write about engineering, food science, archaeology, philosophy, or whatever else. This seemed bizarre to some of them, but overall, students liked it because it enabled them to do research on the areas of their majors. I decided to do this because I firmly believe that the purpose of the course I taught this semester was not that of filling my students with a specific content, but rather to teach them methods of inquiry through the practice of writing and methods of writing through the practice of inquiry. In other words, what I have tried to do as a teacher is to guide my students to practice attitudes of questioning and interpreting that are typical of humanistic formae mentis. Perhaps Alan Liu would call this an instrumental teaching approach quite typical of humanities scholars. Perhaps I am being wrong and delusional to let my students step away from English and from literature and creative writing, and embrace their usually "more scientific" or even more "useful" disciplines for their final writing assignment. But I am convinced that only when they realize that they can very productively apply forms of inquiry typical of humanistic methods in their different areas of study, will they 'understand the lesson' of my course. Honestly, I don't even care they get this conscious understanding, I just care they can write and think provocatively, whatever the field is, whatever the life they live. So, yes, I am (instrumentally?) preparing my students to go off pursuing their majors and apply a humanistic approach to the writing (and, therefore, thinking!) they will be producing in the years to come.
Now, the problem described by Johanna Drucker, that of the reification of information offered by new digital media, evidently seems to be connected to the philosophy that animates my teaching. As humanists, our contribution is that of avoiding this reification. Just as we teach students how to question assumptions through writing and to learn methods of revision of the current state of thinking regardless of the topic, we need to mobilize rigid and static (re)presentations of knowledge as offered and framed by forms of digital information visualization. "The primary strategy for undoing the force of reification is to introduce parallax and difference, thus taking apart any possible claim to the self-evident or self-identical presentation of knowledge and replacing this with a recognition of the made-ness and constructedness that inhere in any representation of knowledge", Drucker writes. In other words, Drucker calls for both an exposition of humanistic methods and an application of them to digital scholarship and to the production of knowledge in the digital realm, more at large. Which means that humanities need to infiltrate and work from within the digital, and not outside of it. Which means humanities cannot help but being digital, at this point. But this does not imply a corruption, or an alignment with the globalizing digital status quo. In fact, hopefully, it can mean just the contrary.
I like the use of the word "proleptic" by Liu, which exposes the fragility of the current moment: we are understanding the need of digital humanities, we are working to make them real, and we hope we are doing our best, but we are still at the very beginning. At the same time, we are not doing anything very different from what humanists have always been doing: design knowledge, preserve knowledge, revise and disrupt knowledge and its social and political implications. The acceptance of this continuation of our task implies inevitable modifications which we should embrace with perplexity and yet excitement, at the same time. It's a question of participation and of resistance, but most of all, it's a question of intellectual honesty and political engagement. We can only remain "servants", as Liu observes, if we stay in our protected microcosmos, which, by the way, does not exist any longer, anyway. The real game of knowledge creation, preservation, disruption, is played in a realm called internet, and we can not only participate in it, but even help to redefine and revise its rules.
Now, the problem described by Johanna Drucker, that of the reification of information offered by new digital media, evidently seems to be connected to the philosophy that animates my teaching. As humanists, our contribution is that of avoiding this reification. Just as we teach students how to question assumptions through writing and to learn methods of revision of the current state of thinking regardless of the topic, we need to mobilize rigid and static (re)presentations of knowledge as offered and framed by forms of digital information visualization. "The primary strategy for undoing the force of reification is to introduce parallax and difference, thus taking apart any possible claim to the self-evident or self-identical presentation of knowledge and replacing this with a recognition of the made-ness and constructedness that inhere in any representation of knowledge", Drucker writes. In other words, Drucker calls for both an exposition of humanistic methods and an application of them to digital scholarship and to the production of knowledge in the digital realm, more at large. Which means that humanities need to infiltrate and work from within the digital, and not outside of it. Which means humanities cannot help but being digital, at this point. But this does not imply a corruption, or an alignment with the globalizing digital status quo. In fact, hopefully, it can mean just the contrary.
I like the use of the word "proleptic" by Liu, which exposes the fragility of the current moment: we are understanding the need of digital humanities, we are working to make them real, and we hope we are doing our best, but we are still at the very beginning. At the same time, we are not doing anything very different from what humanists have always been doing: design knowledge, preserve knowledge, revise and disrupt knowledge and its social and political implications. The acceptance of this continuation of our task implies inevitable modifications which we should embrace with perplexity and yet excitement, at the same time. It's a question of participation and of resistance, but most of all, it's a question of intellectual honesty and political engagement. We can only remain "servants", as Liu observes, if we stay in our protected microcosmos, which, by the way, does not exist any longer, anyway. The real game of knowledge creation, preservation, disruption, is played in a realm called internet, and we can not only participate in it, but even help to redefine and revise its rules.
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