Nov 07, 2009 | 08:29
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Jan 02, 2009
Digital Humanities address changing nature of knowledge in seminar featured on Second Life
After much economic gloom and confusion in 2008, the new year is a good time to reflect on an increasingly vital issue for universities: The future of knowledge in the digital age.Under an initiative sponsored by a $2.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation two years ago, faculty, postdoctoral fellows and guest scholars from more than 10 departments are exploring new research methodologies and disciplinary paradigms in the humanities. On Jan. 5, they met for the latest in a series of “Media, Technology, and Culture” seminars that offers vital insights from experts in the evermore collaborative fields of media studies, game theory and literary and cultural studies.
In a relatively new twist to Internet-enabled distance learning, the “Humanities Tools in Digital Contexts” seminar was also featured on Second Life (SL), the San Francisco-based 3-D metaverse that some call the campus of the future. Numerous universities, colleges and schools offer courses or educational programs in the digital realm, where they own virtual “islands.” Their representatives communicate with people in “real life” through cartoonlike virtual characters known as their “avatars,” or online alter-egos. Open to graduate students for credit as well as to the general public, the three-hour seminar was presented by Information Studies Professor Johanna Drucker in the Math and Sciences Building’s Visualization Portal, a 40-seat theater replete with virtual reality technologies.
Drucker’s seminar focused on the cultural, intellectual, pedagogical and technological challenges that still dog the digital humanities after years of pioneering efforts to improve the ways in which the field makes knowledge visually appealing and archives it for wider and more productive use.
For the Second Life aspect of the seminar, a live video feed of the discussion was transmitted to a virtual “island,” Entropia, as has been the case with past seminars in the Mellon series, which began last October and are offered monthly. The SL virtual island is run by the Digital Library Federation, a consortium of libraries worldwide, including UCLA Library, which communicates key information technology trends and encourages information sharing.
Entropia is remotely managed by Esther Grassian, an information literacy outreach coordinator at the College Library, along with Deni Wicklund, manager of the Stanford University Libraries Tech Support Group. Grassian feeds text transcripts of the seminars on SL for those who might be having trouble listening to the audio version. These are then mounted onto a “wiki,” an online storehouse of the discussions for each seminar, to which users can freely contribute.
“This is the first time in the humanities that anything has been done on such a scale,” said Todd Presner, associate professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies, who chairs the Center for Digital Humanities faculty advisory committee and co-organizes the seminars with Jeffrey Schnapp, a Mellon visiting professor of digital humanities from Stanford.
The seminars are interactive. SL avatars don’t just watch and listen but also ask questions that are answered by the seminar speakers. Meanwhile, attendees in the Visualization Portal focus simultaneously on the seminar as well as the interaction on SL.
“What we want to do is to show how the nature and communication of knowledge is changing,” added Presner, who is the founding director of two notable digital mapping projects – Hypermedia Berlin and Hypercities – that use geographic information systems to explore the cultural, architectural and urban histories of city spaces. “If we want our students to be competitive, we have to train them professionally in the technologies of the 21st century.”
One important aspect of these technologies is that it enables all kinds of knowledge to have an impact well beyond university campuses. The digital humanities seminars on SL, for example, are attended by as many as 75 people, many of them affiliated with leading universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Stanford and Rice.
Although a nascent field, digital humanities is a union of complex open-source practices that treat knowledge in novel, sometimes emotive ways. “We want to create a manifesto of what the humanities can be – or should be – in the 21st century,” said Presner, explaining that one of the results of the Mellon seminars has been a collaborative effort to create a statement about the digital humanities that takes into account not just the future of the humanities but of knowledge itself. (To contribute to the manifesto or to know more about the Mellon seminars, go to http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/).
“The manifesto is brash and provocative and I think it will be a significant publication when it’s done,” Presner said. “We don’t have all the answers but we’re asking the right questions.”
For more information about the SL seminar, contact Esther Grassian.
