Humanities Education in a Changing Climate for Knowledge Production
The conditions under which history is documented have changed, affected by climatic shifts in how knowledge is produced and accessed. Digital communication has generated new ways of capturing, preserving and sharing cultural artifacts, and using them as evidence of history. Once the preserve of memory institutions, publishing the past now plays out across a huge variety of new media spaces and forms. Everyone and anyone can make and share a documentary record in our era of ubiquitous computing and communication technologies. And we do: tomorrow’s historical record will be produced by billions of people self-publishing digital objects–be they facsimiles of physical things or “born digital” creations–that can (and will) be used as primary sources to think about the past. Higher education, gripped by austerity, often welcomes digitization of the historical record as a means of making the past “accessible” under tightening financial constraints. Yet while technologies that deliver digital facsimiles to broader publics have developed rapidly, models for how higher education can facilitate public participation in the making and critique of this new historical record have developed much more slowly. While social media platforms encourage us to document our lives and share our histories, this material is for the most part presented without provenance, context, or clear guidelines for use. Privatized and commodified, personal documents become the business of new media companies without creating a richer or more trustworthy record of the past. Often lost in this process are concepts, methods, and techniques necessary to advance the public production of the past as a common good.
Our project, funded by the Humanities Without Walls grant, explored how higher education can respond to these climatic shifts in the production of history’s record. We developed classroom-based practices for digital documentary and data literacy work that can help position higher education as a partner in the creation of the future of the historical record. By exposing our students to the ethical and technical choices made when documenting the past, we prepared them to be better producers and critics of the historical record in the future. Capitalizing on initiatives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, our Collaboratory collectively explored how to integrate documentary work into humanities education.
Like other such experiments nationwide, the respective projects have so far been conducted on a local, largely ad hoc level, with little knowledge-, process-, or application-sharing, or evaluation and development of recommended practices among them. We aimed to support these individual experiments while building sustained collaboration between them.