Digital futures

Changes to practice

Liu, in his sweep of the current landscape (2012, this issue), agrees with Pannapaker (2009) that digital humanities is the next big thing. Indeed, the impact of the Internet on working practices and the way we share information and communicate has been profound. Recent open, participatory and social technologies (sometimes referred to as Web 2.0 technologies) have led to a seismic shift in patterns of user behaviour – in terms of how people communicate, collaborate and network, and in terms of the perceptions of content in a world where it is free and multi-faceted (see Conole and Alevizou (2010) for a recent review of Web 2.0 tools and practices). These changes to the landscape for communication and for access to resources have changed irrevocably the practices of scholars.

Rausing (2010) writes compellingly about this imagined present/future:

Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West – our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data – as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world’s civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome. Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The non-profit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts.

However not all commentators are so enthusiastic. In some ways the rhetoric of inevitability mirrors that used in the discussion about the digital native, i.e. the view that a certain generation will behave in a particular fashion in relation to their use of technology. Prensky (2001a, b) argues that today’s students, having grown up with digital technology, think and process information differently from previous cohorts of students and that the education system should change as a consequence. We have seen similar types of arguments following the introduction of computers in education in the seventies. The inevitability of changes to the educational system resulting from the new technology possibilities was contrasted with the need for teachers to be educated to appropriately manage and use information technology in their teaching (see e.g. UNESCO World Education Report, 2002).

The views of Prensky (2001a, b) are being challenged by empirical research on the practices of younger people using information technology (Jones and Czerniewicz, 2010). Prensky argued that methods and content need to be quite different to cope with the current generation of learners which he terms ‘Digital Natives’ (2001a). Going even further, he argues that ‘Digital Natives’ brains are likely to be physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up’ (Prensky, 2001b: 1). He promotes the idea of ‘future content . . . as digital and technological but including software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics it also includes ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them’ (Prensky, 2001a: 4). Jones, however, cites evidence to show that digital natives (or ‘Net Generation students’ as he describes them) are not homogeneous in their use of new technologies.

Alongside this is the view from Jenkins et al. (2006) that there are key skills required for digital literacy to be part of what they call the participatory culture. Rather than arguing solely that young people have developed different skills and expectations of education and communication because of their use of digital technologies, they have focused on the behaviour of young people as content creators, as creators of blogs or webpages and as remixers of online content. These and similar activities will have an impact on their long-term appetite ‘for learning, creative expression, civic engagement, political empowerment and economic advancement’. They argue that in trying to understand the new media landscape, rather than looking at the affordances of the new tools available, we should take an ecological approach, ‘looking at the interrelationship between all the communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support’.

With this injunction – to consider cultural communities – in mind, there are parallels to be observed between the possibilities in the new area of digital humanities with new communication and data sharing practices in science. Borgman highlights these changes in academic practice coming from the digitisation of data in the sciences. She suggests that, as in the sciences, the ‘digital humanities could benefit from more collaborative partnerships within the field and between the humanities and disciplines such as computer science’ (Borgman, 2009: paragraph 51). She argues, ‘we are only beginning to understand what constitutes data in the humanities, let alone how data differ from scholar to scholar and from author to reader’ (paragraph 29). Her expertise and experience draw on scientific and geographical projects (Borgman, 2007), but as Liu reports in this issue there are similar shifts in managing data in the arts and humanities.

Evidence from our Digital Scholarship project

Pearce et al. (2010) report outcomes of our preliminary study conducted as part of the Digital Scholarship project underway at the Open University. We are trying to understand the landscape for academics in higher education and the way that their practice may change as a consequence of the information age. We have an initial data set of semi-structured interviews with 22 academics who were asked how they use new technologies. These interviews present a picture of how individual academics are accommodating the new possibilities. There are examples of scientists employing useful tools:

So you know the details of the … all the insects that I work with, well they’re available online … if I want to look up something the guides are online from the Natural History Museum.

There is an interesting recognition of the possibilities for new types of collaboration:

So there’s a sort of community of people that I, that are act[ive] that I used to think was a research community but I’m more thinking about as a practice community that I’m connected, I’m really only connected to really via Twitter and blogs and the online world.

However, this is only a start to our investigations. We are continuing to conduct interviews, to extend our data set. In addition we are conducting a qualitative study of a research community in digital humanities. An aspect of this observational study is the examination of the use of Twitter and blogging within the community. This will add to the growing literature of empirical studies of digital humanities researchers (Palmer and Neumann, 2002; Presner, 2009; Rieger, 2010; Siemens, 2009). Also we are exploring the development of interactive visualisations of the posts of members of a community to see how the content relates to connections in a community, and we aim to use this as an artefact to aid future interviews.

The future: how are openness and interdisciplinarity important?

Two further aspects of academic practice are important for work in digital humanities: openness and interdisciplinarity. The development of open educational resources is part of a movement towards working in a more open fashion, both in teaching and research. Access to open educational resources which are growing in number may be a key feature which leads scholars towards changing their practice (McAndrew et al., 2010). Lane and McAndrew (2010) comment that ‘the first lesson is the power of openness as a driving force … That is not to say there has been an explosion of taking and reworking or remixing open educational resources but it has and is happening across and within institutional borders’.

Borgman (2009) points out why this openness is important for the digital humanities:

Openness matters for the digital humanities for reasons of interoperability, discovery, usability and reusability. Open resources – that is those that can be used under license or are in the public domain – are more malleable for research and for learning. They can be mixed and mashed up and others can add value to them. (2009: paragraph 65)

One issue relatively unexplored here is the skills which teachers and researchers need to develop. It seems that, in addition to skills of working with new technologies, there is a need to consider what it means to be working in an open way. This relates back to the digital literacy issues described above.

Indeed, what may be required are the skills of interdisciplinary working within the extended collaborative groups which need to form round new digital archives and digital communities. The debates and discussions around disciplinary boundaries and the idea of ‘mode 2’ knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994) have been stimulating. The purpose of interdisciplinary working is enabled by the increased dialogue between researchers in different disciplines and stakeholders in the research, with the effect of creating solutions to problems and with the potential to create new meanings. So, in addition to requirements for new skills, more open practices may lead to increased possibilities for interdisciplinary working. Klein (2010) lists watching digital practices change the nature of traditional disciplines from the inside (challenging the superficial dichotomy of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity) as one of the most important trends in the digital humanities.

Communication technologies are able to create feelings of interconnectedness and community over geographical distance (see for example the experiences of distance learners at the Open University). Digital repositories and other online tools mean research results can now be made available to a much wider audience than in the past. Open access practices are becoming more prevalent (Iiyoshi and Kumar, 2008). For example, the Open Educational Resource movement in teaching has been mirrored in the research community by the Open Access Initiative, whereby researchers are choosing to make their research publications freely available via institutional research repositories; thus challenging traditional publication channels such as journals and books. Researchers have argued that ‘Web 2.0’ technologies in particular foster co-construction of knowledge and active user engagement, prompting some researchers to choose these technologies as their preferred mechanism of dissemination over traditional recognised publication routes (see again, Conole and Alevizou, 2010). However, it may be that the incentives for publication in these outlets do not match the needs of all academics (Scanlon, under review).

For example, in recent research an interview study (Conole et al., 2010) consulted a number of researchers in technology enhanced learning (TEL). All 18 of the interviewees made extensive use of technologies to support their research practices, but this use was diverse and very much individually appropriated. Some researchers were comfortable with adopting a ‘Web 2.0’ open approach to sharing and communicating research findings while others were less comfortable.

This study also has thrown light on the requirements for interdisciplinary working in the field of technology enhanced learning. Increasing prominence has been given to interdisciplinarity as a means of addressing cross-discipline research challenges, where researchers from two or more disciplines bring their approaches and adapt them to form a solution to a new problem (TLRP, 2009). Just such a situation is emerging in digital humanities.

This turn to interdisciplinarity and community approaches is well described in the contribution from Singletary (2012) in this issue. The social turn in digital humanities research, the influence of working in an open fashion, the influence of incentives for researchers and the infrastructure within which they work, are emerging issues worthy of further investigation.

The challenge for the future of digital scholarship in humanities research is to grasp the obvious possibilities of this new technological landscape to develop an approach to this work which will fulfil its potential.