Digital Literacy for the Dumbest Generation - Digital Humanities Programs 2010

Marc Baeurlein argues that undergraduates
now and undergraduates to come soon are
“the least curious and intellectual generation
in national history.”
1
Dubbing them “the
dumbest generation” and “mentally agile”
but “culturally ignorant,” Bauerlein decrees
that The Web hasn’t made them better
writers and readers, sharper interpreters and
more discerning critics, more knowledgeable
citizens and tasteful consumers” (Bauerlein,
The Dumbest Generation
110). The crux of
this attack on digital culture lies in the link
that Bauerlein and others (“Reading at Risk”
xii) make between paper and digital texts:
“the relationship,” Bauerlein explains, “between
screens and books isn’t benign” (“Online
Literacy is a Lesser Kind”). Like Bauerlein and
the authors of the NEA report, Sven Birkerts
maintains that book readers learn more because
the book is a system that “evolved over centuries
in ways that map our collective endeavor
to understand and express our world
” and
that “the electronic book, on the other hand,
represents—and furthers—a circuitry of instant
access” (“Resisting the Kindle”). In contrast to
this perspective, scholars and educators in the
digital humanities have spent decades working
with digital texts and arguing that advanced
knowledge production is the primary function
of using computational methodologies in the
humanities (Busa 1980, 89; Smedt 2002, 90;
McCarty 2005, 13).
The three papers in this panel will give
an overview on university programs teaching
digital humanities in the US, the UK
and Germany. The first paper will treat
undergraduate programs, the second graduate
programs and the third will describe in
depth one PhD program. Like others before
us (McCarty, Orlandi, Terras, Unsworth,
“The Humanities Computing Curriculum”), we
are especially interested in comparing these
programs, because this allows us to consider a
common understanding of the essential aspects
of the work in digital humanities. On the
other hand we are interested in analyzing the
differences and to explore as much as possible
the reasons for them. So an analytic charter of
the curricula is complemented by a closer look
at the institutional affiliations of the programs
and the people mainly responsible for them.
Undergraduate programs, for example, have to
manage the challenge to offer an introduction
not only into
digital
humanities but into the
humanities in general while graduate programs
have to determine what kind of knowledge
they demand from the students entering them.
Although our overall perspective on these
programs is similar, not only the personality of
the three authors but also the specific problems
of the different forms of programs motivate
quite different papers. Thinking about the work
that scholars do in the digital humanities from
the perspective of the work we need to do to
produce culturally literate and critically savvy—
that is,
intelligent
— students is essential.
Notes
1.
Please see
www.dumbestgeneration.com/home.html
.
An Undergraduate
Perspective
Clement, Tanya
tclement@umd.edu