The Role of Graduate Students in Humanities Computing at a Multiversity: The UC Berkeley Humanities and Technology Project

The Role of Graduate Students in Humanities Computing
at a Multiversity: The UC Berkeley Humanities and Technology Project

Diane
Harley

Center for Studies in Higher Education
Berkeley Multimedia Research Center
dianeh@uclink4.berkeley.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Research universities or "multiversities" (Kerr, 1994) are under increasing
pressure to develop and evaluate models of how best to utilize the new digital
communication technologies to enhance their complex institutional missions of
research, undergraduate teaching, and service (Trow, 1997). There are many
institutional models that promote the importance of centralized support
structures (e.g., Bates, 1997, Katz and Associates; 1999, Laurillard, 1995).
These models may be particularly useful for institutions that have either
identified distance education as their primary mission, or have made strategic
decisions to engage regular faculty in distance education activities, or are
small in size.
They may not, however, prove entirely useful for institutions where research is
emphasized and more than a few faculty are skeptical of technology's educational
potential. In these latter environments, creating strategies that will involve
more than a handful of regular faculty in educational technology development and
innovation will require discipline-specific and faculty-sanctioned approaches
that serve the tightly coupled missions of research, undergraduate teaching, and
graduate student training and placement. The latter is especially pressing in
the humanities, where there is currently an oversupply of Ph.D's relative to the
academic job market, and a perception that the relevance of humanists to the
world outside of academe is waning (Weisbuch, 1999). These trends, combined with
predictions for a transformation of the academic labor market (Schuster, 1997)
and burgeoning opportunities for Mode II knowledge production in the "culture
industry" (Gibbons et al., 1994), suggest novel approaches for preparing
humanities graduate students for the world beyond the Ph.D.
This paper will briefly describe the genesis, status, and impact of a model that
attempts to address the training and support of humanities graduate students in
the creation and dissemination of web-based curricular materials. The U.C.
Berkeley's Humanities and Technology (H&T) Project () was a response to the
frustration experienced by humanities faculty on the UC Berkeley campus with
regard to the absence of a comprehensible institutional, financial, and on-line
support structure (Campus Computing Commission Report; 1998; Faculty Internet
Survey, 1998). This project's goals are: (1) To support the integration of WWW
and Internet applications into humanities teaching and research; (2) Provide
graduate student support and training in utilizing these technologies; (3)
Provide a one-stop, technologically "smart" venue where graduate students can
meet to share knowledge and collaborate in developing new Internet
applications.
From its inception, the H&T Project's primary assumption has been that most
humanities faculty themselves have neither the time nor the interest in becoming
computer experts--but they do need help in utilizing internet tools for their
teaching and research. Our conviction has been that graduate students, provided
with sufficient resources, are the best source of faculty support for technology
applications. In that spirit, we set out to create a low-cost and
administratively simple model that attempts to assemble a core of graduate
students with working knowledge of Web technology. These graduate students have
the opportunity to directly share that knowledge with those faculty and graduate
students who want to develop course home pages and other creative uses of the
Internet. One of the strengths of the model is its focus on content, rather than
on the technology for its own sake; it is a project born out of pedagogy and
scholarship rather than technology.
We agree with Katz (1999) that technology will only enhance humanities
scholarship if scholars familiar with the content are directing the endeavor. We
would further suggest that at a research university like UC Berkeley, graduate
students, both those who are beginning to explore a field and those who have a
firm grasp of their dissertation topics, are an excellent interface between the
faculty member and the application. Technical specialists, although essential,
cannot understand the scholarly and pedagogical principles that must underlie
good materials development. By supporting graduate students in their
experimentation, the university can help generate new electronic resources that
will enhance the creation, transmission, preservation, and assessment of
knowledge. An important corollary of this activity is that the knowledge that is
created and preserved can be accessed by those populations, such as high school
students and teachers, that have been traditionally underserved by university
scholars.
Centralized support structures are certainly useful for many of the problems
research universities face in integrating new communication technologies into
academic missions. Additional strategies that are geared specifically to the
requirements of humanities computing need to be crafted as well. These
strategies should ensure that faculty have easy access to low-level technical
support and that serious enthusiasts are provided with resources to develop
sophisticated applications. They should also provide a pool of money earmarked
for graduate student experimentation with Web-based curricular materials. These
latter resources, wisely deployed, can be a cost-effective and productive way to
invest both in the creation of digital curricular resources and in the future
careers of humanities graduate students.
Indeed, training and supporting graduate students in creative uses of web
technologies can help them compete more effectively in the academic job market
in obvious ways. Less obvious, but no less important, is how this training and
support can prepare graduate students for employment in a booming culture
industry. Gibbons et al. (1994) suggest that the radical influence of new
technologies on this industry, and its increasing dependence on visual
sensibility and oral skills, is redefining what it means to be literate. By
providing graduate students with tools to communicate the importance of the
humanities more effectively to the wider world, universities can take up
Weisbuch's (1999) challenge and unleash the humanities from the insularity of
academe.

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