Why is it
important?Why is it
important?Increasingly, products of the mind which are studied by scholars in the text based studies are encoded in digital form. Furthermore, the new media make information available in such quantities that traditional information-handling methods have to change in order to cope. Computational methods are often much more powerful than traditional research with pencil and paper.
New textual objects of study are entering the humanities field. The medium affects the message. Multimedia and hypermedia represent the convergence of several media into a new textual whole which is more than the sum of its parts. An adaptation and integration of our old rhetoric is badly needed to study creative and cultural expressions using new technologies.
The automation of some, or many, of the procedures of text based research raises problems of formalisation of data and their treatment, which are different from the problems so far discussed in the traditional approaches to text. Moreover, the treatment of language and speech, the coding of textual material, or the construction of databases of textual data, all pose methodological problems of their own, which cut across the boundaries of the disciplines.
Computing techniques have been applied to textual scholarship for over 50 years and are now applied to many areas of text based studies, including language learning, literary and textual criticism, authorship and stylistic studies, text corpora and text coding, studies of individual languages, applied and corpus linguistics etc.
More and more material becomes accessible electronically. Libraries and publishers are making literature available online, not only by scanning and digitising older paper documents, but increasingly by publishing electronically from the start, using CD- (and soon DVD-) ROM or the Web as media. The proliferation of the Internet and the associated increase in bandwidth has made digital resources of all kinds more widely available. Increasingly, the essential reference works needed by researchers and students are available in electronic form (and often on-line).
Scholars in the text-based studies are thus being confronted with a rapid growth in the quantity of sources available and the steady emergence of new methods of processing them. Not all the methods of the past will become obsolete, but the drift towards computational studies is becoming, or will become, increasingly evident in the text based studies.
Large corpora make it possible to carry out new kinds of analyses that take into account all the works of an author or all the works of a particular location, period or genre, linguistic varieties etc. Moreover, the integration of different types of materials - e.g. texts and images - enlarge the scope of interest of the textual scholar and encourage broader disciplinary views; this also encourages more inter-disciplinary approaches.
The boundaries between 'research' and 'teaching', and especially between the materials used in each, are narrowing. Information technology makes it much easier for a researcher today than before to bring her or his research into the classroom and students can not only work with source materials in digitized forms and use the same reference works as researchers but see and sometimes even participate in actual research in progress. By the same means researchers can share their research and collaborate with students as well as with peers.
The tools provided by information technology play an important role in the transfer of psychological findings on learning and knowledge aquisition to pedagogical concepts with respect to the teaching of humanities subjects in general and the teaching of languages in specific terms. According to these concepts inductive learning is at least as important as deductive learning and teaching thus has to provide the possibility for both. Computing applications allow for the realisation of concepts like language awareness, research driven aquisition of knowledge/languages and discovery based learning, which play a central role with respect to inductive learning.
As we have in the past trained university students in the use of traditional paper sources for the writing of reports and articles, it is now necessary to give students experience in the use of electronic sources as well. This is the case not only for students who are preparing for advanced research but also for those who are planning careers that will involve the production of texts.
Knowledge is stored electronically primarily in the form of text, images, or sound (the latter two in both static and dynamic forms), or as combinations of these media. Each medium presents particular problems for storage and retrieval. Standards for citation and preservation of cited material (given the ephemerality of much electronic material today) must also be developed and are being developed, and students will have to be exposed to them.
Many beginning university students can today be expected to be at least as familiar with the use of the Internet, particularly its multimedia aspects, as their teachers. They have to be introduced, however, to the use of specialised, discipline specific sites, materials, corpora and databases (whether text only or multimedia) and empowered to evaluate critically the information offered to them and/or to interpret the retrieved data.
Computing in learning and teaching in textual studies helps to produce new generations of researchers and university teachers able to apply the new technologies to their work. It helps to prepare students for the professional world where our linguistic and cultural artefacts will increasingly be manipulated by information technology. It contributes to the understanding of computing and helps to create European citizens who are technically adept as they enter a work place that is increasingly dominated by technology.
What speaks
against it?(1) Applied computing in the text based studies is very expensive to teach, i.e. it requires laboratory equipment and makes the kind of demands on human resources that laboratory courses commonly make.
(2) We don't currently have enough trained people.
(3) There are numerous, profound differences in the educational systems of Europe, bringing into doubt whether any trans-European design would apply anywhere.
(4) We have no consensus on what humanities computing is in general and no agreed-upon curriculum for the text based studies. There is insufficient evidence to support a claim for a separate, expensive effort to establish yet another academic unit.
(5) At some if not many institutions the subject is already covered under computer science or computational linguistics; at others what has been called "humanities computing" is hardly respectable as academic.
What are our
answers?(1) Not teaching applied computing is more expensive in the mid- to long-term, in the sense that we cheat our students of adequate preparation, which they then suffer from the lack of or have to acquire elsewhere. The unrefurbished humanities are likely to be less appealing in an unfortunately market-driven world, and so student recruitment will suffer; students will go elsewhere. The provision of equipment is required in any case, so the actual expense is in providing the teachers.
(2) We can at minimum get started at the institutions where we do have the qualified people and use the coordinated effort to develop better guidelines and a support network of European colleagues.
(3) The effort to MAKE a European community out of the disparate nations is an ongoing, difficult but nevertheless necessary project. The correct approach, which we are taking, is to define and work at a level of sufficient generality so that it can be locally applied. We do not get caught up in institutionally specific issues.
(4) Part of the work is to work toward this concensus and applicable curriculum.
(5) If in the various participating countries applied computing is in fact better done within an existing disciplinary structure, then it should continue in our view. Experience at specific institutions suggests strongly, however, that the existing disciplinary framework in principle inhibits development, since humanities computing must by definition be interdisciplinary. From an administrative perspective, an extra-departmental department is simply the most efficient and economical way to proceed. It is understandable that existing departments with some activity in this area do not want to let go of it, but that is a local, pragmatic issue which does not reflect on the principled issues.
| Last modified: 06 November 2000 |
| Elisabeth Burr |