digital digs

English Studies futures market

At the confluence of two conversations. Yesterday I watched Dave Parry's talk on the future of the university and received a link to William Chace's American Scholar article on the "Decline of the English Department." These are very different approaches. Both identify a problem/crisis with our current situation, but where Parry recommends an embrace of emerging practices, Chace calls for a return to the past. Not surprisingly, I am more sympathetic to Parry's argument, but there are interesting things in both.

When I look at Chace's essay, it is maybe easy (for someone like me) to dismiss his position as some old guard conservative reaction. But I don't really read it that way. Certainly there is some longing for the way things were back in the heyday of literary studies' height of popularity when he was an undergrad in the early 50s. But as he points out, in retrospect (and if, indeed, we are seeing some final decline of lit studies), the popularity and centrality of the field to higher education was really quite fleeting--something experienced only by a generation or two of scholars. The explanations for the decline our now familiar I think: the rise of other, pre-professional majors, the increased acceptability of women entering other fields, etc. Chace adds to this the observation of English's fragmentation and departure from the traditional, canonical approach to literary studies (i.e. the experience of his youth). And perhaps that could be seen as finger-pointing as cultural studies or feminism or whatever, but he also notes

there are more and more gifted and enterprising students coming from immigrant backgrounds, students with only slender connections to Western culture and to the assumption that the “great books” of England and the United States should enjoy a fixed centrality in the world. What was once the heart of the matter now seems provincial.

Note that even he is putting "great books" in scare quotes. After this, the essay becomes somewhat fragmentary (much like our discipline). Chace goes into the changing economics of higher edu: the increasing expectation that a college degree is preparation for a career, increasing tuition, institutional expectations for external funding which is scarce in the humanities, etc. But he really wants to focus on the discipline's internal problems, namely that "English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit. English departments have not responded energetically and resourcefully to the situation surrounding them." In short, for Chace we have lost sense of identity and mission starting with scholarly/research paradigms and bleeding down to undergrad curriculum. Though he may be loathe to recognize it, I think even Chace sees the old structure is not useful. As he aptly observes, "The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn’t here anymore; our technology is obsolete."

So where does the rubber hit the road in Chace? This is what he suggests:

• " a return to the aesthetic wellsprings of literature" (as opposed, I think, to the politicized cultural studes analysis, but that's just my assumption here)
• emphasize teaching over research for tenure: "If they wanted to publish, [humanists] could do so—at almost no cost—on the Internet" (really? no kidding? tell me more)
• central to that teaching focus is a renewed focus on books (again, away from cultural studies/theory)

But here's the real kicker:

English departments can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

Just as a side note, I was talking to faculty in the law school last night, someone who teaches legal writing to first year students. He said that English majors have the hardest time adapting to legal writing b/c they have been taught and rewarded for writing in a particular way that is not appropriate for the legal genre. That's something to think about if we are going to proclaim our expertise as teachers of "writing."

If we fail to act, Chace imagines literary studies will become like Classics departments. That's a good analogy. I always think of art history myself.

Parry sees the same problem in a different way. He's looking more broadly at the university as a "hack" (as he puts it) for the limits of print-based knowledge production and distribution. Here in the late age of print, we necessarily must re-invent ourselves or see something arise to replace us. He calls for us to embrace and even race toward the realization that the cost of educational products is approaching zero.

That's true, but he also points out the knowledge is more properly seen as a process than a product, and certainly learning is a process. As a process, it requires labor and materials to be undertaken. I would argue that the labor involved is highly specialized and thus ought to continue to demand some premium in the marketplace. I've been up and down that debate before. Yes, there are folks who can go to opencourseware and learn on their own. And maybe there will even be people who will be willing to teach/mentor for free or in a crowdsourced way or something. I remain skeptical at this point that we can educate our citizenry through such practices. The institutions must change, but I think we will still need them for the foreseeable future. However, those that do not change may be in trouble.

In that way they are like Chace's English departments.

It's funny, but I really don't disagree that much with Chace. I don't really care much for his "return to books" strategy, but if that's what lit studies folks want to do, I don't think it matters much to me. I agree that we need to change our research practices (and that digital scholarship wll play a role in it). I certainly agree with a renewed focus on writing, but I'm fairly sure that we would disagree on what that actually means, as I don't think that writing 1000-word close readings of canonical works is going to achieve the writing goals that Chace values.

In my view, English is the humanistic study of textual practices in the English language. We have had to think broadly of text and see our interconnections with non-textual media. But our obvious focus remains on text whether it is creative writing, rhetoric, literary studies, composition, or professional/technical writing. Obviously today we need to study the transformation of those practices in the context of digital networks. But the reality is that there is more text and more textual production today than at any time in human history. And textual production, distribution, and consumption is undergoing the most radical revolution we have seen in centuries, if not since the invention of writing itself.

In other words, there is more for us to study and more for us to teach our students than ever. So maybe that's why we seem so fragmented and lost. The process of globalization altered the centrality of the textual practices we historically studied. And now this technological revolution has fundamentally changed the rules of the game.

But I agree with Chace, we need to stop wallowing in despair or pining for the old days or closeting ourselves off with our particular research interests (if we are indeed doing such things) and put something together. And I think a lot of what Parry says about where we might go by questioning the naturalized assumptions of print-based university practices makes. So I think we need to ask two simple questions of ourselves, our departments, and our discipline.

1. How do we make use of our existing knowledge, experience, methods, and expertise to refocus on the central issues and challenges of contemporary textual practices?
2. How do we communicate that renewed focus to (prospective) students, to others around the university, and to broader public discourses on education?

is artificial intelligence a rhetorical process?

In an interview with New Scientist, robotics expert Noel Sharkey expresses his doubts about the possibilities of artificial intelligence. He says:

It is my contention that AI, and particularly robotics, exploits natural human zoomorphism. We want robots to appear like humans or animals, and this is assisted by cultural myths about AI and a willing suspension of disbelief. The old automata makers, going back as far as Hero of Alexandria, who made the first programmable robot in AD 60, saw their work as part of natural magic - the use of trick and illusion to make us believe their machines were alive. Modern robotics preserves this tradition with machines that can recognise emotion and manipulate silicone faces to show empathy. There are AI language programs that search databases to find conversationally appropriate sentences. If AI workers would accept the trickster role and be honest about it, we might progress a lot quicker.

So of course when some mentions the use of trick and illusion, I immediately think of rhetoric. It's not about being intelligent; it's about convincing others that you are intelligent. In other words, AI is like an academic conference. OK, enough snarkiness.

One of the fundamental conceptual problems of AI is that we don't have a very good grasp on what "intelligence" is to begin with. As Katherine Hayles' work details, the history of this field is replete with hand-wringing over defining human intelligence in a way that would allow it to be artificially recreated with computers. Is intelligence really computational? Does intelligence equal sentience/consciousness? Obviously we don't know the answers to these questions.

What does seem more likely is that we might develop computers/robots that have the appearance of intelligence that is driven by computation. As Sharkey points out, Big Blue can win chess matches with brute force computation. Perhaps in some sense this makes it smarter than humans but it's "thinking" isn't anything like our own. On the other hand, when I talk with someone all I can discern is the appearance of intelligence.

From a digital humanist viewpoint, one of the interesting things about AI discourses and practices is the way they lead us to reconceptualize human intelligence. Does the computational model of the mind represent the material reality of how we think? I suppose that would fall into the "I guess anything is possible" category. Does it shine light on how equally flimsy and contingent other, more traditional models of the mind might be? I'd think so.

I just think it's interesting to turn this conversation around and ask the same question Sharkey has for AI to the conversation we have about human intelligence. Maybe human intelligence is little more than cultural myth and a willing suspension of disbelief. After all there are plenty of humans who could use some additional programming in order to "recognize emotion," "show empathy," and "find conversationally appropriate sentences." (I guess I wasn't finished with the snarkiness.)

Introducing composition students to blogging

This is a continuation of a series of posts that constitute a draft of an essay I am writing for the Writing Spaces textbook. See part one here. I'd love to have your feedback, as always.

What is a blog? Or better, what is your blog?

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Typically the first answer one imagines for this question refers to the content of blogs. One might think of blogs as public diaries or perhaps as amateur journalism or political, op-ed websites or maybe as celebrity gossip sites. Many of the most popular blogs today deal with specific interests from computers and automobiles to (allegedly) funny pictures of cats. But none of these things really define the blog itself. Technorati.com, a site devoted to indexing blogs, has recorded 133 million blogs since 2002.  In short there are many blogs with many topics. On the other, one might attempt to provide a technical definition of a blog. While one might create and maintain a blog using only HTML, like a traditional web page, most blogs operate on a web application (e.g., Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, etc.). With such blogs, individual entries are saved in a database and those entries are then called up and published on the blog according to any criteria including in the database fields. For instance, one can publish entries chronologically, which is the convention for blogs. However, one could also publish them by category (also common on blogs) or by author (if there are multiple authors for the blog) or even alphabetically by title (which is certainly less common on blogs). Having some technical understanding of the particular blogging application one chooses to use will be helpful in making it work effectively, but the technology behind blogs doesn’t offer much insight into a useful definition of blogging practices.

Arguably, the practice of blogging has become so vast, including people from around the world, that any definition general enough to include everyone would be of little use in helping a new blogger in a composition course decide what to do. Instead, it is necessary to begin with identifying a more narrow genre of blogging practices. In a sense, this is much like the more general advice I give to my composition students about writing. It isn’t particularly useful to try to understand “how to write” in a general way. Instead, one needs to learn how to identify the particular writing practices at work in the specific writing situations that one faces as a writer.  That is, students in a literature course face different writing tasks from those in economics courses or biology courses; and writers in public relations firms face different tasks from technical writers in the computer industry or analysts at a bank. However, any writer might begin with some fairly basic rhetorical questions.

• Who is my audience? What do they expect from me? What do they already know about the subject of the text I am composing? How will they react to my message?
• What is my purpose? What is the exigency for this text? (i.e. what has motivated me to write this text?) What do I hope to achieve?
• What is the genre in which I am writing? What are its conventions? (E.g. fairy tales being “Once upon a time...:” what are the familiar practices of this genre?) How are arguments made in this genre? What types of evidence will be found convincing?

These questions certainly apply to blogging. So when we ask “what is a blog?” the answer is shaped by who we wish to write to, what our purpose(s) might be, and how others with similar audiences and purposes already practice blogging. I know that when I began blogging I didn’t have a very strong idea of what my blog would be like. I knew that I would write about my professional-academic interests and experiences (as opposed to personal experiences or hobbies or pop culture). I also came to my decision to start blogging after having read the blogs of several colleagues, so I had some idea of what others with similar interests were doing. Most of all, I was already familiar with my intended audience (though, of course, on the public web, one never really controls who reads what one writes). I knew what other English professors and graduate students were like. I knew about their expectations for scholarly writing. That said, no one knew what academic blogging should be like, and arguably we still don’t know for sure. So blogging was an experiment, an exploration into what that genre could do for me and other rhetoricians. However, blogging will probably operate somewhat differently for you as a composition student.

Of course it is difficult to generalize about composition students (but I will anyway). In my experience, typically, composition students haven’t had much experience as writers. When I started blogging, I was already a writer and already had experience writing about my subject matter and to my intended audience. These things probably aren’t true for the average composition student, but they probably aren’t true for the average blogger either. So, in order to understand what a blog is, or more specifically what your blog will be, you will first need to identify the subject on which you are writing and the audience to whom you wish to speak. If one thinks of the typical, public diary blog, then the answers are “personal experience” and one’s friends and family (at least to start). Over time, that audience might expand to include other bloggers and readers who have similar experiences and interests. (I’ll speak more about expanding one’s audience later.) This kind of blogging might be useful for you as a student if you use the blog to write about your classroom experiences. The blog then becomes a place to reflect on learning.

However I want to encourage you to consider writing a different kind of blog, one which might more directly support your academic and professional careers. For this kind of blog you need to identify an academic or professional subject in which you are interested. Perhaps you have already declared a major. If so, that should give you a good place to start. If not, then you might have to get more creative in thinking about a subject that you would like to read and write about. Once you’ve decided on a subject, you need to investigate other blogs with similar interests. Read a wide range of blogs--the most popular blogs on your subject, blogs by experts on your subject, blogs by those with amateur interests, and blogs by students like yourself. Reading is an essential part of blogging. Once one gets beyond the diary blog, it is quite common to blog about one reads elsewhere on other blogs (aka the “blogosphere”). In fact, writing about other bloggers is one of the primary ways one builds an audience and community for a blog.

Researching for blog writing is much like researching for course assignments. One can begin with a general search engine. Google allows one to search specifically for blogs, or one might try Technorati. The goal here is to find a handful of the most popular blogs in your area of interest. From there, things get trickier. Most blog sites include a list of links called a “blog roll” somewhere on their sidebars. This is a list of sites that blogger also reads. Sampling the blog rolls of bloggers you like is a good strategy for finding worthwhile blogs. As you find good blogs, you’ll need to bookmark them, or even better, subscribe to them using a RSS Aggregator (a website or desktop application that will check your blog subscriptions and let you know when there are new posts; see the Appendix for some suggestions about aggregators).

Maybe this sounds like a lot of work. Maybe it is. Much like most things in life, one can get out of blogging what one puts into it.

For example, perhaps you have an interest in medieval history (OK, probably not, but maybe).  Even if with a quick search of the web, one can find dozens of blogs on the subject and start reading them. Got Medieval, for instance, is a blog maintained by Carl S. Pyrdum III, a graduate student in Medieval Studies at Yale University (or at least so we are told; one must always be somewhat suspicious on the web). On his blog there are links to many other related blogs. One of his recent posts comments on a comic documentary where people go in search of the Robin Hood legend. As a blogger one might then link to that post, embed the video (more on that later), and then write one’s own post about Robin Hood.

And off you go. Of course, since you’re probably not interested in medieval history, you’ll have to find something else to write about, or maybe multiple things to write about. One of the most popular blogs, Boing Boing, calls itself “a directory of wonderful things,” and is fairly miscellaneous. I'm not suggesting that you have to do what everyone else does. To the contrary, one of the great things about blogging is the opportunity for autonomy the genre can provide. But reading other bloggers with similar interests can help you in understanding the kinds of choices you might make and will also aid you in finding an audience for your work.

intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the writing classroom

Dan Pink has an interesting TED talk in which he discusses the science of motivation and its implications for management and creative professionals. To summarize: it turns out that classic extrinsic motivation (i.e. the carrot or the stick) is ineffective in motivating people to complete more "creative" tasks. I'll leave the question of what is creative open, except to say that I think writing is a creative task. In fact, extrinsic motivation can actually inhibit success in some situations. So Pink advocates a new management style where one employs intrinsic motivation. He mentions autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Again briefly:

• autonomy: the ability to direct our own work
• mastery: the desire to get better at something that matters
• purpose: the opportunity to work on something that has a larger meaning.

I want to think about this in terms of the writing classroom. As we've said in rhet/comp thousands of times, one of the central challenges we face is the artificial nature of the writing tasks students undertake. Often the motivations are extrinsic, namely grades and fulfilling requirements. I take Pink's talk this way: extrinsic motivations are great when the task is to find the shortest route between two points, which of course implies a task that has an easily identifiable end point and a single correct solution (a shortest path). Clearly these are not characteristics of writing, not even for the most expert writers and certainly not for novices. And yet, we know that our students are often in search of the shortest path. In fact, just yesterday in my FYC class I asked students how many words total they would expect to write if they were given the task of writing a 1000-word essay. Predictably, some students anticipated the kind of answer I was looking for, but even then it was clear that they were looking for the shortest path.

And I don't blame them. After all, it's a little silly to give out assignments with a word minimum without implying that some economic calculation is supposed to be made.

The tougher challenge is to offer conditions that encourage intrinsic motivation. One could say that "intrinsic" means intrinsic to the students themselves, that the students have to want to learn to write. And when I read Stanley Fish's remarks, sometimes I think that approach, with its focus on form and style might work with highly motivated students, with writing majors for example. But as we know, FYC students often struggle with motivation: they are not necessarily intrinsically interested in writing.

Pink discusses the "results-only work environment" (ROWE) as an example of what he's advocating. To me the ROWE sounds much like an academic workplace, where, aside from a couple hours of classes and the occasional meeting, your time is your own. Typically FYC students aren't ready to work in that kind of environment. You can say they are immature or that schooling has not prepared them to learn that way. Either way, the fact remains.

But maybe FYC is a place where we can begin to talk about autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Presumably these are qualities we want to foster in undergrads. Developing a writing practice is one way to do this. Though I know we like to pretend (why, I'm not sure) that there are practically step-by-step instructions for writing, we certainly know that's not the case. We can pretend that there are micro-choices like word choice or sentence structure, which are separate from macro-choices like topic or thesis. But who, as a writer, has not uncovered a problem with one's argument by struggling with a sentence?

The kinds of creative challenges that Pink discusses here happen throughout writing. They all require a sense of autonomy as a writer to address. They all require a desire to improve and a belief that one can get better. And they all require a sense of purpose.

So I'm going to think this semester about how these things get into FYC.