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Hacking as Scholarship
FatherBusa writes "I am a professor of English who specializes in what is usually called "humanities computing"--a discipline concerned with creating and theorizing about the use of computers in humanities research (the homepage for the Association for Computers in the Humanities has some info). I was recently asked to join a working group charged with the task of establishing a peer review process for scholarly software projects in the humanities and stumbled across the Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages put out by the Modern Language Association (the main professional organization for language and literature studies in North America). Hackers working in humanities departments may want to give it a read. It's an interesting statement that speaks to the (sometimes difficult) process of getting "tools" and other sorts of digital work evaluated as academic scholarship in promotion and tenure processes."
I'm a computer engineering student in my 4th year of study @ Memorial University. Right now we have to do an Assesment of Technology course and an Ethics course before we graduate. The Ass. tech covers the social implications of past tech. work and other topics along those lines.
:)
I also never heard of a CE/EE student in Canada/USA who don't have to do these courses and i'm quite sure that we make up a fair share of the "Hackers" In the world.
Either way they are interesting courses to take
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
University of Michigan requires 16 credits in Humanities for C.Eng. and C.Sci. students.
Still, Humanities Computing sounds like an interesting aspect of the field. It could be very useful in most corporations (like my Engineering company, for example).
If you're in the tech things/scientific and don't know who Strauss was, you are automatically banned in the limb of the mind numbed tech freak, while if you studied history of arts and you don't know what a square root is, that's simply normal.
I remember time spent fixing pc for other students that had to finish their thesis about don't know the role of granary in the middle of dark ages and that trated the "machine" as the root of evil, the stuff that was wasting their precious time.
They were of course thankful but at their eyes you were just a cleric of the satanic cult of technology that behave in a very gentle manner, and fixing the pc was a sort of dark ritual.
So if someone in the Humanities starts looking at the technology in another way maybe is the begining of a better world.
Many readers apparently found this to be boring and irrelavant reading. I think they may be missing the point.
In the "old school", professors would get recognized (and tenure) for their contributions thorugh publications (appearing in critical journals, for example).
Now though, you can make MAJOR contributions by writing "software" (not just programs, but anything published in a digital medium). Using the old rules, you wouldn't be recognized.
The article referenced implies that such digital contributions are equally relevant for recognition, PROVIDED that they follow the same sort of review process - peer review, unique contribution, etc.
This seems to be a good approach and good news for "hackers" - our value is being recognized in fields beyond software development.
The conventional evaluation method is for a professional society in a subject to think the creation is worth saving in perpetuity. Then they provide archival and serving of this material. The official stamp of approval is the "citation reference", which could be electronic. This is normally done with peer-reviewed papers in journals. However some of these journals are now entirely electronic.
Humanists are not only adopting new technologies but are also actively collaborating with technical experts in fields like image processing, document encoding, and information science. The whole point of the article is the stress of cross-disciplinary useage of technology. The motto is "do the work, and don't be so obsessed about getting credit for it." The principle underlying these guidelines is that when institutions seek work with digital media and faculty members express interest in it, the institution must give full regard to this work when faculty members are hired or considered for reappointment, tenure, and promotion. This gives some "rigor" to any "proof" of theoretical underpinnings of projects -- you don't need ML or TWELF (www.twelf.org) to provide the level of mathematical rigor previously needed to publish. That nifty speech-recognition software that you wrote for the linguistics department is now worth a whole lot more to you. We can probably expect a whole new outpouring in professor/grad student productivity.....i mean heck, I'm probably going to use this in the coming two years to justify some of *my* work. (Dual ms/bs....so my senior project has to be a doozie) -b
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
While you are right about one thing: I'm not sure either how appropriate this piece is for Slashdot. However, hackers are in the humanities classrooms more and more. You might look at the programs offered at Rennsselaer Polytechnic's Language, Literature and Communications department which is involved in different technology based programs. Meanwhile, I have a degree in computer science theory and am working on a PhD in English. And I know of others who are "hackers" and English types.
As a social scientist (somewhat removed from humanities, but close enough), I've come to really value the role that computing can play in non-traditional fields. While some institutions have come to respect it as a component of any research, it's nice to see articles actively promoting computation, and in particular, elite and elegant computation, in soft research. Despite the stereotype that the only tool required for humanities students are books, the volume of information available now has reached a point where computer-based data mining and high-level analysis algorithms are necessary in order to provide anything resembling a thorough presentation.
Up to this point, that sort of work, no matter how exceptionally coded, has been seen as just another research tool. I'm very supportive of any effort to arrange for scholarly recognition of code written in support of research. Just as in the sciences, a tool, once written, can be used again and again to further study. Furthermore, a well-crafted program or script can be of more value to the field than the initial data it returns, if only because it makes one more avenue of investigation available to future researchers.
In summary, I'm glad to see that some of the fields that have traditionally relegated computation to the sidelines are beginning to recognize that there is academic and scholarly value in more than just the data that comes from computers. The development of research tools in the soft sciences may in time come to be almost as important as it is to the hard sciences.
~Cloudmark
"Be proud to be a fighter" - Martial Arts Adage
Repeat in chorus with me: We are not worthy...
Many /.'ers thumb their noses at the academy. Who needs a degree if you have the skills? Why pay money for a piece of paper when one can get right to coding? But the acceptance digital media within the ivy-covered walls can help the acceptance of digital media as more than "playing" video games, surfing pr0n, and "stealing" copyrighted content (not that any of these are not worthy endeavors in themselves ;) ). One of the best ways to ensure the evaluation and production of digital media is to have them studied in an academic context, and only a tenured professoriat can make that happen in ways that matter academically.
At present, digital media are often marginalized as low-brow. Video-games are often blamed for encouraging mindless violence, the web is blamed for shortening attention spans, and security-checking is vilified as terrorism, email is the font of spam, and reverse-engineering is called breaking copyright. This is the public understanding of digital media.
Specialized software and digital research being done at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanites is at present abstract and does little to affect the thinking of the unwashed masses of undergraduates, let alone the public at large. But this kind of work is important because it influences the scholars who drive the field, and their work goes largely unnoticed by the established disciplines that might most benefit from them. On the other hand publicly-accessible texts are in many ways the "content" the web has been looking for (as demonstrated by usage), but recognition of such projects is still limited to circles of elite users. This must change, and a cohort of professors teaching students can help bring about that change.
Creating an established body of scholars able to use computers in ways that help normal people understand how Art and Architecture, Modern Languages and Film shape the world in which we live--this will further the widescale acceptance of digital media as worthile and noble ones.
It is important that people see digital media as more than video-games and surfing the web. Devising a body of standards by which digital media can be evaluated in the context of tenure review (limited though that context might be) will help.
The need for a set of standards to review and assign value to the digital work of humanities scholars is crucial to the culture of computing.
blog
In some cases I support this. Scholarship is a very broad concept at small liberal arts colleges (unlike tier one research schools). If you write a textbook that has no new ideas of your own, but which can help students learn the material better, that counts as scholarship. If that is acceptable, then why shouldn't some computer tool that you created (i.e. language teaching tool, a chip simulator for a C.S. class, etc...) count?
In my opinion, it should, provided that it goes through the same rigid requirements other stuff does. It is not enough to write a textbook and force your students to use it -- you must demonstrate that it is good enough that other people use it as well (otherwise you are just pawning crap off on your students). That is the difference between scholarship and class preparation.
And this is also where the debate gets nasty. Many (but not all!) of the people who are trying to get credit for their hacking as scholarship are trying to get it with just their class prep and not subjecting it to higher standards. Sure, they want a review process, but the people often reviewing are other people who want credit for hacking, not the academic community at large. This is very bad; I am reminded of a card from the game "Survival of the Witless" (a satire of tenure politics) called "New York Times reviews of each others books".
As a result many of them have hurt their credibility badly. And therefore, even though I would like to support them, it has been very difficult.
This won't be relevant to most slashdot readers until we can get a tenure committee to accept "+5 Insightful" as the equivalent of a peer-reviewed publication.