Went to a talk today, the last (?) in a series of lectures on digital literature in research and teaching. This one was by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a charismatic polymath. The man does it all: he teaches writing in odd spaces, he blogs (at Grand Text Auto), he has co-edited a couple of books, and he’s an active participant in various electronic literature and art communities in addition to being an artist himself.
Today, Noah theorized about both digital literature itself and approaches to teaching it. Two things struck me in particular.
One is his classification of important aspects to consider when looking critically at digital literature and art, broadly defined as that which requires computation. Noah went through several classification schemes that are both useful and not meant to be exhaustive. For example, there are works in which computation happens without human intervention (for example, email novels), as opposed to pieces that require a lot of very obvious human input (interactive fiction comes to mind). A few more two-sided classifications, and he arrived at the poignant triad of media (text, image, sound), audience and processes (computational and aesthetic). All of these, he said, must be analyzed preferably in depth, and in relation to each other, in order to understand digital literature and art and their impact on our thinking.
The second part of Noah’s talk centered around pedagogical issues that immediately arise when one proposes to teach digital literature to humanities students. The single most important thing, from his perspective, seems to be the teaching of processes: recognizing them in code, critically analyzing them from an aesthetic perspective, and designing them as well. This should be achieved not only through familiarization with theory but also through the learning of languages that can be used to design processes. Michael Mateas and his teaching at Georgia Tech came up multiple times; apparently his students are learning all these things, and in the span of a semester at that. Impressive.
Of course, I immediately started thinking (again) about how all these things could be effectively and concisely taught to humanities students. Those who study digital media specifically, as a major or a minor, are one thing; but what about the students whose principal interests remain firmly in history, sociology, literature? How does one cover different types of digital art and its various backbones, and teach them to not only read but also write creatively in heretofore unfamiliar languages, not to mention how to familiarize themselves with critical literature which might be absolutely relevant to what they are doing but is presented as computer science papers, which they might have difficulty reading or indeed finding in the first place? All of these things, Noah said today, are crucial; but they’re a [composite] field unto themselves.
Noah’s passionate enough about the necessity of knowing all these things that he was willing to “do away with calculus” (joke!, or is it?) in favor of having more space in the curriculum for cross-disciplinary study of digital literature and art. I tend to agree with him on this; as cool as calculus is, the knowledge of (dare I say it?) humanities computing issues is more practically useful if presented well. Computing and the network are now indelibly interwoven into our lives as individuals and as societies. My own feeling is that understanding of computing as both art and science is as important as the study of languages, of public speaking and of writing.
Challenges remain. Literary criticism, for example, must expand its scope to include digital materials as a matter of course. At the same time, it would be helpful if computer scientists and humanists came up with a reasonably penetrable common language that would make it easier for students of digital media to read literature relevant to their studies.
College curricula must be expanded to eventually include humanities computing in a way that targets all students; I think that the conglomerate of subjects this implies is crucial and should be a requirement for a well-rounded education. The problem with this is that some colleges are already brimming with required courses. In the States at least, where college education particularly emphasizes personal choice, expansion of the set of general education requirements will probably be met with much scepticism and resistance. This, of course, leads straight into the problem of primary and secondary education, which is frankly crap in this country, widespread inadequate preparation for college-and-beyond. (Generalizing for the sake of brevity; yes, private schools etc., I’m talking overall and public schools.)
Anyway, good talk. More interesting stuff was said there, but these are the broad strokes.
