News
What is the Future for the Humanities?
17 September 2009
| Source: | Lydia Wevers |
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An address given by Professor Lydia Wevers at the Stout Research for New Zealand Studies Conference 'Antipodes: New Directions in History and Culture Aotearoa New Zealand' this month.
The Way Forward for the Humanities
It has been said, though I think this must be apocryphal, that when Gertrude Stein was dying her companion, Alice B. Toklas, asked her urgently: "Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?" To which Gertrude replied, very reasonably: "What is the question?"
I want to use this little scene to think for a moment about the humanities. What does a humanist do with this fragment of narrative which I found recently on the net. As a scholar I have already interposed myself, judging that it is likely to be an apocryphal anecdote. The reasons for this are both to do with the nature of the evidence – references which might authenticate or contextualise this story have not been disclosed on the net – and also, more importantly, with the kind of narrative and generic conventions buried in this little story. The novelistic denouement of a deathbed revelation, the tidy rhetorical glibness of Alice’s question and Gertrude’s reply, the aphoristic utility of the dialogue, the neat way in which existential and philosophical questions are opened up and the appropriateness of their venue, all point to something invented and re-imagined narratively. The point that distinguishes the humanities from other fields of enquiry is not that we don’t ask questions or find answers, but that interpretation of both question and answer are central to our primary business. We are not often satisfied with the question asked, let alone the answer given. Humanities at Stanford puts it like this:
A hallmark of humanistic study is that research is approached differently than in the natural and social sciences, where data and hard evidence are required to draw conclusions. Because the human experience cannot be adequately captured by facts and figures alone, humanities research employs methods that are historical, interpretive and analytical in nature.
One question we might ask is why we need to rehearse this stuff, but I think everyone in this room knows some of the answer. Worldwide the humanities are in defensive mode, as the description from the Stanford website implies. Google key words ‘future’ and ‘humanities’ and the web overflows with anxious discussion about the way forward for the humanities. Colloquia held recently at the University of Victoria in Canada presupposed that the future of the humanities will unfold in an environment of funding cuts and increasing pressure on universities to provide more career-oriented training, an environment that many see as inhospitable to the humanities. UVic’s colloquia asked:
What is the place of the humanities within the university? What is the future of humanities education? Why is humanist inquiry important now? How do the humanities relate to other ways of knowing? How should the humanities conceive and conduct themselves in an environment where the meanings of "culture" and "values", concepts central to the traditional practice of the humanities, are contested and shifting?
All these questions have also been and continue to be, germane in New Zealand, where the PBRF funds the humanities at 1 and the sciences at 2 or 2.5, and the explanation – that it costs much more to teach science – doesn’t seem an adequate explanation of why this should apply to research. And last week the Minister for Research Science and Technology, Wayne Mapp, announced four themes as critically important to improving the research sector. All these themes are directly or indirectly related to the economy and are about drawing ‘science out of the lab to realise commercial opportunities’.
When I was a student and a beginning academic noone that I recall ever used the term ‘Humanities’ except maybe Americans. We just talked about disciplines, which seemed not to need explanation. But since what is known as the ‘science model’ (hypothesis-driven, fact-based research) became dominant everywhere in Western societies as the template for all research, humanities projects have had to adapt to funding formulas and research agendas that ignore the different assumptions on which humanities research proceeds. An increasing emphasis on utility, targeted research, start-up models, innovation and enterprise, means that knowledge for knowledge’s sake is something to be fought for. And for humanities scholars I think it is accurate to say that questions about the nature of knowledge are of as much interest as knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The different ways in which humanities configure knowledge should not be submerged by funding agendas driven by the idea that research has to be linked to wealth production.
At the same time we have to guard against the perception that our work has a dilettantish aspect, the kind of mountain of useless scholarly work George Eliot so memorably satirised in Middlemarch, with Mr Casaubon’s attempt to find the 'Key to all Mythologies'. The point often forgotten about Casaubon was that he was a bad scholar – as Ladislaw points out in the novel – his work had already been done in Germany. What I am arguing is that the scholarly purpose and objective of work in the humanities has not always been expressed as well or as forcefully as it could have been.
Mark Bauerlein has argued that one of the effects of funding systems based on the 'science model', where almost no papers are single authored and many have upwards of 50 authors, is that humanities staff have been driven to overproduce with, arguably, bad consequences for a humanities model of research. Greater output requirements for academic staff such as those instigated by the PBRF, has resulted in overproduction. He says:
When literary critic Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry came out in 1947, it altered Romantic criticism forever, not to mention William Blake studies. By 1987, a book on William Blake, however perceptive and eloquent, was just that, another book on William Blake. Too many readings had circulated, too many interpretations and reinterpretations and meta-interpretations.
Consider some numbers from the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography. In 1956, the annual contained 10,056 entries for books, articles, notes, and the like, in all the language and literature fields. In 1970, the number jumped to 36 158. A decade later in 1980, we had 58 261. In some twenty years, then, scholarly output increased nearly sixfold in one area of the humanities. Can we really say that from the 1950s through the 1970s the realm of literature and language required six times more pieces of scholarship to be written?
On the one hand then, we in the humanities face a challenge from the ‘science model’ as to what scholarship is and the kind of value placed on scholarship, and on the other, the systems within which we now operate are also affecting the nature and perhaps the purpose of our work. The way forward for the humanities is never going to be a simple transition to an agreed objective, and part of what we now have to face as a community, is how to shape a future that manages to steer between the various forces applied to our work.
In New Zealand the situation of the humanities has been under pressure for different reasons for some time. One major difficulty, reflected in the founding of HUMANZ by Brian Opie in 1993, has been the historical lack of collective organisation and infrastructure, which became a serious issue when the Marsden Fund was established. The Marsden Fund originally had no provision for humanities funding and it was only after the then Minister, Simon Upton, was intensively lobbied, that humanities were added to the Fund. But the architecture of the Marsden Fund still puts humanities in its place (to say nothing of the 'science model' template it uses). There are nine panels which allocate grants. Two are in the social sciences, one as you know is humanities and the other seven are science. This message about priority is underscored by the fact that Marsden is hosted and administered by the Royal Society.
Part of the problem which the humanities have faced is the lack of a central organisation which acts as advocate and representative of our sector. Humanities disciplines in New Zealand have traditionally been networked internationally,
reflected in the numbers of New Zealand graduates who move overseas to do their postgraduate work. Of course there are good reasons for doing this, but it has, I think, contributed to the external focus that many humanities disciplines maintain. Effective national organisation across common interests is extremely new-only in the last decade has there been the attempt to do this through HUMANZ and latterly the Council for the Humanities.
You don’t have to look further than Australia to see what we have been missing. The primary goal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities established in 1969, is to promote the interests of the humanities in Australia and it has frequently been an energetically vocal advocate for its sector. It has taken us 30 years to move in this direction, and the consequence is we are undervalued and underrepresented. A recent example of the higher and more focussed level of debate in Australia is the excellent analysis of the ERA journal ranking exercise Paul Genoni, President of ASAL, and Gaby Haddow, have published in the Australian Humanities Review. The article shows that the impact and quality in Australian humanities journals cannot be adequately measured by citation websites such as Google Scholar or Web of Science and that the exercise fails to take into account many of the factors which differentiate humanities journals from scientific ones.
An issue in New Zealand is the differential scale in the PBRF for rewarding performance in the sciences and in the humanities that I mentioned before. Despite that fact that the four largest panels in terms of PBRF eligible staff whose portfolios are assessed are (in order) Education, Business & Economics, Social and Cultural Sciences and Humanities and Law, we receive half as much performance-based funding as Sciences. But the Humanities and Law panel comprised 10.2 per cent of all PBRF eligible staff and at this university the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences is the largest faculty. Why do we have so little voice, and why do we agree to have so little voice?
One of the ways in which HUMANZ was innovative was in its advocacy of a bicultural model for humanities research, and one of the reasons for strengthening the humanities as a represented and connected sector is to maintain the cultural footprints and distinctiveness of humanities scholarship in and about Aotearoa. Part of the way forward for the humanities is surely to pay more attention and take better care of the rich cultural terrain which we inhabit. One of the keynotes at this conference is Aroha Harris’s ‘Browning-up New Zealand Studies’, a phrase that could be applied more widely. What will the humanities look like in Aotearoa in 20 years time? In fact this question raises a number of dimensions and possibilities, which I will briefly suggest.
The first and most obvious of these is the growth in digital humanities. As more and more records, documents, newspapers, and databases are digitised the scholar’s task changes and so do the support networks. It is much easier now, partly through the mechanism of websites like the Humanities Research Network, to know what other scholars are doing than it was five years ago. Open access online journals and the increase of Creative Commons all help to make scholarship available, accessible and at your desktop. And the net is awash with sites of digital humanities which offer media labs, interactive sites, cross-reality environments, robots, webcasts, open annotation (i.e. Wikipedia) and data and reality mining. A lot of claims are made about the exciting futures opened up by digital humanities and thanks to James Smithies for steering me to some of it.
MITH or the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities claims on its website that the University of Maryland is answering an international call for innovative responses to the changing landscape for scholarship, teaching and the creative arts. "We’re agents of disciplinary innovation and transformation,” says Neil Fraistat, director, speaking of this and similar centers. “I think of MITH as an applied think tank.”
Examples include Doug Reside, assistant director at MITH and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Theatre, whose research focuses on the performing arts. His Music Theater Online archive, places scripts, music, video and, in the future, annotated dance footage on the Web in order to permit scholars to study the very interdisciplinary field of musical theater history. He says that just having access to a simple digitised document “is no longer acceptable.” Or a recently digitized a 12th century prayer book that, in an early form of recycling, was apparently written on top of important treatises by Greek scientist and mathematician Archimedes. The ink of the Archimedes text was scraped from the goatskin and then written over with the prayers. Using imaging technology, a team of scientists and researchers from around the world have uncovered Archimedes’ writings.
But it is still, in my opinion, what you do with what you uncover or connect, that is what matters for a humanities scholar. To maintain the kind of interpretive, analytical, contextualised and nuanced scholarship that is the humanities at its best, requires not only a mixing of traditional and new technology skills, but also a strong support base. Humanities scholars frequently say that time is the most essential requirement of their research (though it’s also surprising how much money they think they need when producing Marsden budgets). And where it applies, it seems to me, is after the new technologies have uncovered Archimedes writing, or put together an interdisciplinary field of music theatre history. What then? This is where our scholarship stands or falls.
Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information asked an important question at the 2006 Pauley Symposium at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He said:
In the age of Wikipedia and Google, is all knowledge destined to be just ‘good enough’ knowledge?
If not, how can the academy and Wikipedia/Google help each other sustain the practice of creating good knowledge? The important point here I think is how the academy will sustain the practice of creating good knowledge. In New Zealand we have two major challenges and a problem. The problem is the one Mark Bauerlein drew attention to, which he called overproduction. How do we manage the system demands made on us with maintenance of quality? As for the challenges, the first is to develop a durable infrastructure which allows the humanities to argue its case in important fora and institutions and get more connected internally. This should also allow us to create and sustain a more robust and equitable share for the humanities in research funding. The second, which is harder, is dual – to get listened to, so that humanities content and methodologies are an important and valued dimension of public knowledge; and to respond to the new environments in which humanities knowledge is created without sacrificing quality or the characteristics we have traditionally valued.
In April this year Mark Taylor, an op-ed contributor to the New York Times, published a piece called End the University as We Know It. In it he argues that in the world we now live in, connected, multicultural, IT-enabled:
There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.
Taylor proposes that permanent departments (by which he means discipline-based departments) should be abolished, even in undergraduate programmes, and be replaced by ‘problem-focused programmes’. Topics he nominates ‘around which zones of inquiry could be organised’ include ‘Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water’.
Whatever you might think about this list, Taylor’s broad thesis depends on being able to ask questions about the nature of knowledge and requires traditional humanities skills – interpretation, contextualisation, history – to work. I don’t believe there is any place on the knowledge spectrum, from the purest scientific hypothesis, where humanities questions are not useful. But this entanglement of humanities knowledges with other kinds of knowledge is often overlooked in the general drive for economic benefits and associated problem solving.
The way forward for the humanities then, in a more ontological sense, is to find a way to reassert and demonstrate the value of our scholarship and the kinds of possibilities it offers for epistemology and knowledge production. We often talk about our creativity and interdependence with artists, the imaginative dimensions of our work. Jerome McGann has said that ‘poems and other imaginative kinds of social texts are quantum fields’ and that ‘pursuing a sociologics of textuality in a digital frame of reference helps us to specify more clearly why and how this is the case.’ The work being done at the University of Virginia, which McGann calls an ‘algorithmic form of scholarly method’ is one of the methodological revolutions happening in the humanities about which we should exercise imagination and skill.
But we also operate as humans in social systems, not only scholars in quantum fields and we should also be imaginative about our status and future in the academy, and not just the academy. What is our role in the real world and the many worlds to which we are now hyperlinked? And as part of that effort, here, in the real world of competitive funding regimes and targeted agendas, the humanities need to establish a more durable collectivity and a stronger voice in the debates of our time.
