 To my far right, Allison Birely is provost and executive vice president, as well as professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont. She received her BA from Wellesley, her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of numerous articles on Victorian literature, culture, and media. Her first book, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in 19th Century Literature, was published by the Cambridge Press in 1998. During a recent year of leave, she spent some time as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where she completed a book entitled, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism, which is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. And as I mentioned earlier, she last visited MIT as a participant in 2009 in the Media and Transition 6 conference, where she gave a paper, a very interesting paper entitled, What Not to Save the Future of Ephemera? I hope the humanities don't fit in that category in a few years. Steve Pinker, to my immediate right, is the Harvard, is a Harvard College professor and John Stone family professor of psychology at Harvard. He's also taught at Stanford and spent 21 memorable years at MIT, where he became my friend as well as my colleague. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the American Psychological Association. He's received six honorary doctorates, at least at last count, and he's won many teaching awards. While he was here at MIT, he was legendary as a powerful and charismatic teacher, and he's won many prizes for his books, which include the language instinct, how the mind works, and the blank slate. He's currently honorary president of the Canadian Psychological Association and chair on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He also writes frequently, as many of you surely know, for places for such publications as the New Republic and the New York Times. He has been named, at one point, humanist of the year, so he has special qualifications to speak to this subject, and he has been listed in foreign policy and prospects magazine as among the world's top 100 public intellectuals. I think he's among the top five public intellectuals myself. And he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world today. His latest book is The Stuff of Thought, Language as a Window into Human Nature. So two very distinguished panelists who I'm sure have a great deal to say about our topic. I thought we'd begin by worrying very briefly about what we mean when we use the term the humanities. About 15 or so years ago, more than that, I guess 20 years ago, it was just on the beginning, just the very beginnings of the digital age. I remember because I was still using a computer that had floppy disks. I gave a lecture, a talk, a keynote talk at a convention of media, media practitioners and broadcasters, and there were a number of other academics there, but they were in fields like economics and business, and there were many other distinguished speakers there from a range of practical fields, but I was the only one from the humanities. And when I got up to give my talk, I thanked them for it, and said I was honored to be there, and indicated that I was especially happy to be there because I was the lone humanist on the panel. And I heard some grumbling, and I didn't quite pick up on what was going on, continued my talk. And I'm usually very attentive to my audiences, and I couldn't understand why a kind of emanation of hostility was rising out of the audience, and of course you can guess what it was. After the talk, one of my colleagues on the panel said to me, you know, you made a bad mistake, they thought you were saying you were the only human being on the panel. So that's part of my motivation for asking our two panelists to begin by defining the humanities. What do we mean when we say the word humanities? I don't mind starting because as someone who teaches at a liberal arts college, I find that the humanities are often conflated with the liberal arts as one of those sort of generic terms that people toss around without necessarily defining very precisely. But one of the things that struck me as I was thinking about how we might approach the topic, is to recognize that quite often these days the humanities is defined in terms of what it is not. It is not practical, it is not useful, it is not something that will necessarily get you a job. And most of the things that appear in public discourse as definitions of the humanities, I think reflect a sense that it has been a very rich and capacious term in the course of academic history, and has sort of blended into a large series of topics that sometimes are used in public discourse as a way of just characterizing things about academia in general rather than characteristics of particular disciplines. But recognizing that the humanities typically is defined as the study of what it means to be human, the study of what it means to ponder the deep questions of humanity, it's interesting to reflect on the fact that the different disciplines that make up the humanities, which might typically include language, literature, philosophy, religion, art, all are disciplines that fundamentally tend to focus on individual thought, individual action, individual and specific art objects and texts in a way that makes it harder to determine how those disciplines as broad fields fit together. And so I think that when we talk about the humanities now, we tend sometimes to look back to a sense of tradition in each of these fields as a way of orienting ourselves. But in fact, part of what I think is interesting about the conversation we'll be having today is recognizing that the term itself needs to be shifted and updated in a way that recognizes how it's evolved over time. Well, as a former humanist of the year, I want to also clarify that misunderstanding because there's another sense of the word humanist, which it's basically a kind of sanitized polite term for an atheist, but an atheist who, contrary to the stereotype in much of this country, doesn't believe in murder and child abuse and all those horrible things that people associate with atheism. And so it was kind of a rebranding if you're a humanist, sometimes preceded by secular, means you believe in morality and niceness and all kinds of good things, but not as derived from a supernatural deity. And in fact, I often get a lot of confusion when talking about humanism or being a humanist because I think it is sometimes referred to as a scholar in the humanities. Now, in terms of the, I was trying to, after I got your email with the preview of the questions, trying to think what would be a good definition of the humanities. And obviously there's not going to be a precise one because many of the fields in the humanities shade off into fields that are not humanities. Philosophy, for example, with symbolic logic and mathematical logic, political science, with sociology and other social sciences. But the best that I could come up with is the study of the products of the human mind. And I don't think that fits exactly, but I think it's pretty close because it includes languages, all of the arts, theories of previous thinkers such as philosophers, political theorists, maybe even history if you think of human behavior as ultimately coming from the human mind. So that's my best stab at it. I guess the only thing I would add is I've been very influenced in thinking about this in a theoretical sense by Clifford Geertz's writings. And he makes a great to do about the difference between what he sometimes calls the interpretive sciences against the empirical ones. And his desire to rest anthropology into the interpretive camp, he essentially defines the humanities as those scholarly endeavors that rely in a fundamental way on interpretive behaviors, rather than laboratory research or the kinds of empirical research that we sometimes associate with the social sciences. Another way to think about that contrast is to think of it not just as a matter of interpretation but of judgment, that so much of the humanities comes down to making judgments of value that are predicated on a different sense of value from practicality and utility, but aesthetic value or moral value or some more complicated sense of value. I'd like to pick up on that though because it strikes me that that is, I think it's probably an accurate characterization of what a lot of scholars in the humanities would say is their mandate. But it is, it can be questioned and in fact one could, certainly within anthropology, there are many anthropologists and not just the stones and bones physical anthropologists, but the cultural anthropologists who would say they're making hypotheses that are empirical. They could be true or false and they can be and ought to be tested. And I think one could, certainly philosophers, care very much about truth. It's not just a kind of criticism but they argue with each other as to what positions are sound and internally coherent, what are accurate versus inaccurate readings of a philosopher. And even in literary analysis, one could say that many claims in literary analysis are empirical claims that by the tradition of the humanities have not been subjected to empirical tests, the way hypotheses are in the social sciences and sciences, but could be and maybe ought to be. So I'll give you an example. This is from Jonathan Gottschall, a literary scholar who's been trying to integrate literary analysis with evolutionary theory from biology. And so he came across a claim in a study of European folktales that there is a, most of the females are described in terms of their physical appearance. A lot of the males are described in terms of their prowess. They're often sympathetic, attractive female protagonists and unsympathetic older female protagonists. And the scholar was attributing this to certain aspects of patriarchal European culture as it had developed at the time. And he thought, well, that's a hypothesis. It could be due to some peculiarity of early modern European culture. Another possibility is that there are certain inherent biases to the human mind that men are often valued in terms of their strength, women in terms of their looks and that might be a human universal. And so he went to an encyclopedia of myths and folktales. I think there were something like a thousand of them and sampled the ones from Europe and the ones from every other culture, coded them in terms of how often a female character was introduced in terms of her looks or her age. Likewise, male character, looks, age, were the younger ones sympathetic or the older ones sympathetic, depending on whether they were male and female, and just did what a social scientist would do and concluded that this particular hypothesis was false, that the sex differences that were observed correctly in the European folktales were seen in folktales in every single culture. Now whether or not he's right or wrong, it's a case in which he took a claim which one would think has some responsibility to being either true or false. I think most of us, even in the humanities, if someone said, well, is what you're saying true, maybe there are cases in which the person making the claim would shrug, but I think a lot of times they would say, well, it's true or compelling or you ought to agree with me or there are good reasons for it. As soon as you do that, there's no reason not to submit it to tests, maybe not as coarse as the one that Gottschall applied to the folktales, but it strikes me that this is actually quite an interesting and exciting avenue for the humanities that would bridge some of the gap between the two cultures and wouldn't be that hostile to the actual aims of humanists as they actually practice what they do, namely trying to say things that are warranted true, coherent, have good reasons behind them. One of the things that would be required in that kind of system would be recognizing that the sort of context you described consists of a larger data set that has to be used as the kind of framework for the analysis and so much of literary criticism in the past has rested on the study of a unique and individual text. Sometimes, unfortunately, absent of context, but sometimes sort of interestingly self-referential as a kind of analysis and of course there have been many literary theories that have come and gone that have had different attitudes towards what the appropriate contexts are, but in thinking about the way in which the humanities in general tend to privilege individual texts or individual, as you said, products of the human mind rather than sort of collective wisdom or collective data, the kind of shift you've suggested is the kind of thing that might be facilitated by the kinds of technological changes that make it possible to sort through lots and lots of different, say, literary texts in the way that people who are now looking at coding literary texts are able to do. It wouldn't have been possible in the past for a single scholar to assimilate 20,000 pieces of literature of the same period and look for similar image patterns. You could do that now. I think there's a good argument to be had about whether that is or is not literary analysis, but it could be done and it would be more testable and provable. And we should. I didn't want to over... Steve's correction is helpful. I wouldn't want to oversimplify it. There's a tradition of a kind of empirical work in literary study going back meant forever, really. When I was an undergraduate, one thing they were very big on was counting Shakespeare's images and there were whole books written by people who literally would go through the plays and count up the number of times they were references to nets or references to bloody knives or whatever. And then on the basis of this aggregated information, all collected before the age of the computer incidentally, what scholars used to devote their entire lives to could be done in 15 minutes with a search engine today. That's interesting and significant, I think, with a way certain aspects of what could be empirically checked in the humanities is now possible in a way that was not before the digital age. And this is a fascinating and complex theoretical aspect of the whole problem of the humanities. We probably shouldn't get too deeply into it. But my own impulse would be to say that the way I would respond to Steve's correction would be to say, yes, true, still the standard for what's compelling or coherent or, quote, truthful in the humanities is the standard of validity, I think. I'm borrowing now from E.D. Hirsch's great book Validity and Interpretation, in which he tries to distinguish between the forms of argument that humanists make as against the forms of argument that would be made in a purely empirical piece of work. And that what we can hope for is a kind of validity, which is based on evidence and proof. But it never has the kind of absolute certainty that, say, a scientific experiment would generate. But again, this is a very naughty question that is probably a partial digression. Let me turn now to a broader issue and ask our panelists to begin to comment on that. The call to the meeting was perhaps exaggerated the danger in which the humanities finds itself today. And it may well be that the discourse of crisis is a continuing aspect of our culture, that the humanities always seem to be in crisis, some might argue. Nonetheless, there have been some signs recently of something going on that justifies our concern for the field. One, just to remind some of you about, the nation of Iran has recently banned the study of humanities because they thought it was unhelpful to the health of the nation. And there was a quite elaborate article in the New York Times about this. There is now a great uproar going on in Great Britain over cuts in humanities programs that are so serious that many institutions of higher education are being forced to regroup in profoundly radical ways. On the other hand, if you look at certain kinds of statistical evidence in the United States, for the United States at least, there's some evidence for the idea that things have not changed that much, at least over the last 10 years. I have some graphs that we actually could show, but I think I'll just summarize the primary findings. If you look at a list over the last 10 years of doctorates awarded in the United States, there's a tremendous increase in the number of science and engineering doctorates. But the humanities doctorates, although there have been slight declines, but essentially over the last 10 years, the numbers are relatively stable. This is not the only measure. I guess you could show it, Steve. The first just shows the difference. Science and engineering doctorates as against non-science and engineering. And you can see the non-science and engineering category, which includes more than just the humanities, is fairly stable. If we go to the next one, the very elaborate chart, will be too difficult to read on the screen, but we can take a quick look at it. It's too small to read. I'll summarize this one. Go on to the next one, Steve. I can expand it, if you'd like. These are 10-year numbers, and they're interesting for that reason. They're broken down by specific fields. If you drop down to the humanities, Steve, near the lower middle of the pay, I can went to the drama. It's just below education and health. There we are. In 1998, total number of humanities doctorates, 5,275. 10 years later, 4,641. A decline, but not that much. English literature, 1,600 degrees to 1,400. Foreign languages, a pitiful 643 in 1998, but an equally pitiful, not different, 627 at the end of the decade. History holding pretty stable. 946, 10 years ago, 921 today, and so forth. What these numbers suggest is that if there is a crisis, it's a very slow moving one, or the faculties in the graduate programs are not interested in the crisis, and this is maybe more likely, are continuing to produce PhDs who may not be bound for work in universities. With that as a kind of background, is the question of the impending diminution of the humanities more than just an ongoing discourse? Is there something more urgent or threatening in the current version that we're hearing? Is the advent of digital technologies related to current fears about the survival of humanities programs? Do you want to start with that or shall I? I guess one observation I would make is that I think that in my initial remarks I was commenting on the way in which the humanities tend to kind of stand in for traditional fields and academia in general in a kind of broadly broad brush way. And one aspect of that argument is a recognition that there's an inherent sort of aura of remoteness about the humanities. The humanities is a field that studies the past and the very distant past. And at a time when technology seems to be speeding things up and bringing information to us faster and faster, I think there's a sense of the pace somehow of the humanities doesn't seem in tune with the times. And so without there being a specific critique of what the humanities is failing to do as a discipline, I think at times there's a sort of assumption that it simply doesn't meet the current needs of the current generation without there being a careful investigation of what aspects of what disciplines need to be changed. Yeah, I think there is reason to be concerned. It could be that faculty tend to prioritize shorting out new PhDs and that's what gets protected. I think what's also relevant would be how many students are taking the courses, how many universities continue to have vigorous programs in the humanities. And my understanding is that the enrollment, the undergraduate enrollments, well I don't know if they've been going down in the last 10 years but they were going down in the years before that. And it is, I mean the nightmare scenario is that the humanities has been surviving on a general idea that to be an educated person you can't not have some big dose of the humanities but that if there was ever a disaggregation of the more practical aspects of university education in the eyes of students and the humanities, then it could spiral downward. I mean a very terrifying analogy would be newspapers survived because the classified ads from mattresses and apartments subsidized the news and the editorials then Craigslist came around and disaggregated it. People could sell their mattress for free on a website and we all know what's been happening to newspapers. The content of two of our previous forums. So the question is are dollars and smart minds being supported in the humanities has a kind of spillover of all the kids who want to get degrees in business and engineering and law simply because it's always been the American tradition that you can't just get an education in a bachelor's degree in business without having to do some 19th century novel or modern philosophy. If you have the one in the phoenix universities nibbling away at students at another end budget conscious deans who are just looking at what brings in grants or what's most popular among students could there be a kind of death spiral of the humanities as it stops getting cross subsidized from the rest of what we consider to be an undergraduate education. If I could add something speaking as someone who's actually a college administrator myself and so often in the position of looking at the budgets of different departments and comparing them it's absolutely fundamental to our system of education that that kind of cross subsidy does take place because in fact it's just inherently true that some fields are much more expensive than others. That it is much more expensive to run a chemistry lab but on the other hand a chemistry professor is much more likely to bring in significant grant money. It's much less expensive to study the Victorian novel. All I need when I walk into a class is a copy of Bleak House but on the other hand if we have except the general premise that Steve outlined that education is partly contextual that it's partly requiring you to learn not just the one thing you know that you came in to major in but everything else surrounding it that provides an important intellectual context then any disaggregation of different fields is inherently problematic and so one of the things that's most disturbing about talks about the crisis in the humanities is the tendency to want to carve out different parts of either an undergraduate or university curriculum and pick out the ones that seem not to be thriving at any given time and talk about why they might need to be excised from the whole organic whole that if you start breaking it into little pieces you'll find that the kinds of values that are associated with different fields differ over one decade to another and certainly the budgetary impact is different but once you start down that path people like myself provost you know will start coming in and saying well this department isn't as profitable as it might be and perhaps this colleague isn't as profitable as he might be and once you start that argument I think it's hard to shut the door on it. One implication that both of you have been saying I think might be worth expanding on a little bit or at least this is an implication I hear and I have some sympathy with the argument is it possible that the idea of the humanities we're talking about is if not uniquely primarily American because it's certainly the case that undergraduate education in Canada or undergraduate education in China or undergraduate education in most of Europe is much more specialized than it is in the United States. This idea that you come to university to sort of grow is not universal respond. That's certainly the case and it's one of the things that I think many would point to as a real strength of the American system. It's a strong distinguishing feature and if you send students abroad for example for their junior years at almost any other country they come back amazed to find that in your junior year in the world you're studying nothing but the major that you began studying your freshman year that you've been studying one field and one field very intensively. In some ways what seems most surprising about that is that in a context where most undergraduates are not in fact going on to be professional academics and getting PhDs but doing something else it's quite amazing to me that in Britain anybody is allowed to spend four years studying nothing but a single field that may not in fact be the vocation that they've chosen. So as an English major at a liberal arts college in America you're learning lots of things in addition to English literature. If you're studying English literature for three years at Oxford if you're not going to be an English literature professor there might be other things that you'd wish you'd studied. I think it's even in a number of other countries it's even closer to the Phoenix University model where people just study things. They go to what they call going to university means basically getting education in business or maybe in law. I was surprised when I visited Poland for private profit making universities in psychology. My own field which I didn't realize could turn a profit. These are basically would-be psychotherapists and they kind of went to psychotherapy school and it was private and there were shareholders and they didn't learn the 19th century novel or modern philosophy and they didn't seem to miss it. I think they should miss it but the fear is that is that a direction that the American system could go in if people don't value the humanities. I mean I want to take in a slightly different direction that I think is relevant to this which is Allison talked about the problem of partitioning off the humanities faculty and I don't know how the dollars work but it strikes me that a lot of places a tenured professor in the humanities in his or her sixties with benefits and retirement is pretty expensive especially if they don't bring in any grants and so it is kind of a attempting target and one of the ways that would both have the practical benefit I think of protecting the humanities but also I think would be good for the humanities is to integrate it more with the social sciences and sciences and there's just so many what I think of as tremendously exciting opportunities to do so which would make humanities faculty indispensable. Already now for example I wouldn't go to a university that didn't have a strong linguistics department which has traditionally been humanities simply because I'm a psychologist of language and even though I do experiments I need to have good colleagues and people who will teach my students in linguistic theory and history of languages I wouldn't want to be in a place that didn't have a good philosophy department because if I'm teaching on say consciousness the issues including the scientific issues were laid out by philosophers and those are cases where the humanities have blended into social sciences or sciences over the last 40 years but I think it could happen in other fields and it's a common place that that's the way linguistics and philosophy works but say in you'd be restricted in the United States because there are very few undergraduate programs in linguistics that's true there's only four universities you can teach it lucky you've got a job but that could be so the way linguistics has it which is I mean it's still fragile but it's made itself a little more less dispensable by being a field that people who study language scientifically can't do without so for example music theory I think has a lot to both give and take to auditory perception and that's been starting to happen in the last decade English literature there's so many connections to the sciences of human nature consciousness and that's kind of what novels are trying to simulate cognitive psychology theory of mind what is the mental process by which we take other people's perspectives evolutionary psychology what are the motives in human nature that excite people in all ages and all cultures linguistics and poetics Jay Kaiser here at MIT has done very interesting work applying phonological theory to metrics in poetry in political theory there are connections to both evolutionary psychology and political psychology this knitting together would attract to the humanities the kind of undergraduates who currently get excited about what they can do in these sciences and social sciences but also it would make the disaggregation a little bit harder for deans because the people in the humanities would be integrally involved in the very some of the very same research projects as their colleagues in safer departments Allison has suggested that already that the field of the humanities because it's always sort of historical backward looking in a certain essential way has a somewhat different relation to technology than our neighbors in social science and certainly in engineering and science and I'm wondering if there are other aspects of this difference that we ought to address before we go on to what I think is more exciting some of the really positive ways in which digital technologies and the possibilities that now are available because of our digital culture how they're not just dangerous but enabling to the humanities in certain ways and that's where I hope we'll go in a second but do you think that there are further distinctions between our field's relation to technology that I guess I would add that considering that even the social sciences have become more data driven in the last decade or so and that as Steve has pointed out there are many possibilities for some of the humanities fields to move in the direction of looking to a kind of broader more scientific methodology in collecting a wide range of information there's certainly room for some blurring of boundaries but I do think that one of the challenges in thinking about technology in relation to humanities does have to do with thinking about the distinction between technology as a way of accessing information and technology as a way of sort of processing information and using data in a field like literature most of the use of technology that's been most exciting really is text based it's just different ways of manipulating text it's not using computers as processors it's using computers as ways of either presenting text or presenting visual material or presenting aesthetic material differently and a lot of those things have been very exciting they don't fundamentally change the way in which we approach literature they present different forms of literature like hypertext or they create different possibilities for accessing literature that might be hard to reach because of where it's stored where it exists how rare it is but I don't think most of the fields in the humanities have fully incorporated the possibilities of thinking about the ways in which they actually process information moving in a different direction I think where you do see those kinds of potentials is in for example the growing use among historians of GIS capabilities to figure out ways in which the sense of history that they're examining say in a particular geographic region can be reconsidered visually in ways that they perhaps hadn't considered when they were looking primarily at primary documents which is what historians typically have looked at so I can think of historians whose work really has changed over the last decade because instead of simply looking at the words in actual texts they're looking at a different way of conceiving of the evolution of a small New England town when you look at visual mapping of how the population has moved for example and really moving almost more into geography or economics and so those kinds of changes in how we think about the information that constitutes our field I think is where we're just starting to head. Well let's continue that I mean ways in which you think, promising ways in which you think the advent of these technologies can enhance and strengthen rather than endanger our fields. I guess the other field I would see as moving in that direction in interesting ways is art history where of course the sharing of visual information has been dramatically expanded by the establishment of visual repositories of visual information that previously had to be accessed either through books that then had to be scanned and turned into slides or through actually going to museums and seeing the original works of art which of course anyone would agree is preferable but isn't always practical for say undergraduates in a classroom and so the fact that many art historians have been able to not only look at things that would have been previously inaccessible but apply computer technology to scanning them looking for parallels looking at ways in which similar to the example we were thinking of of looking at all of Shakespeare's plays and having the computer decide how many times a bloody knife appears you can look at hundreds of Rembrandt drawings and look for all of the ones that are shaded in the lower right hand corner by having a scanned computer do some of that preliminary work that's not going to replace the kind of judgment you need to apply to whether that's interesting or significant but it can certainly save you some legwork to have a kind of processing power and to me one of the things that's interesting to think about is whether that will change the kind of privileging of the individual object that I mentioned earlier and turn it into a more broadly comparative almost experimental network of data that one looks at that would really change I think the way in which most humanities fields have evolved which is out of close study of particular texts particular objects particular paintings in great and loving detail which is fundamental to each of those fields but if that can be contextualized with a broader range of reference through being able to assimilate a lot of information more rapidly that could be an interesting direction. I was originally hoping to give a demo of a project that I've been peripherally involved with but for legal restrictions I can't show it just yet because it hasn't been publicly announced. This is a project that does automated text analyses of Google Books. Now you all know that Google Books has scanned gazillion books going back to the 1500s and when it doesn't take much imagination to think that you could search for text strings and see how they rise and fall over the past few centuries and as soon as I started to demo this I just had the hypotheses that you can test that were previously you might think are untestable they're just influence, interest dissemination of ideas. Well you can actually see them in the percentage of books in different eras that cite a particular author or a particular term and so on. So I mean I immediately I was reading a book by a social historian and a Lynn Hunt who had claimed that interest in civil rights in western history peaked at two periods in the second half of the 18th century the time of the Enlightenment and then again after World War II around the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and so I just typed civil rights into this program and sure enough there was a big peak in the second half of the 18th century and another peak after 1950. And I mentioned this at lunch as soon as I was able to run this I was having lunch with a guest Meagan Marshall a historian literary scholar who's written writing a book on Margaret Fuller, wrote a book on the Peabody sisters interest in Harriet Beecher Stowe and my wife Rebecca Goldstein who's a novelist and philosopher and they just about almost ripped the laptop out of my hands they had so many things they wanted to test. Rebecca wanted to see, she was just writing about how the influence of Spinoza suddenly grew in Germany at a certain point in the 18th century and she wanted to see if the mentions of Spinoza went up. Meagan had hypotheses as to the rise and fall of interest in Harriet Beecher Stowe and wanted to immediately look at the curve of how many times Harriet Beecher Stowe is mentioned. Then when I was writing a book on the history of violence and all of these hypotheses that would seem just too squishy to be testable I found myself trying to test. I mean just to give you an example there were a lot of, you could look through European history and there were an awful lot of really kind of stupid wars fought over looks like nothing I mean they're basically pissing contests but the kings would send soldiers into battle and people would die just because of who would salute whom or who would sit at the head of which table and that kind of thing plummeted especially in the last 50 years where at least developed nations are very skittish about getting into war over questions of honor, glory, precedence, preeminence, prestige so I was curious as to whether a word like glory for example probably doesn't have the same pulse increasing resonance today that it probably did 100 years ago. I mean I wouldn't go out and put on a uniform and risk my life for national glory I mean it just doesn't get the blood coursing but it probably did 100 years ago much more so I did a search for words like glorious honorable and indeed they plummeted and just in contrast all of us now have a kind of crossover of scientific concepts into the mainstream discourse. We have ethological concepts that the deflate and deconstruct honor things like alpha male, testosterone poisoning pecking order, pissing contest all of them are attempts to say that what used to be considered inherently and unquestionably noble pursuits might just be symptoms of too much testosterone coursing through male hypothalamuses and indeed as glorious and honorable went down things like pecking order and alpha male and testosterone and pissing contest went up and it doesn't prove that this is why we should credit the women's movement for fewer for fewer stupid wars and actually I actually do make this argument and this is one of my pieces of evidence but that's the kind of thing that without tools like this would just be well you could say it's a good story maybe you believe it maybe you don't. Now this doesn't prove it but it does give a little bit of of a teeth to it and I can imagine that once this tool is available the humanities again it's not going to replace the deep rich interpretation of a single work but to the extent that a work is interpreted in the context of some generalization the era differences between that era and other eras differences between that culture and other cultures you start to be able to teach them thanks to these I think at least in the future of these developments. So what one implication of what you've been saying clearly is that the way in which digital technologies allow us to aggregate knowledge in a way that had never happened before will open up not just the humanities presumably but all fields that's certainly a powerful and I think compelling idea but are there other ways in which we can think of the possibilities of digital technologies as strengthening or enhancing the humanities I mean what you're talking about Steve here is a kind of almost specific scholarly application I have a scholarly project I'll go to Google books so I'll test my hypothesis to see if I can find support but are there other things we can say about some of my colleagues here at MIT for example have worked on projects in which well I'm thinking now especially about Peter Donaldson's video project in which he has collected a range of visual versions video or film versions of Shakespeare plays from all around the world and what he can do then is juxtapose let's say a single scene in Hamlet in 13 or 50 different variations and apart from being a fascinating and crucial study guide presumably that sort of thing has a much wider application than merely to Shakespeare that sort of thing also seems to be very promising one thing I would add about that is that we've been focusing primarily on research but of course if one thinks about teaching as a kind of introductory stage of research for students at an entering level I think in some ways technology has changed teaching more than it's changed research for exactly the reason you're describing that it's so much easier to bring richer materials into the classroom if you think about what it was like to try and show a scene from a movie 20 years ago just to illustrate a point in class the sort of technological expertise needed just to do that was beyond anyone who was a film and media culture scholar an English professor like myself wouldn't bother I can now teach a class in which I'm constantly pulling up websites showing clips bringing in DVDs accessing a wide range of contextual information and allowing my students to make a lot of comparisons between textual materials and visual materials and talk about not only novels in relation to plays but novels in relation to films in relation to television episodes in relation to other kinds of media in a way that really broadens their understanding of literature as a form of media like any other that simply wouldn't have been technologically possible 10 years ago and I can see my own teaching and that of many of my colleagues having changed quite dramatically what I'm also seeing now is of course the students have changed even more dramatically and what we're presenting has changed enough that the kinds of dissertations that students are writing now clearly are very different from what they would have been a decade ago as well and so I think the trickle-down effect on their own research when the students we are now teaching are writing their own dissertations and becoming researchers in turn I think will be even more noticeable I'm at the St. Anecdote when I was an undergraduate and I took the art history that kind of cave paintings to Andy Warhol type course the textbook was in black and white and it's like take our word for it to use some red and even today of course a good textbook like that if printed in color could be push the budget of a typical undergraduate but then you have an iPad or a laptop and you can see it in color and if I could just follow up on that with another example one of the things that you recognize then is that much more of what one does in the classroom involves working with the students one-on-one with the information in front of you having allowed them to gather a lot of information on their own that you used to have to present in the form of a lecture so that for example if I was lecturing on the Victorian novel to use an example that Steve used in the past I might have spent the whole first class doing background on the Victorian period now I can say go to the Victorian web which is a website the George Landau setup that's wonderful has all of the visual material I would have shown them it has wonderful photographs of what people were in the period it has lists of all of the important political accomplishments of the period and I can say here are the five things I want you to look at I'd like you to familiarize yourself with these basic cultural trends now let's talk about the topic of this particular class and I've saved an entire lecture and allowed them to do something much more interesting and interactive to assimilate information that I used to be the only source for now they can have that information in so many different ways that my role is no longer to aggregate information and present it but to lead them through the analysis of the information rather than simply collecting it in the form of lectures these are very positive things that we've been talking about and maybe we can continue this sort of positive note for a moment how about the way in which the scholarly publishing and what you called in a note to me the dissemination of information is changing because of digital technologies since I was the one who raised it maybe it's only fair for me to take the first stab at that but one of the things that struck me in thinking about how my own field and other humanities fields have changed is recognizing that the sort of pace of research and presentation of research which is fundamental to how we all conceive our careers and certainly to how we present work to students is shifting so rapidly that I think a lot of what we talk about as a crisis in humanities is partly just a crisis in humanities publishing as well as in other academic venues and so it looks worse than it is because there's such a clear sense of vulnerability on the part of university presses but one of the things when I spoke earlier about a sense of the humanities feeling a little bit more timeless and hence out of time or out of pace with contemporary culture I think is seen most dramatically in the pace of say book production which now which has always been slow but now feels very slow when you compare the pace at which say scientific research appears in various websites and then think about getting a book a literary monograph accepted which might take about two years from the time that you first start sending out letters that will sit on somebody's desk for a month or two and then they'll get back to you and by the time each reader's report has taken half a year and you've done some revisions and then it takes another six months for it to go before a board it feels very slow and it feels very old that's not necessarily problematic but what it does do is create a sense that other fields are moving faster and that part of the sense of I think vulnerability on the part of humanities colleagues comes in part from a sense that we're still in the old publishing world and everybody else is moving into the new publishing world so that colleagues in economics are publishing a lot of their work online colleagues in the sciences are doing most of their work online we seem to be the only people left who are still doing books and I love books and everybody that I know would still enjoy publishing a book in addition to perhaps doing other forms of presentation but the fact that that is the kind of canonical standard way in which we present work means that we're starting to move into a different kind of universe in terms of our scholarly field from the one that other people are occupying and I think many of us who do spend a fair amount of time reading other work on the web recognize that we're sort of living in two cultures and there's the slow moving book culture and then there's the rest of the world that's moving a lot faster so trying to bring those things into alignment in the way that some presses I think are trying to do by expanding their digital publications seems to me absolutely critical to helping to bring the humanities along at the same pace that other fields are moving there's when you talk about the book they're actually two different things the one could be referring to one is something monograph length or longer as opposed to a short article and the other is printed on dead trees and so a book itself now obviously never going to have the quick turnaround paper does just because of sheer length but in terms of publication lag there's no reason anymore that it has to be as slow as it used to be when everything was done just purely on paper now when I do research I'll have the physical book which has a lot of advantages paper is a very good medium for a lot of things but then I'll also have often either the iBook version open or I'll go to the page on Amazon or Google Books so that when I want to do one thing that paper is terrible at namely searching for text strings I can just even though I'm looking at the book I'll then go to the screen type in the text screen find the page go back to the book and this speeds things up a lot because I've never actually timed it but in doing research relying on a thick book you often spend a lot of time leafing looking for some phrase that you read that you forgot to write down it is completely anachronistic that we have to do that the physical constraints on a book really do start to feel frustrating like basically a footnote is a kind of a primitive hyperlink when you think about it and an index is a primitive search engine there's no we could love books as much as we always have but not necessarily confine ourselves to some of these limitations which are really just historical artifacts another thing that drives me crazy is discursive end notes where often the book publisher doesn't even think to do things like put the page range at the top or to let you know what chapter you're looking for the notes for and a lot of time is spent in many books just trying to go back and forth between the footnotes and the text there's just no reason that that should happen and you don't have to be a Philistine to complain about it because it says nothing about the scholarly depth or even the sheer bulk of the material in fact on the contrary it makes longer texts that much more usable and appealing one way in which I think the argument becomes not so much about the substance but about the way in which the books are put together I think that even the example that I gave of how long it takes to produce a book mostly isn't about the printing it's about the kind of traditional review process and how long it takes and one of the things that struck me in the most recent experience that I had of sending a book out and waiting for readers reports was that it now begins to seem odd that it takes so long and that only two people are reading your book manuscript that is when you compare that to what happens when you put something on the web and lots of people start commenting on it right away that's become a common enough way of getting critical feedback because I was only hearing from two people and it took them months and months they were wonderful thoughtful reports and I'm not even saying that it's necessarily a better thing to have lots of quick comments rather than long thoughtful comments but it is different and my experience even of reading those reports has changed over the last few years because I've become more accustomed to a kind of scholarly interaction that's closer to real time it began to seem very strange that it was taking that long and that I was relying on the judgment of two people to comment on a particular aspect of a work rather than lots of people and so things like the recent Shakespeare Quarterly experiment with crowd sourcing their peer review process where instead of sending it out they just posted it and said tell us what you think it got a lot of attention and it's an interesting idea I'm not sure it substitutes for identifying people with particular expertise and targeting them but it's become common enough that my own way of thinking about my writing is starting to change because it's beginning to seem very strange to compare what two people think instead of wondering what do a lot of other people think I think that's an acute comment that I'm in a field that's not exactly the hardest of science is cognitive psychology but not quite in the humanities either but there the rate limiting step is absolutely the review process and it's been estimated that in experimental psychology there's a six year lag from having an idea to seeing it into print and a lot of that lag is the cycle of it sitting in reviewers inboxes they take their time to write the review usually it's with demands for revise and resubmit then there's another review process that goes on for many cycles actually getting it into print is one of the speediest parts but the process our process of peer review does deserve a second look it's not clear and I think all of us know publish and peer review journals there's a lot of chance as to who those two people are who get sent your paper and if they like you it'll get accepted and if they hate you it won't get accepted and if one likes you and one hates you then there'll be endless cycles of revise and resubmit and you hope that the editor will you know so it's not an optimal way necessarily of filtering for quality now I don't know if the alternative of which is more and more feasible publish everything let readers you know rank link comment things rise to the top of the page to the extent that people like it people anyone can post their own review they find a flaw there it is at the end of your paper you could reply to it or not and with unlimited publication space unlike the wood pulp journals there's no reason that everything will be published and the stuff that's really crummy will just sink to the bottom as no one comments on it or links to it I don't know if I'm ready to go that far but on the other hand we are living with the historical legacy of limited publication space and the practice of peer review probably was solidified when academia was far smaller than it is now it's not clear if you were going to devise the process from scratch and your disinter atom was encourage and disseminate the highest quality scholarship that the current process of sending it out to two people is necessarily the best in the put very gently I I'd like to urge the audience to get your questions ready this is my last question and after this we will turn to the audience implicit in what both of you have just been saying is the vast issue of the way in which we're clearly in a moment in which the inheritance of print culture is migrating into digital format and obviously that's going to take a tremendously long time to be completed but it's already well underway it's obvious to me at least that humanist ought to have a great deal to say about the way this migration is occurring and I'm wondering if they actually do and I think this is really a major question even in the case of Google books of course we know that there's a quite rich controversy over the particular strategies that are being used by Google for this process and how much control or lack of control Google will be exercising over the materials and that's just one sort of small example my broad question is in this ongoing process which presumably is going to take generations do you think that as I do that humanists have a particularly important role to play and if they do how would they begin to do it how would they begin to influence the technologist to let them say listen do footnotes better to make it a floating hypertext than to put it at the back do you want to start with that well I think the tone of your question suggests that you feel that perhaps humanists have abrogated their responsibility in some way abdicated their responsibility and not stepping forward more decisively and I think it's because things have changed so quickly and individual tastes are so different that I don't think there is a real policy on the part of any professional organization that I can think of towards some of those questions and controversies that you're mentioning and I think individuals themselves have quite mixed feelings about them I wasn't as much as the folks who are making encyclopedias many years ago in the very early dawn of the digital age I was asked to review a proto version, a beta version of what became encarta and they were very excited about the fact that they could include voice as well as text and so their plan was okay we're going to do poetry and we're going to have Robert Frost poem and we'll have Frost reading the poem and wonderful idea but they found because there was limited bandwidth in those days they found that they didn't really have enough space to do the whole thing so this was their decision this is what I have in mind their decision was give only half the poem because we can hear voice and together that way even though it was only a 15 line poem that seems a sort of bad decision that a humanist might have been able to correct. That's right and I think though I was sort of joking about the sense in which humanists haven't stepped up to the plate I think it's the case that it's very difficult for individual scholars to feel that they can speak with authority about whether it is a good thing or a not good thing to have certain perspectives taken on how the for example digitization of books by Google will proceed because how you feel about it depends among other things on whether you yourself already have access to a good research library in which case why would you particularly favor this project versus someone who doesn't who might see that it really opens up their research horizons in an exciting way. I think people have very different views on it depending on whether they see their own research agenda being expanded or not particularly affected. I think though that the question that Steve raised about where the kind of filtering takes place in the publication process before something is published or is it afterwards is part of the issue because if there is no sort of filtration process in determining what does get digitized, what does get presented, what is accessible I think there is some sense that it's difficult to know what the overall impact on particular fields will be. Would for example there be an enormous boom in studying a particular author simply because their books got digitized first and is that the way in which you would want to decide who is the major novelist of the 1920s because this particular collection came forward. As soon as I say that I say I find myself thinking it's wonderful the stuff that's now accessible that you can find on the web. It's unbelievable the way in which research has changed by virtue of the things that are now there and often the kind of odd idiosyncratic arbitrary things that just happen to be there are the fortuitous choices that lead you in an interesting direction. So I'm not sure it's a bad thing but it is certainly an uncontrolled thing and so in some ways what would make sense would be to have some of the major professional organizations or some groups of scholars be invited to weigh in on some of the decisions that I think are being made about how some of these things will proceed. Instead what you have are individual libraries individual presses and for-profit companies you know doing their best to do what makes sense from their perspective that's not the same as deciding we're going to have a national digital archive here's how we're going to set it up. It's lots of individual and in some cases commercially driven decisions that might go in the right direction and might end up being something that we wish had evolved differently. Let me mention another point that hasn't come up in our discussion yet but that I think is relevant to this. I'm assuming the experience of the three of us or anyone in our age demographic that very often we learn about digital innovations from people who are younger than us that it's a I can think of a lot of cases where it would be a graduate student who says oh have you, did you know that you could keep files on your computer as a PDF I mean this is 10 or 12 years ago that didn't occur to me to have my reprint collection actually on my computer and I'm sure there are many other examples. I don't know if there have been studies of the demographic profile in the humanities but anecdotally it feels to me kind of old I mean in the professoriate anyway that the consequence of the expansion of the university's massive granting of tenure in the 70s means that there's an aging professoriate a lot of people if they survive at all hanging on by their fingernails as a migratory lecturers can't break into the majors not because of talent but just because our generation hasn't died yet is there going to be I think a limitation is there going to be a limitation on the innovation in the humanities just from the fact that it's not getting this bulge of younger people who tend to be the early adopters and early innovators for that matter I think there are a lot of questions that say Allison raised on how could you have say visualization techniques in different fields history, music, political science, languages that say even spread of languages over history we actually see it oozing across a map in 3D or something that I can't think of because I've already passed my critical period for acquiring new technologies but that some 20 year old it would be the most obvious thing to him or her but if that 20 year old is going to go into well go into I don't want to say engineering in this university but according to law for example something horrible like that instead of into English literature or philosophy are we missing out on that source of innovation by our skewed demographics now's the time for the audience may I ask you if you'll notice there are microphones on both aisles it would be helpful if you would speak into the microphone because our sessions are recorded as you know and it would also be helpful if you would identify yourself when you come to the microphone so we're open for questions now but while we're waiting for you to get up your courage to come up with questions here we are I'm Leslie roll I'm at the graduate school of at Harvard so my question is you have spoken a lot about using digital technologies as tools for productivity or as an extension of things that are already done what about digital technologies for creation so when you look at the iPad and you look at the types of books that are being created and you spoke a little bit about that but the example is one but the ability to you know all of the basically all of the literacies that you want to put in you can and I think that unless the humanities you know heads in that direction it really does feel sort of old and you know it won't get integrated into teaching and learning at least at a you know elementary and or you know high school level so if you would speak a little bit about that I think that would be interesting thank you I think there is a lot of promise in that just as in as Alison mentioned in lecturing the ability of PowerPoint to allow you to show images, animation, video is a very powerful teaching tool it can be used in gimmicky, distracting ways but for at least for what I do teaching psychology the opportunities that it's opened have been amazing and likewise with books I don't know if you've heard the expression of a book this is a book with you know video links and so on that could be a nightmare if it was like what you often have on news websites where you click a story and instead of reading it you've got some guy yammering to you which I find incredibly annoying because I'd rather just read it on the other hand there are some things where the medium actually can be put to good use we already are used to that with illustrations many books have illustrations and plates and often it's important to have color as in our history in some cases it might be important to have video or motion or sound or graphics so just an example the book that I'm working on now on violence there's a discussion in which I'm referring to parts of the brain that are involved in self control and violence and I have the standard picture of a brain but when I try to understand the brain myself and when I teach about it I have a graphics program where you can actually rotate it and look at it from different angles which is far more intuitive than seeing a static picture just because the brain is such a wiggly complicated three dimensional object that unless you can kind of pull it apart look inside you really don't know what you're looking at if there was a book that when you talk about the brain had not just a picture of the brain but something where you could take your finger and rotate the brain or dissect it to see what's behind this lobe when the text refers to it that could be a huge asset in communication and I think that's where the sort of book debate will end when it becomes easier to do that sort of thing because already people for example working in fields like musicology are noticing pretty dramatic differences between what it means to write an article in which if you're talking about a particular Brahms symphony somebody has to go find a recording of it and in some other space listen to it and then come back to your argument and see what they think versus being able to click onto it and have the precise illustration that you'd like played immediately but the question also raises points out the fact that we're talking from a scholarly rather than a creative perspective that there's a whole lot more that one could say that's very interesting about the forms of art that are now possible using technology and we've really been focusing primarily on the scholarly dimension and so when I'm talking about a book I'm talking about something like a scholarly monograph within my own field if you think about how novels may change when people start incorporating video and illustrations into them because you can I think eventually it won't be long before you'll have novels or something that we might or might not call novels that will be a combination of text and image perhaps moving image that will be an aesthetic experience that's not at all like anything we have now Alright I'm Flourish Clink and I am a lecturer in comparative media studies and I just graduated from MIT in the comparative media studies department hearing this I have to say you guys I'm supposed to be writing a summary of this right now and I had to jump up and give you this question because this isn't a perfect example of how people aren't getting it I just tried to write my master's thesis on a topic which in many ways was very traditional but was about you know some of these texts which actually do have video and animation and so on and I was incredibly frustrated because the MIT library wouldn't take the information that is ephemeral this is stuff that's all posted online and I can't guarantee it's going to exist forever so when you can't find it anymore my work is total trash it's gone and the MIT library wouldn't accept like all of that information that I had carefully collated you know I couldn't put it in HTML form and give it to them and I've had there have been other students who have had this case too and this is a problem for academic publishing because I'm looking into the future and thinking how is my work ever going to actually get published you know in a way that anybody can understand it when you know as you were saying paper journals are not going to be able to show the animated gif that I'm talking about so I just wanted to bring that to you and I know there was a technical problem that the library didn't have the facilities for storing your information or your information was in a category they didn't care about well I wouldn't be able to say on that because by the time that I got to that point when they said no I was just like screw you all I've worked on this for so long you know what I mean but more or less as I understand it the issue was that they require you to put in a sort of a text version of this format in their way and if it is code if it's HTML code then the best that you can do is submit like your entirely marked up document and have it printed and bound into their little book with all the markup in it which I've known several people to have done and you can put a CD in the back but CDs you know degrade over time so there's not really a good solution there and also then you know you're responsible for going through a lot of bureaucratic mess to even get that CD in there which by the time the next person goes to it will be degraded so it's a policy issue I think but it's not just MIT's fault you know I'm not trying to pick on MIT this is I think coming up in several places it's a media issue and a storage issue but it also it seems to me there's sort of two places where that's a problem in the creation of a work that relies on links that may disappear and materials that may be ephemeral and then in what level of commitment of resources does the institution have to maintaining a variety of formats in order to keep those things alive and that's in fact was a topic at the media and transition conference that David referred to earlier a recognition that because there is no organized system at work here you just have lots of people doing lots of different things there hasn't really nobody has come up with the sort of gold standard of here is what we're going to do to ensure that the same format that you're using somebody else is using and the library will be committed to maintaining they're waiting for all of that you know they're waiting to decide you know which format and which system of any particular medium is going to survive and that's something that just kind of happens in an evolutionary way so I can certainly see why that's frustrating one thing it seems to me this obviously is a question that goes far beyond the humanities it applies to all fields but it may have particular urgency in the humanities it's the problem of what I call the instability of platforms I mean if you the fact is the book is an incredibly durable technology and if you think about the delivery systems platforms for communication that have risen and disappeared just in the last 15 or 20 years you'll understand more clearly why this problem of instability is such a deep one you can certainly understand why archivists and libraries would be reluctant to commit themselves to formats that are going to go out of date on the other hand we don't have any permanent formats and this seems to me in a broad sense one of the really fundamental problems that the ongoing digital transition we're in we may be in a lifetime of transition we may live and die in a ceaseless spectacle of transition but that wonderful phrase is Thomas Pinchons but if that's true it raises this issue in a particularly acute way I mean give an example that probably a number of us are familiar with when I had to turn in my thesis and there's this transition period where the librarians were still insisting that theses be submitted on Crane's thesis paper typed with a cloth ribbon a xerography wasn't permanent enough because the little bits of plastic could flake off inkjet printers were still kind of new on the block now you can see the concern of the libraries on the other hand it would be preposterous to insist that all theses be submitted with an ink ribbon the way they used to in answer your question what do humanists have to contribute to evolution of digital technology this strikes me as a huge one namely who is asking the question what are people 100 years from now going to have as our cultural legacy if the 8 inch floppy gives way to the 5 inch floppy gives way to the thumb drive and so on that's the question that the humanist can and should ask forcing everyone else to think about something that they may not have thought about I myself think that one implication of this is that you have to be ready to commit to interim choices but that you should try to make the interim choice as widely shared as possible if it's only the Harvard library that's made the commitment it's much less helpful and if all university libraries say okay we found a semi-stable platform we're going to stick with that and see what happens for the next 15 years and even if nuances appear later we're going to stick with this until we see that a better alternative is available that's one partial strategy for this but I think in fact it's one of the critical ongoing problems that face all forms of learning and education in the digital age I have a question here I wanted to defend the honor of the library actually the libraries are just enforcing the rules of the provost as you know it really goes further than the libraries I'm sure they were but thank you for defending libraries and to the absolute problem that we have in being able to bring the archive forward to maintain for 100 years for 200 years you want your thesis read 50 years from now and it won't be it won't be if it is not in some stable format so the libraries are working on it we really are and we've been working for 8 years with the provost to come up with standards we're getting closer but we're not there Teresa are you working on standards that are just for MIT does this mean that there are 15 or 20 or 30 different enterprises of this sort going on and you can come up to a different answer? Yeah we are sharing our take on it with other university libraries with ARL libraries association of research libraries so I think when a standard comes it will all be doing it really quickly on top of each other but it's not here now Thanks Can you hear me? Courtney Michael I'm an archivist at WGBH and also I have a history background so I have a two part question but first I also wanted to say that some of those issues are also being solved by scientists and by publishers I think we don't have to be too scared about it digital object identifiers permanent URLs even a semantic web will help us with the permanence of this digital digital information but my question the first was just a comment on I think your question about humanists humanity scholars as creators of digital humanities as opposed to users and I was wondering if you could comment on publication and sort of the way that we wait different types of publication and the creation of digital resources for others also Professor Byerly had talked about the length of the publication process and I wondered if you could talk about humanity scholars sharing their process more I feel like scientists are a lot better at just sort of getting something done putting it on the web getting some reaction and changing their process and we sort of as humanity scholars hoard everything until it's closer to finished and then one more comment just sort of on the culture of humanity scholarship you had talked about how humanities feels more past and I'm wondering if the digital makes it more present for example as a historian am I now able to look more closely at census data not census data but speeches and television images from the 1990s whereas historians usually look they won't touch anything within 50 years of their present day so does it bring us closer to journalism does it bring us closer to other fields in terms of the timeline and again with the idea of waiting until something is published to put it out there the idea of you had mentioned keeping one object sacred I feel like historians because I come from a history background really sort of hoard their sources and they don't want to share is there a way that younger scholars will be thinking about putting their sources out there on the web putting their comments out there on the web getting people's feedback as part of their process of creating new history works as opposed to just sort of waiting until they get a contract your questions I think come together into a kind of general question about how interactive you know can we be as scholars and how do we go about entering the scholarly community both through publication and through the kinds of resources that we share and you're right that the humanities is not typically a very collaborative field and it's not because humanists don't like each other and are not as friendly as scientists it's because the nature of the research doesn't lend itself as well to the kind of collaboration that you see in other fields you know fields in which a lot of the knowledge that is created comes through aggregating a lot of information that different people develop is quite different from humanities fields in which you typically have large ideas coming from small objects you know you don't have a lot of data coming together into a specific hypothesis you have large philosophical ideas coming out of one poem or one piece of artwork or you know one philosopher's ideas it's a very solitary process I think some of that is changing and I think that is one of the things that could be most interesting in the way in which humanities scholarship changes over time so I think that the kind of your sense that there just isn't a lot of collaboration and a lot of interaction in the sort of works in progress at this stage is one of the things that I see changing in particular to speak to Steven's point among younger scholars that younger colleagues coming up through the ranks and say the youngest faculty that we hire at Middlebury do much more in the way of reading groups where they sit and critique each other's drafts much more of the posting things on a wiki so that other people can comment on them than people in my generation do so I think that's a very positive change. You asked earlier how are certain kinds of digital publications valued and as someone who in my role as a teacher I think that I have a lot of time on things like tenure and promotion reviews it's something I think about all the time and something that I talk with the faculty who are on the committee that is involved in that process with every year I you know try and present information about changes that I've seen in fields and you know when the MLA came out with a statement a year or so ago about digital publication I gave that to our tenure and promotion committee and said here's an example of a kind of professional standard of what constitutes meaningful publication and we certainly see the envelope being pushed again by the younger scholars coming up many of whom now have a blend of traditional and digital publications that makes it easy to see the quality of the digital work because it's paralleled by traditional publication that balance is going to shift and what will happen is ten years from now somebody will come up for tenure who doesn't have a thing in print and the first time that happens it'll be important that faculty colleagues who are involved in that process of evaluation are prepared for that and so I think it's the responsibility of senior scholars in every field to make sure they know about the caliber of review that goes on in a lot of online journals and the new venues that are coming forward that they're in a good position to meaningfully comment on that work when it appears and not make assumptions about the work that might or might not have gone into judging something that appears in those forms and so that kind of transition I think is important in the academy and probably will have a kind of generational dimension to it. I'm Alvin Kybell and I'm booming am I? The last remarks are very interesting and actually have some questions about it but I stood up here to raise a different point. The talk so far has tended to in the direction of the aggregation of information storage and retrieval and worry about platforms and all of this gives the digital age a big leg up but naturally it looks like something that counts simply as progress and unproblematic progress and of course that's an old idea, someone would write the history and maybe has been written the invention of a printed book allowed standard editions which allowed indexing the contents which was a big boost to the storage and retrieval of information the invention in the 19th century of filing cabinets enabled huge bureaucracies to function and completely change civil service but I don't hear any lengthy discussion about the fact in fact the contrary so it's taken for granted I don't hear any lengthy discussions about the fact that when you store things that are the primary objects of study you're changing the nature of the medium Wolfland when he first set up the projection of slides to teach art never thought he was teaching the artwork he was teaching the iconography now if you look at a book like Andre Mollie Rose Museum Without Walls which celebrates the fact that the book has changed the color print has changed access to works of art what he reproduces has a different size and demands different modes of attention from the people who look at these works especially when they're juxtaposed with other works which don't really have much to do with them but the worst I'm sticking with the visual arts because Miss Barley sort of celebrating the idea that everything now can be put in storage and retrieved in digital form when you look at pictures that have been retrieved on a computer screen you are looking at light coming through the image it's entirely different from looking at light that's reflected from the image and the works take on a depth and a brilliance that they never had before and that weren't intended and I think something of the same happens when you digitalize books I wonder if anybody is addressing this problem and how the panel thinks one should go about it I guess I would start by saying I consider any of those problems in relation to the alternative that is I think none of us would say that looking at either a slide or a digitized image of a painting is the same as seeing the painting you know I teach in Middlebury Vermont which is not very close to the Louvre it's not even very close to the Metropolitan Museum most of our students when studying art are looking at things that either are slides or in books and that students who are well funded through one of the grants that we occasionally can give might go and look at some of the works that they're studying while they're abroad but by and large the study of art is a kind of distanced operation for our art history department they're already working in a medium that is not the original work of art and so I think it's very important to make sure that students recognize that and talking about precisely the kinds of things that you raise I think is something I've certainly heard our faculty discuss there was a big discussion of moving from slides to digitization in our own department the very last colleague who was willing to show his things digitized rather than slides did so this year up until last year he was still showing slides because he said the color is better than the digitized version exactly as you said but he recognizes that the trade-off in having access to so many more images so much more conveniently when put in the context of you know the other trade-offs to him seemed worth it so I think that you know for myself I would say that the experience of reading a book is different on screen when I recently had some students reading Dickens's Bleak House in monthly numbers through a website at Stanford that presents the monthly numbers with illustrations etc etc that's not at all the same as reading the tattered paper copy that you would have been reading in the Victorian period and it's also not like reading a penguin edition of the novel we talked about how those experiences were different and I think it's important to recognize that they are but I'm not sure I would agree that that's something to feel threatened by I think it's always the case that media change and that making sure we understand what is inherent in the work and what is a function of the way in which it's presented I guess is what I would hope to convey to students I don't know what you would add. I'm Shieru Miyagawa I'm a linguist and I also work on new media projects in humanities particularly in history and it's in a lot of role that I have sort of an observation and a question about something that's been mentioned in many different forms so you talked about two kinds of benefits for humanists in using technology. One is the art historian example Alison that you mentioned which is an enabling kind of a benefit it enables you to do something better something that you have always done. The other kind of benefit is the kind that Steve mentioned and also Pete Donaldson's project and so the project that I do with John Dower visualizing cultures in which using technology digital technology forces you to ask questions that you didn't ask before and it's the latter that I'm interested in pursuing and in particular with my project visualizing cultures we look at images and what images can tell us about history so historians traditionally look at written text and particularly written by authoritarian figures in society and you create history out of that and what John Dower was a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and I have been doing is looking at images historically important images looking at images as text and analyzing that as a way to tell history and I think the work is very important but you know in the academy you talked about refree journals there's a huge huge wall to climb with Steve you mentioned the age gap you know I don't know that I would encourage a junior faculty to do this in history because it's a huge gamble you can you can fail a career or journal article by choosing making the wrong decision but this in turn keeps us from asking the interesting questions that are now possible to ask and so we're struggling with this and if you know of any previous experiences of fields that have somehow overcome this what I consider to be a very very big challenge for the humanists and we're imposing on ourselves because of this tenure system because of the refree journal system that we have. In thinking about fields that have overcome those challenges I was reminded as you're speaking of what happened in English departments when people started treating films as texts you know before there were film programs or media programs all film was taught in English departments because people who were interested in narrative were the first people to think of teaching film as an academic subject and you know some of us can almost dimly recall when that seems strange you know when it was a kind of sideline for some English professors to be doing first you'd start with films of Shakespeare and then pretty soon you were just doing Hitchcock because you liked Hitchcock and pretty soon you were starting a film program and that was a way in which the study of narrative moved out of a particular format novels and other forms of literature into another area that allowed people who were already studying text to say well it's a visual text but it's like a text and then they had to develop a whole area of expertise that's quite different from perhaps literary expertise but I would hope something similar could happen in the field of history for example if the study of images no longer becomes the province of art historians look at art looking at art but becomes the province of historians reading images with that same level of sophistication I would hope that could be seen as compelling I guess what I would say about the kinds of processes that we're talking about is that the whole field has to collaborate in creating a system in which those things are understood candidates coming up for review have to make sure that they do lay the ground work among their own colleagues for communicating what they do which is what I always tell colleagues who do really cutting edge work make sure you tell everyone what you're publishing why that's an important journal who are the other people who have published in it if you're doing something online make sure that you give people lots of information about who else is involved in this project so they can see what establishes the credibility and I think that it just as fields we have a responsibility to try and figure out how we can create a culture of understanding of what the new works are so that people coming up aren't disadvantaged by having colleagues of the generation Steve was referring to that is ours say this doesn't look like real history to me it's about pictures hopefully you would be a colleague who would not assess a junior colleague in that way and you know could be part of an effort to make sure that that new trend is recognized in the field I think it is worth doing a comparative study of academic disciplines to see which ones have experimented with other models and how well they've fared and in the couple of decades ago the discipline of computer science which was relatively new had different models of publication and promotion and even before the web there was just publishing in technical reports as opposed to peer-reviewed journals and it just was known in computer science you didn't publish people didn't publish everything in peer-reviewed journals it was just too slow and laborious and but technical reports circulated and acquired a reputation and I think deans and provost had to get used to considering candidates who didn't have a long list of peer-reviewed journals it seems to have worked out okay in computer science so another example is the electronic journal which was partly done in cahoots with librarians who were sick of paying these outrageous sums for paper journals and Michael Jordan when he was here at MIT helped take a journal and just transplant it online and it would be to hell with you Elsevier or Springer or whatever it was and that was a model that started there that was then emulated in biology in other fields Michael Jordan not the Chicago Bulls point card Michael Jordan the statistician, computational, neuroscientist, psychologist back into the microphone because the audience can't hear you I just wanted to say to your comment about different disciplines that archaeology because they have been dealing with artifacts have moved a little bit further along and they're not whether or not they're humanists or social scientists I don't know but they have actually moved more towards a blended sort of publication model I guess I feel compelled to say and now for something completely different so my name is Philippe I'm a visiting student here in biological engineering I want your opinion on something I've been recently hearing the claim and to bring it back to the problem of lack of investment or difficulty in getting financing for the departments of humanities recently hearing the claim that this is far from a deep political process is part of turning educated population into specialized problem solvers rather than say problem framers presumably people in the humanities so as professionals in the humanities I'd like your opinion on this I'm the moderator so I'll start I'm reluctant to take on the responsibility for humanists of being the only ones to frame crucial questions it seems to me one can expect that same level of cognitive skill in scientists and social scientists but I think that there is a truth in what you're saying I think that it has traditionally fallen to the humanities to frame questions of the sort that you're alluding to and in so far as the humanities are more reluctant if Allison is right or structurally structurally organized such that it is more difficult for them and a slower for them to adjust to digital things I think that you're pointing to something quite significant and I do think of course that if we went into if in the United States we actually moved to a situation in which the humanities were an immensely marginal activity that only a very small number of students engaged in I think the consequences for the larger culture of the university and the larger culture of the society would be very dire the problem is I mean it's easy to sing these crisis songs but it's hard for me to see such a dramatic and negative outcome I think we're likely to muddle along keeping about crisis and being partly in crisis but partly solving our problems in the way history in general muddles along I'm sure Steve could be more eloquent on this I think it is I don't think there's anything wrong with humanities scholars making the case to the general public of what the historic impact has been of people who could be seen as just interpretive scholars who in their time may not have been seen to be as historically important as they are or issues now that can be illuminated by no one but a humanities scholar in the current election there are claims about the framers and the founders claims about the greatest generation that more historians would immediately leap in and make sure that their number was on the Rolodex of the radio and TV show producers to weigh in with that kind of knowledge on historic issues that are very much on people's minds now that very much depend on framing problems not just solving them and I think humanists would do well to make that point repeatedly My name is Ahmed, I'm a junior here in course 9 very incognitive sciences, mostly as a result of having read how the mind works when I was 11 years old I'm a 20 year old male and this is a conversation about humanities in the digital age so I want to talk about video games I just want to hear your ideas about a video game becoming a legitimate humanity I think there are a lot of parallels between the video game and the film for example I took Professor Thorburn's film experience class and we talked about the Fred Ott sneeze which was just a 5 second video of a man sneezing and I think we can compare that to a simple video game like Pong which isn't really played anymore but we talk about in a historical perspective and in the modern era with video games now being advertised exactly like movie trailers if you look at the recent advertisements for Saints Row or Grand Theft Auto IV they look like movie trailers so I'm just wondering what you think about the progression of the video game as a humanity If I could take the first step at that I would comment that there's an interesting conversation going on among those who study video games whether the game aspect outweighs the narrative aspect whether you see them as a story that has enough coherence and drive of its own that it's comparable to a film or a novel or is it a game that is so driven by the player's experience that it doesn't have that aesthetic status that we accord to works of art and one of the things that that debate raises is the question of how interactivity gets factored into our understanding of the aesthetic that since most artworks are the product of the individual mind and are prized as such we're not accustomed to attributing aesthetic value to something that is sort of co-created between the creator and the experiencer and so I think there's probably going to be a lot more discussion about how you play something like a video game before people feel secure enough about it as a sort of work of art to recognize that. That said plenty of books being written about video games now, plenty of people making them an object of serious study. We've interviewed candidates in our own film and media culture program even in Middlebury College in Vermont who work primarily on video games and do really interesting theoretical analyses and so I think that it's already moved in that direction for those who are scholars in the field I think probably the general public isn't accustomed to thinking of video games as something that isn't the same league as films but I think it probably is going to follow that same trajectory I would think. Already a bigger business than film. Yes, that's right. We adore it at our peril given the number of dollars and number of person hours that it consumes. Well the CMS program here as some of you in the audience surely know is on the cutting edge of this and I've learned much more from my students than I've taught them in comparative media studies about video games. It's obvious to me that they are in embryonic aesthetic form, that they're going to be a major aesthetic form in the future. I don't think there's any question. I think that they belong to a special class of objects that are now emerging because digital technologies open up new forms of creativity that we're just beginning to discover and I think it's inconceivable that in 50 years or in 100 years we won't have new kinds of objects of study in our curricula that come out of this revolution we're living through. Diana Henderson and not for the first time I'm not sure what generation I'm part of after listening to this conversation. First just an easy observation because I was one of the reviewers for the Shakespeare Quarterly. It was not just crowd sourcing believe me. Before anything got online it was reviewed by traditional folks who know a lot about Shakespeare and then some of us were asked to be expert reviewers and we also opened it up for crowd sourcing. So I think it's a hybrid model that we might want to think more about which doesn't sacrifice what I haven't heard much about yet which is questions of judgment that have historically very important to the work of the humanities and I guess I wanted to bring that back in. I also wanted to bring critique as a positive and that maybe one of the reasons also we haven't just given up on the book at least from when I talked to my colleagues is that it's not just that we're all fashioned it's also the sense of one of the things we have to offer in the humanities is sustained attention to a complex argument that cannot be made a Twitter that cannot be even made should not be made a single article and too many books are in fact inflated articles we all know that but to see the medium appropriate to the disciplinary work we're trying to do. So I think I'm hearing a little too much it's just a matter of lagging because of that. On the other hand I'm very much in the forefront of wanting to work more collaboratively and in that regard I also want to go back to the future and remind people of performativity in that old sense. There are forms of collaborative artwork novelists I know are not first on that list but since I do drama we've been being interactive for 2,000 years and so the idea of thinking about the true comparative media model we have here at MIT as we talk about this I think could get us out of a couple of at least for me dichotomies that I'm uncomfortable with it's all generational it's just all going in one direction. I think we're replaying in a lot of ways and Alvin was bringing this up some familiar questions about media and transition and I hope we'll be a little more celebratory about this and put them in dialogue a bit more rather than just seeing this sequence. If I could add something about the question that you raised about the sort of pace of humanities scholarship in talking earlier and I said a couple of things about the sort of aura of remoteness of the humanities and how it seems to be at a slower pace I didn't mean even necessarily to present that as a negative but simply as a feature of humanities scholarship and in fact I had been thinking of making precisely the same point that you made which is that humanities scholarship involves a kind of real time meditation on how other people's minds work. That if you think about what we do as literary scholars or as historians or as art historians the reason that those arguments unfold slowly is typically we are figuring out how Keats got from the beginning of the ode to the end of the ode. How Mozart got from the beginning of the symphony to the end of the symphony and we're trying to follow a kind of mind unfolding and so it's not coincidental that the long book is the kind of natural medium for studying sort of the operation of the human mind through philosophy, through religion and through art and so that aspect of the humanities probably shouldn't change and if we had more time I would have maybe pushed back a little more on Steve's argument about the sort of aggregation of data as the way in which you could improve a literary argument counter poised with as you said yourself the need to study certain objects very deeply and not simply count how many of them there are in a given time and space. I think there's room for both in literary scholarship but I agree that it would be a mistake to characterize humanities scholarship as sort of slow moving simply because it's not of the right generation and can't catch up. It's fundamentally true of humanities scholarship that it has a meditative quality that you wouldn't want to sacrifice. Hi, my name is Luciana and I work with digital communication in Brazil and as a Brazilian I tend to see the digital age and the web as a very vibrant and alive environment so because Brazil is one of the countries that people use more social media and communication tools and people mostly use the Y app mostly to talk and to talk with each other. So my question is about the creation process as you said before and in English not my name, it's language, I took the liberty to write it it's about the creation process as in which way you think it will affect the way that we tell stories the fact that the digital age have enabled people to talk between each other in open forums and directly to the authors who was a very distant figure before and they are saying things that even can inspire these authors. It's a great observation and I'm sure all of us will want to comment on that. I think your point about the way in which authors now have their own websites and invite commentary is in some ways very different although to go back to Diana Henderson's point about how all media have of course been the same for many hundreds of years in the Victorian period people didn't hesitate to send Charles Dickens letters about whether they wanted a little now to be knocked off in the middle of the book or not. Some of those things have happened just at a different pace and maybe on a different scale but the sense of the sort of scale of dialogue among people being different I think is something that myself I find it surprising that fiction hasn't changed more rapidly to reflect that. You know it's interesting that you don't have more phone conversations represented in fiction considering how much time people spend on cell phones. You don't see characters pulling out cell phones a lot in novels. There are certain ways in which again the kind of texture and pacing of dialogue and conversation in fiction to me at least seems still similar to the past that I grew up in rather than the one that my teenage daughter is growing up in and I would think in 20 years there will be a different sort of mode of conversation for that reason but your sense that so many more people are talking to each other in ways that they wouldn't have because they have those written conversations rather than verbal ones I think is I would think linguists will be spending a lot of time thinking about how speech patterns change because teenagers don't really talk to each other anymore they only type that's bound to have an effect on how people communicate for the rest of their lifetimes and it's a little too early to tell but I think there's going to be some very interesting people out there over here. David, I studied mathematics at Berkeley many years ago. I'd like to put Google books back on the table and wonder if you think that the ordinary lay person or the young person with humanist tendencies can use Google books in the same way that you mentioned in the project as a way of mining data, books way into the past and to me it's just a fantastic tool that expands my ability to search things, to find materials that I would not have even in this city and with the university libraries that are close at hand Middlebury may be an outpost but I think now everywhere we have the ability to undertake this sort of project as you mentioned and I've asked a variety of other things coming. The fact that you have access to or will have the entire corpus of printed matter in one of the terms that we use for this is the human biblium. Everything that's ever been written in a book at some point will be available from an iPhone or an iPad who are privileged enough to be in a university are already used to having access now to almost all of scholarly journals in the past 75 years and that's obviously going to expand and it's going to be a tremendous thing. It is sad to think nowadays you put so much work into a scholarly publication and it might only be in some unaffordable journal that some handful of libraries carry and no eyeballs are ever going to see it. The idea that it could be much more democratized is very exciting. Not as if you make any money on it being exclusive in the first place so if everyone gets access to it as long as we can figure out what to do with those journal publishers. Likewise in the case of the books, the whole issue that we haven't raised at all is at what point does the excitement of digital access get opposed by the lawyers and intellectual property holders. I think one thing I can't resist adding here is that the point that Steve raised earlier is very important here. It does seem to me that many of these remarkable possibilities are endangered not because of the Luddite nature of humanists or because professors are slow but because there are economic and especially corporate interests that are interested in using the knowledge in very different ways. So the notion of an activist humanist one model of that would be Robert Darden, the wonderful librarian at Harvard who was even when he's wrong I think he's helpful. I mean I think he is sometimes wrong in his notions about Google but he's a wonderful example of someone who's saying look these matters are too important to be decided by corporate boards. There's a national or public interest involved in how we make these decisions about the ways in which the print culture migrates into digital form and it's incumbent on all of us to argue for that. I think that's profoundly important and I think a lot hinges on that. We can already see that images for example are much less accessible to scholars who want to use them than printed materials are. That's an unnecessary accident of the fact that very aggressive lawyers for Walt Disney Corporation and others have extended copyright in ways that are very harmful. So there's a very modest example of the kind of problem. It's not restricted to the humanities of course but a critical one. Over here. Hi, I'm Ralph Lembrelia. I teach fiction writing here at MIT. I'm kind of surprised this question hasn't come up. I'm sure you saw Nick Carr's Atlantic Monthly Cover article a few years ago is Google making us stupid and he expanded it into a book, The Shallows What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. So the thesis of this basically is that there's sufficient neuroplasticity even in adults to change yourself, to change ourselves cognitively and that we are. We are changing ourselves in the sense that a previous questioner mentioned sustained attention to a long article or to a long book versus attention to snippets that you can mash up. Is this a chicken little hysterical issue or are we changing ourselves and should we be concerned about it because if sustained attention to long works begins to erode then obviously the humanities have a pretty big problem. I have written about this and I think it is a chicken little fear. Bringing neuroplasticity is just a way of dressing up an argument with I think a pseudo scientific backing. I mean anything that you do, anything that changes you is going to change your brain. Yes, Google is changing our brain. Everything we do changes our brain. And I say this as a brain scientist, let's leave the brain out of this. It really adds so little to it. It is not the case that fundamental properties of brain operation like the ability to multitask or the ability to hold things in long term memory changes as a result of whether you see things on screen or on paper. Also I think the party of Twitter which seems to be a symbolic encapsulation of people's fears of a limited attention span. It is almost designed to make you think that is the only way that people communicate. Well there are tweets but as far as I have noticed it hasn't been a decline in book publication. There is still, just last week a 900 page biography of George Washington came out. The fact that sometimes you have things in... Perhaps not by a tweeter though. Maybe not but I think it is selling well. I think we need to have information aggregated at multiple grain sizes. Information is increasing exponentially. There is a lot of good stuff out there. Not everyone can read everything. We are all mortal. The idea that you have indexing services, abstracts, letters, links, ways in which you can get a sample of what is out there without avoiding the reading of long books or long texts but also having access to the summaries and the capsules is a wonderful thing. If we could only... If we couldn't learn about anything other than by reading a 900 page book we would be intellectually impoverished. There is just too much knowledge being created. So we need a mixed diet of links, tweets, abstracts, short Wikipedia articles and 900 page books. I am saying that having just finished a 900 page writing a 900 page book. I don't even know if I could read one anymore. We have two final questions. I was interested in your discussion about comparing American universities to international universities and how curriculum is developed. I wondered with the acceleration of the world is flat basically that we can really still have this difference because Americans have to compete with people coming out of China's universities with very specialized knowledge. If this is really something that maybe the humanities we need to push on to high school and because we have now this...I've seen reports about how much more, less time students are spending in college than they did 20 years ago. Maybe that's because they don't have to type as much and do as many manual kind of tedious administrative tasks and maybe have more time for thinking. So I just wanted to comment on maybe how high school and university will change as a result of the productivity increases and also our competitiveness. I could take a one aspect of your argument that I think is interesting has to do with the productivity question and what college students do in the course of a year versus what they might have done 20 years ago. As someone who teaches as an administrator as a college the students talk all the time about how they work much harder than students ever have in the past and my recollection is that 20 years ago they were making the same argument. We have actually done studies of how much they do for each course and added up and what we do find is exactly as you described that the senses that the students are doing are spending about the same amount of time that they have at certain kind of measurable points in the past but they're spending it differently. They certainly still have plenty of time to play video games to participate in athletic activities to do lots of things but they have a much busier sense of their lives. They feel much more overwhelmed by busyness and I think that that's part of our culture as a whole but in thinking about how that educational system in America compares to what we have abroad and then compares to what they're coming out of in high school I guess one observation I would make is that we do have our educational system is moving in a slightly more regimented direction because of all of the need for assessment and accountability that is driving high school curricula to be very very structured and so students coming up through the ranks in college I think typically expect many more tests, quizzes online discussions, lots of apparatus, lots of different grades because they're accustomed to having lots of those grading points. A lot of time gets spent in what you were calling kind of administrative stuff rather than the kind of long thoughtful sorts of works that we might have asked students to produce in the past. When you compare that to what's happening in other countries though it's tempting to say we're not competitive because they're more focused everybody's trying to come here. The fact that in most foreign countries it's very prestigious to send the top students to American universities suggest that other people have not dismissed that as a model and so I think that if anything the struggle will be to contain the kind of space that's needed for the most thoughtful sort of learning and not be pushed too far into creating the sorts of structures that do become the typing of the future, the busy work that is not really necessary to learn. And also the reverse of what you've suggested has often been suggested about Asian education for example in the words the fears that many people, educators in China or in Japan have is precisely that they're producing students who were taught in a kind of empirical rote learning way and they can't frame questions. They can't deal with the kinds of larger issues that you must confront when you actually go out into the workforce. So it doesn't work. So the reverse of the argument is often made about the more regimented forms of education. I would certainly think that the notion that the humanities should sort of deli-quest into the high schools is not something that would be very helpful. One more question. First of all, my name is Mitch Smith. I work in the interactive department at WGBH but more than that I'm just a linguistics enthusiast, unashamedly. But I wanted first just a comment, applause Dr. Vonberg's observation that the idea of a crisis in humanities has to be an overstatement. The Academy for a thousand years has been based on humanities and on conservation of information and really humanities is a centerpiece no matter what kind of innovation occurs. It's really the conservative aspect of the university. I'd like you to meet my dean. But I have a specific question for Dr. Pinker which is do you think to some extent that the perception of a crisis in the humanities could result from a nostalgia for methodologies applied to literary studies and history that are now being replaced with more empirical studies, especially in line of the Chomsky-Skinner debate about what is data, your things that projects you were involved in in terms of treating literary texts on a bulk mass scale and then I also think of people like Hadros and treating poems as sort of not only sorts of linguistic data but also applying the tools of linguistics and scientific method to the analysis of the works of masters of language. In fact you mentioned Hadros, a former colleague at MIT who collaborated with Jay Kaiser and I mentioned applying linguistic theory to Poetics. They worked together on some of that. It's a good question. I don't know if it is nostalgia for older methodologies. I don't know how many words these interdisciplinary either hypothesis testing or synthetic conciliants between science and humanities have made any inroads. I don't know if that's what's motivating the decline. I think there's certainly some dread and some of the same people who are bemoaning the decline of humanities are saying well whatever is going to rescue us let it not be that. So I'm not sure that that's the diagnosis. I think part of it is a fear that some of the exalted, Eurocentric forms of art are getting less bandwidth than they used to. A lot of it was a reaction to the reaction to post-modernism where the humanities became a target of ridicule and students were leaving in droves and there was some offense taken at that. But not being directly in humanities I wouldn't have as much insight as would be necessary to answer your question. I'd like to thank my panelists and especially thank the audience.