An old-fashioned view of how the humanities interact with big data: people in disciplines like English and history are on the receiving end of what technology and computing provide and aren’t themselves contributing significantly to how information gathering, analysis and visualization shape our world. Cameron Blevins, Associate Professor Clinical Teaching Track in History, hopes to bring about a different future: one where the skills and frameworks of the humanities actively shape digital and data spaces. Blevins says, “There are so many areas in technology today that desperately need the kind of critical thinking and analytical frameworks that are taught in humanities courses.”
“For those who are working in the space of data broadly – which these days encompasses almost every single person – there is an assumption that humanities scholars maybe need to get with the times,” he says.
Blevins wants to smash those misconceptions. In his own research, he has used data analysis, visualization, and mapping to write an award-winning book on how the US postal system shaped the history of the American West. In the classroom, Blevins teaches students a buffet of digital skills, from web and graphic design, to video and audio editing, to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and coding in languages like R or Python. These courses are part of the Digital Studies Certificate, a program that teaches both technical skills to students along with how those technologies intersect with society, politics, and culture. Blevins administers the certificate alongside Associate Professor John Tinnell of English, a technology scholar whose newest book traces the history behind today’s “Internet of Things.”
“One goal of the Digital Studies Certificate is to give students a technical skillset that makes them more marketable to employers. But the second piece is teaching students how to think more critically about technology – wrestling with topics like consumer privacy or government regulation,” Blevins says. “So fifteen years from now the nuts-and-bolts of these platforms might look totally different, but students will still be equipped to understand some of the bigger issues they raise for society.
He points to the recent rise of ChatGPT and other forms of generative Artificial Intelligence as a prime example of the importance of going beyond the technical side of these platforms to focusing on their implications for things like copyright, intellectual property, or even what it means to create knowledge.
Blevins and Tinnell are part of team from CU Denver and CU Boulder, Data Advocacy for All, that received a CU Next Award in May 2022 totaling nearly $300,000. They are using this award, which aims to foster teaching innovation and collaboration across CU campuses, to develop curriculum that teaches students to use data to drive social change.
“Data Advocacy for All started with the idea that there is an expanding number of data science courses and programs. And while more and more of them are incorporating things like data ethics into their curriculum, we saw a gap when it came to the area of communication and rhetoric – in particular using data to communicate and advance socially engaged goals.”
The team, which includes researchers at CU Boulder in Writing and Rhetoric, English, and Library Science, is in the process of developing a series of eight open-access teaching modules, available for anyone to use. Their goal is to design modules that are flexible enough to plug into different courses without excluding anyone based on a lack of technical background. “We’re not presuming any existing knowledge; this really is geared towards researchers and instructors to use in any setting.”
The modules are being completed over the 2023 spring and summer semesters with the aim of piloting them in two courses in fall 2023, one taught at CU Boulder and one taught on the Denver campus by Tinnell, called Multimedia Composition.
“Students in these classes are going to not just learn the skills of data advocacy, but actually create their own projects to try to enact social change,” says Blevins. Rather than presuming what these topics are, the team is surveying students at CU Denver and CU Boulder to narrow in on the issues that matter to them. “We’ll then gather the projects together onto a single online repository that will showcase student advocacy work for a larger public.”
Blevins, Tinnell, and the Data Advocacy for All team highlight some of the contributions that the humanities are making to an increasingly digital future.