Towards a Twenty-First-Century Pedagogy for the Humanities

Abstract

The concept of digital epistemology discussed here suggests that the historical curriculum should be revised, since “the digital”—understood as a perspective or a lens (Lindhé 2013; O’Gorman, Marcel, E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and The Humanities. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2006)—shifts our focus in the treatment of historical topics and aesthetics. Consequently, it is argued that the answers to the epistemological and pedagogical challenges of today lie not just in digital tools and devices, but also in early modern modes of thought. By combining digital perspectives with early modern modes of thought, we arrive at a defamiliarization (Shklovsky 1991; Agrell, Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap 1, 1997) of our own digital, pedagogical and theoretical present, as well as of our relation to cultural history and aesthetics. The chapter ends with further suggestions on how to implement digital epistemological perspectives in educational practices.

5.1 Introduction

In this book, we have heuristically labored with digital epistemology as different modes of thought, dedicated to capturing those parts of our culture that are not necessarily explicit or formally digital. I hope I so far have shown, or at least hinted, that—in addition to Moretti’s graphs and tables (Moretti 2013) —there are other digital ways to read Balzac, Austen and Tokarczuk, reading practices that are in line with O’Gorman’s ambition to shift the analysis from hermeneutics to heuretics, from interpretation to invention (O’Gorman 2006, 12). It is thus a matter of reading and writing practices that differ from our teaching and research tradition as it has looked until recently. In the previous chapters we have located one such digital mode of reading practices in the field of media archaeology.

At the same time, digitization and our new forms of communication, and not least the bibliometrics propelled by computer technology and a neoliberal agenda, have often been used as arguments to undermine the position of the monograph in academic discourse. Therefore, it is appropriate to point out that the monograph, viewed through the lens of digital epistemology as a mode of thought rather than as a genre, should be able to regain—or consolidate—a significant position in academic knowledge production. Moreover, there is reason to reflect upon various academic forms of communication—such as the monograph, the peer review article, the collection of articles, the practice research, the seminar and digital formats—from epistemological rather than bibliometric perspectives.¹ You cannot simply replace the monograph with a collection of articles without a reflection on what it does with the results of the research. And you cannot simply put your lectures and seminars in a digital toolbox and expect that the learning result is identical.²

5.2 The Two Cultures 2.0

The following discussion on “the two cultures,” it must be said, is based on my experiences from universities in the Nordic countries. I am aware that the situation may differ significantly in different academic cultures, perhaps most clearly in the United States with its tradition of private funding, etc. So while the reader may or may not identify with the overview, I hope the concluding challenges will apply to—and inspire—readers of different academic backgrounds.

C.P. Snow in 1959 famously coined the phrase “the two cultures,” by which he referred to the gap that has arisen between the natural sciences and the humanities, and the problems that occur when the two fields of research do not interact (Snow 2013 [1959]). Snow’s distinction has been used in our days as a metaphor for the lack of understanding between different academic traditions, and for discussing concepts such as “science” and “education.”

In the last decades, we can see two new cultures that have emerged in the humanities, and this time the watershed is spelled “digital humanities.” Although digital humanities as a field of both research and education has expanded significantly over the past decade, and external funding as well as local initiatives indicate the attractiveness of the field, the gap does not appear to have been bridged but rather consolidated—digital humanities often seems to exist as an activity separated from the regular curriculum. The perspective of digital epistemology, however, encourages us to affirm our digital contemporary in a mode of thought that does not disregard either history, theory or object. Anne Balsamo has similar thoughts in Designing Culture:

Fundamentally, we need to stop thinking about new digital technologies as the channels through which education is delivered, and instead explore the ways in which these technologies are implicated in the reconfiguration of knowledge production across domains of human culture. The aim then is to take these insights as the basis for rethinking structures and pedagogies within formal educational institutions. (Balsamo 2011, 137)

Digital tools are not just tools. They contribute, Balsamo believes, to the restructuring of our way of managing and distributing knowledge, and they offer new opportunities for pedagogy. At the same time, we know how strangely resistant educational systems are; we accept influences from the most diverse directions (gender theory, postcolonialism, queer theory, environmental humanities, etc.), but our disciplines and fields of research still essentially retain their curricula.³

I hope we now, in 2020, can look at the following as history. But far into the 2010s there was a clear skepticism among many practitioners of “traditional” humanities towards the digital curricula. This was partly caused by fear (new technologies, making the reading of books obsolete); or disinterest (“that digital thing is not my concern”); or envy (“they are taking all the funds”); or epistemological concern (a skepticism towards the seemingly positivist nature of big data research); maybe something else. And it is important to acknowledge that digital humanists themselves may have to take some blame for establishing this tension.

However, the tension between educational tradition and classical analysis vis-à-vis databases, topic modeling and digital tools cuts right into the core of the media skepticism that the two cultures 2.0 express according to this reasoning. That skepticism has a history: It has existed at all times, a more or less automatic resistance to new media and new cultural expressions (not least the romance genre was met with great suspicion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was advised to be withheld from easily influenced women). The opposition to the modern ether and mass media culture was formulated eloquently by Marshall McLuhan adept Neil Postman in the 1970s and 1980s—a book title like Teaching as Conserving Activity (1979) is a clear statement—and a quote highlights the book’s main theme:

Its [the education’s] aim at all times is to make visible the prevailing biases of a culture and then, by employing whatever philosophies of education are available, to oppose them. (Postman 1979, 20)

This attitude may seem rabid, but if you look past the moral dimensions you will find several modern echoes of Postman’s reasoning, in the 1990s for example with Sven Birkerts, and later also with Andrew Piper (although in very different modes). We shall return to them.

So let us take this media skepticism seriously and ask ourselves a two-part question: Should we develop strategies that constitute a form of counter-culture to the many problematic trends that digital culture inevitably carries, or should we adapt and find ways in which we embrace digital culture as a resource and as a mode of thought in academic and educational work? The answers generated by this two-part question can be called “counter-culture” and “correspondence,” respectively.

5.2.1 Counter-culture

Sven Birkerts’ book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age was first published in 1994. There the author describes his sincere concern about a reading culture that he sees as threatened by mass media in general, and digital culture in particular. About the (at the time of the book’s publication) new genre of hypertexts, Birkerts writes: “I stare at the textual field on my friend’s screen and I am unpersuaded. Indeed, this glimpse of the future – if it is the future – has me clinging all the more tightly to my books, the very idea of them” (Birkerts 1994, 164). The new genre worries him. Birkerts has a powerful precursor in the above-mentioned Neil Postman, and a similar skepticism also echoed in 2013 in Andrew Piper’s Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, in a passage about electronic texts where the author claims that “The more my body does, however, the less my mind does. Interactivity is a constraint, not a freedom” (Piper 2018, 18).⁴

It is easy to sympathize with this “Gutenbergian” pessimism, and if we consider it productively, we as researchers and teachers fostered within the humanities can regard reading, interpretation and the overall dedication to, and work with, the “analog” cultural heritage as an act of resistance to contemporary cultural discourse. It is our duty to create intellectual harbors for reflection, Archimedean points from which this contemporary culture can be critically observed—and the humanities is an indispensable tool for this endeavor.

It is obvious that Postman and his followers see pedagogy and classical education as a tool to free young pupils from the paralysis and confusion of modern media. To achieve this, we must refrain (preferably entirely) from an education that is congenial to the surrounding society—research and teaching will certainly adapt to the surrounding media environment, but only in order to offer a counter-culture.

This, of course, may sound conservative—or reactionary, even—but quite frankly, who should hold the banners of education and history, if not the humanistic and aesthetic disciplines? These also form the backbone of the knowledge that teachers in elementary and secondary school deliver in their professions. Thus, a great responsibility lies on those disciplines. Moreover, trying to adapt education to digital cultures would still only mean that you are one step behind the youngsters themselves.

It would be tempting here to use the concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie) introduced by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, a strategy to break the taken-for-granted perception of our environment, a trademark of the avant-garde and other “difficult” poetry (Shklovsky 1991, passim). Why should traditional education not have the same effect, to interfere with the blurred perception of reality, obtained by our youngsters as an effect of too much media consumption? But as Beata Agrell reminds us (in an essay from 1997 to which we shall return soon), Shklovsky’s concept is largely based on recognition—thus making defamiliarization a function more or less in contradiction to the concept of counter-culture in education.

5.2.2 Correspondence

But, if the humanities is to be anything other than a closed system, some kind of sanctuary, then we may have to try forms, in both teaching and research, that correspond to the surrounding culture. Out of those who would like to see an adaptation of the classroom to digital culture, we can count Anne Balsamo, already quoted, and N. Katherine Hayles. In both cases, they argue that humanistic competence is best communicated in an environment that gives room for the younger generation’s own languages and media. It is a version of the pedagogical notion of “experience-based learning,” which in this case means focusing on media habits and digital experiences. In How We Think (2012), Hayles asks how we can translate digital literacy into the ability to read, understand and work with, for example, literary texts? And how do we make possible the connection between these two areas of expertise?

While literary studies continue to teach close reading to students, it does less well in exploiting the trend towards the digital. Students read incessantly in digital media and write in it as well, but only infrequently are they encouraged to do so in literature classes or in environments that encourage the transfer of print reading abilities to digital and vice versa. The two tracks, print and digital, run side by side, but messages from either track do not leap across to the other. (Hayles 2012, 57)

Perhaps the humanistic and aesthetic disciplines have been too restricted in allowing the production of multimodal texts within their own curricula? Hayles describes it as two parallel tracks that meet too rarely, or not at all. So, then: Should all students start blogging? Should the teacher tweet? Do we need to know programming? Should everyone work with databases and scanned texts? Sure, why not? But also, no, not necessarily—and this is where the media archaeological perspective enters. This chapter will advocate an attitude towards digitization in education and research which simultaneously promotes “digital literacy” and more traditional humanistic competences; a defamiliarization of contemporary culture, but not through resistance or by surrender to “digitization,” but through curiosity about the digital as a mode of thought, which also leads us to pre- and early modern modes of thought. Let us first, before we go into the modes of thought, look at some digital forms of expression.

5.3 Digital Expressions?

Digital epistemology is based on the fact that digital forms of expression affect how we view and process information, both contemporary and historical. The notion of “digital forms of expression” requires, for the sake of clarity, a rather narrow definition in this context (this is not to say that phenomena that fall outside these examples do not support the following arguments). Thus, here are some examples of (a) digital practices; and (b) digital-born works of art.

5.3.1 Digital Practices

The desktop has come to play a diminishing role in how we organize our digital files. In the personal computer’s “adolescence,” however, the desktop was an important entry-level metaphor, not least for humanists who felt uncomfortable with program code and flickering markers. In the metaphors of the desktop—documents, folders, trash—we felt at home. The hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson has repeatedly talked about what a missed opportunity in the development of human thinking it was when the desktop came to be the dominant interface, because it exerts such strong limits on the potential of thinking new that the computer medium possesses: “We must,” he wrote in 1999, “overthrow the paper model, with its four prison walls and peephole 1-way links” (Nelson 1999).⁵ It may have taken the decades that Nelson feared, but nowadays we are not quite so committed to the desktop metaphor. The hierarchical structure is not as prominent any more, as many of us have more or less abandoned the folder structure to instead clump our documents into a single folder and online in different clouds, such as Dropbox, Box and ProDrive. Instead of browsing folders we “google” our own hard drive—the verb reveals that the search engine is replacing the desktop as a metaphor. And on tablets and smartphones, we barely handle documents at all.

Searches on Bing and Google or in different library databases thus represent a partly different logic than the desktop and the hierarchical file structure. It is no different from the logic of the encyclopedia (or library shelf); we all remember how we searched for a keyword in the encyclopedia, only to find ourselves reading about a lot of other things on the same page as the entry we searched for.⁶ The point of the encyclopedia, after all, is that it is not organized according to a hierarchical principle—the encyclopedia is blind to any order of things outside the alphabetical (and to the order of things that direct the editor’s choices of headwords). The same goes for search engines: The words you type in the search box inevitably generate results that could be far away from the information you were actually looking for. However, it would be a mistake to call this handling of information management “democratic” or “neutral”—search engines, just like the authors of various encyclopedias or the manager of a library, work (or operate) in the interests of their owners. Somehow, we ourselves seem to contribute to these powers, as we more or less consciously design texts and headings with more than one eye directed towards the algorithms of the search engine (and possible click effects).⁷ In the next step, the search engines have also identified our preferences and search history, and will soon come up with suggestions and arrangements of our searches. A search on Google or Bing from a computer located in Sweden (and without tampering with VPN servers) generates completely different results than if you search for the same terms in, say, India or South Africa. Thus, the search engine is hardly more “fair” or more “neutral” than the hierarchically (and ideologically) arranged archives. But it does have another logic.

The same goes for the webpages to which the searches refer us. The information we are served is always part of some major network or overall interest. It could be a large company or authority, the provider of the web service, or the interests represented by the site’s advertisers. The information provided by the webpages is very rarely self-sufficient, and in principle never completed, since the purpose is to direct our gaze or interest either towards the advertiser or away from the authority that runs the page.

5.3.2 Digital-Born Works

In the category of digital-born works we can—in this context, that is—count both computer games and more or less interactive, platform-based or site-specific artworks. Interactivity as such is of course not unique to digital objects—even the codex invites interaction, mainly through page turning. But computer games and electronic works generally offer greater opportunities for multimodal and synesthesia experiences—image, sound and text, in both moving and static forms, cooperate.⁸ If computer games nowadays, with few exceptions, for commercial reasons invest in getting maximum dissemination (online games are more attractive than arcade games), digital art is characterized by an interesting dualism between on the one hand online-based works, and on the other site-specific installations. It can be about utilizing virtual rooms such as CAVE, but also other more or less advanced digital constructions.⁹ Often, different gaming platforms are used to explore artistic expressions, as in several of Johannes Heldén’s works. An illustrative example is the early online work The Prime Directive from 2006, where the reader is first introduced to a title page, illustrated with a drawing of a natural motif depicting beavers by a lake. From there you come to a page with two animated books that rotate against a black background. As the user approaches the books with the mouse pointer, a heading and a short poem—or perhaps a motto—appear underneath them: “1 The Path of the Fragment” and “2 The Prime Directive.” When you choose one of the books you enter one of two different text/image spaces depending on which one is selected. Thrifty but suggestive animation appears, short text snippets and different sounds for different mouse clicks. Instead of the linear structure of the traditional reading of books, the reader is met here by an oscillation between headline, image and text fragments. Does the puzzle have a solution?

From Heldén we can also find an example of site-specific digital installation, the work Field, a multimedia installation displayed at HUMlab X, Umeå University, in the winter of 2015. In the leaflet accompanying the artwork, Heldén reflects upon the relationship between code, DNA and language, topics he has been occupied with for a long time. Throughout his works there are, as noted earlier, continuous negotiations between concepts such as technology, digitization, nature, creation, automation, games, language, life, artifact. From a posthumanist (and probably also a Heldénian) perspective, we cannot really draw a distinct line between these binaries: life and artifact, nature and culture, code and language, man and stone (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1

Johannes Heldén, from the installation Field, HUMlab X, Umeå 2015. Photograph

In Field Heldén worked with soundscapes and screens, not only on the walls but also with one giant screen on the floor (one feature of HUMlab X), and exhibited 3D prints of slowly mutating jackdaws. Walking on the interactive floor changed the texts on the walls, which also mutated, decomposed. In this combination of natural lyric and dystopia, the DNA of a jackdaw changes at the same time as a projected text is transformed into fragments; prose becomes poetic text. Four different mutations of the jackdaws have been produced by 3D printers and are displayed on the floor. The viewer must move in and through the artwork to stage the various moments of image, sound, text and sculpture (for more, see Bolick 2018). Indeed, Heldén’s installation is guided by a moral appeal (just like the emblem), but the bizarre combinations, fake mutated jackdaws and oscillating relations between the different parts of the artwork still echo many aspects of Kunstkammer poetics.

5.4 From Mode of Expression to Mode of Thought

Let us repeat. If we consider the internet as a huge archive, we find that search engine logic—which, as noted, partly coincides with well-known phenomena such as the encyclopedia and the library—in many aspects marks a return to the early modern order of the principle of pertinence—or the subject principle, or dossier system—which has been introduced in earlier chapters. It is also a logic, or a sense of order, that is in accordance with the perspectives brought forward by media archaeology.

Many websites and digital works can also be said to be organized according to the principle of pertinence, in its associative rather than linear order—such as Heldén’s The Prime Directive. But perhaps even more so, these phenomena can be said to resemble the emblematic mode of thought that has been highlighted in previous chapters. Let us take this one step further: In her extensive study of Swedish novels of the 1960s, Beata Agrell has established the emblem as a kind of matrix for the open and challenging strategies that characterized large parts of the 1960s’ experiments in literature and art, not only in Sweden but in culture at large at the time (Agrell 1993, passim). Agrell’s book is one of the first attempts to update the aesthetics of early modern emblematics into an analysis tool for more modern artistic expressions.¹⁰

In short, Agrell’s reading of the emblem means that she, in line with Daly (1979) and Manning (2002), considers this not as a curiosity or banality, nor as mystification or a decodable rebus, but as a system of organizing knowledge. Agrell, too, thus views the emblem both as an art form and as a mode of thought (ibid. passim). The art form consists of the objects that were presented in emblem books and collections. And although the pictura can retrieve motifs from a variety of allegorical, biblical or mythological inventories, the image’s referential content is not given—a frog or a rose can have different meanings from emblem to emblem. This “arbitrary symbolism” is also reflected today in digital phenomena such as memes and GIFs. The associations created by the visual elements in, for example, memes are not static, but are always governed by the cultural and regional code in which they are generated and disseminated.

Even though he does not believe that “Madison Avenue has re-discovered emblem books,” Peter M. Daly, in an essay from 1988, makes some interesting connections between the Renaissance emblem and modern (1980s) advertising (Daly 1988, 352 and passim). The tripartite form—inscriptio, pictura, subscriptio—is everywhere, Daly observes, and he concludes:

While the emblem is certainly not a source or direct model for modern illustrated advertising, the two forms frequently employ texts and symbols in a similar manner to convey messages and persuade readers. (ibid., 362)

It is evident, if you start looking, that the logic and structure of the emblem appear in many cultural expressions, from poetry to advertising and webpages. The reason, however, why emblems have taken such a prominent role in this short introduction to digital epistemology is not—as you may know by now—only their formal appearance, but the emblem as a mode of thought.¹¹ Agrell sees this mode of thought as a “maieutic practice,” aiming “not to give knowledge of nature, but to redeem a sense of the visible that reveals a connection to ‘Creation’” (Agrell 1993, 51). This mode of thought and maieutic practice are congenial to the expressions on many regular websites, as well as in Johannes Heldén’s works, for example. Both on webpages and in many digital works, an information surplus is created which makes a “finished” reading of the pages impossible; instead, the reader is invited to redirect his or her interest in an emblematic way. This coincides with Daly’s observation that the “solution” to an emblem does not lie in revealing the background of the different components; it is not a rebus or a riddle to be solved. No, the emblematic mode of thought instead encourages combination and composition—echoing Marcel O’Gorman’s earlier-mentioned ambition of “invention” rather than “interpretation.” This also coincides with what Peter Boot points out in Mesotext: Digitized Emblems, Modeled Annotations and Humanities Scholarship (2013):

The emblem’s use of multiple media, its wide variety of subject matter and its many intertextual relations make emblem studies very suitable for experiments in humanities computing. (ibid., 13)

Johannes Heldén can, again, serve as an example. Several of Heldén’s poetic installations, including The Prime Directive, can be usefully related to emblematic modes of thought: the establishment of a text and image interaction that at once creates riddles and promotes the reader’s reflection; his or her active participation; and the view of nature “through the ‘spectacles of books’” (as Manning 2002) points out in the motto to this chapter), which in this case may become “the spectacles of graphic interfaces.” If, in the seventeenth century, as Manning suggests, one lived in an environment of emblematic epistemology, today we live in a digital one.

Heldén’s previously mentioned installation Field from 2015 also shows an emblematic structure—image and text appear in an oscillating interaction, an unfinished participatory process with a clearly moral message—but the work also promotes the spatial order of the early modern Kunstkammer , which also is an expression of the principle of pertinence. The participant/viewer moves between seemingly disparate physical and digital objects in a room intended for this experience only.

This brings us to a concluding note on digital culture and older modes of thought (before we move into theoretical and pedagogical reflections). For it is striking that even though many digital expressions may appear “new” and “foreign” to the traditional humanist, they may as well be related to a variety of cultural genres, phenomena and modes of thought from the time before (or around) the breakthrough of modernity. In this book, attention has mainly been directed to some significant early modern forms, but “the early modern” is not really an end in itself for the juxtapositions that have been carried out here. In addition to the emblem, the cabinet of curiosities and the principle of pertinence, we can mention the romantic fragment; salon culture; the rhetorical ekphrasis and enargeia; the ancient poetic collage technique cento; and other ancient concepts such as techné and methexis.¹² These are principles for organizing, exploring and problematizing our cultural heritage that do not necessarily follow a Gutenbergian and post-Romantic principle, or the concerned notion of evidence fostered by the natural and social sciences. This is not about reproducing knowledge, but creating new knowledge—and creating it anew from already existing material. Or, as Marshall McLuhan stated: I don’t explain – I explore (McLuhan 1968, xiii).

5.5 Media Archaeology, Digital Epistemology and Pedagogical Challenges

We can thus establish parallels between contemporary digital forms and older aesthetic expressions. But this must not be regarded merely as a curiosity, an intellectual musing over the similarities of existence; most of what we have around us can be likened to something else. No, the reasoning advanced so far is partly to show that the “digital” we observe is not a self-sufficient—or even completely new—sphere, but borrows expressions and modes of thought from aesthetic genres with a very long history. At the same time, the “digital” establishes new connections and its own logic, whose theoretical and educational implications are the final subject of this book.

This is, of course, not the first attempt to unite digital practices and pedagogical challenges. The hypertext pioneer, author and theorist Michael Joyce, in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, already in 1995 suggested some radical changes in the teaching situation, made possible by hypertexts and the software Storyspace (which he himself developed together with Jay Bolter in 1987):

Let us say, then, that in the new cosmology learning and teaching are both decentered and distributed, i.e. hooked together and mixed up. Thus, when Martha Petry and her American literature students at Jackson Community College build a Storyspace around the poetry of Walt Whitman there is a natural confluence and linkage among the machine-based learning conversation, the textual encounter, and the gathering of scholarly resources. It is a linkage that software like Storyspace is uniquely suited both to enact and to represent. The learning conversations embodied in students’ journal responses not only are graphically linked to Whitman’s lines as part of the encounter with the text but, indeed (and quite naturally), also find their way into the resources that the teacher-scholar brings to bear upon the text. The learners truly take their place as co-equals in an interpretive community. (Joyce 1995, 121)

This is a line of argument not so different from Marcel O’Gorman’s (2006). However, in the mid-1990s the fully equipped computer lab in schools was still a rarity, and Storyspace or hypertext software in general was not commonplace. Today the situation is different. And the ubiquity of digital tools and gadgets puts us in a more privileged position to combine digital interfaces, media archaeological perspectives and historical juxtapositions.

In other places in this book, media archaeology has been mentioned as a congenial expression of digital epistemology. For example, it has been suggested that search results on Google or Bing correlate well with the activity of juxtaposing our own research results, and the same search engines—not to mention the library databases—give us unprecedented opportunities to dive into individual years. But media archaeologists do not arbitrarily parallel their results—the archive has nodes (just like the search engine, by the way). These digital and media archaeological perspectives, at the same time, challenge the theories that since Romanticism have consolidated a subject-object position between theory and text, art and reality. Media archaeology and search engines both encourage us to re-examine cause and effect, materiality and presence.

This must of course also affect how we work actively in the teaching situation, for a start by not seeing the internet as a problem, or the online student as a disruption. Instead, these new forms of knowledge can challenge us to relate cultural artifacts to each other in new ways.

In previous chapters, Marcel O’Gorman’s E-Crit has been mentioned as an inspiration for the present work. O’Gorman applies an educational model that he devised with inspiration from W.J.T. Mitchell, which he calls “Hypericonomy.” A “hypericon” is an image that, in Mitchell’s words from 1994, works like “a piece of movable cultural apparatus, one that may serve a marginal role as an illustrative device or a central role as a kind of summary image … That encapsulates an entire episteme, a theory of knowledge” (Mitchell 1994, 49). Mitchell continues: “They are not merely epistemological models, but, ethical, and aesthetic ‘assemblages’ that allow us to observe observers. In their strongest forms, they merely serve as illustrations to theory: they picture theory” (ibid.).

The point is, then, that the images, “the hypericons,” not only represent and present—they do something, too. O’Gorman emphasizes this aspect on the basis of Friedrich Kittler’s media historical project: Critical thinking is not a text about culture, but rather a method of writing with cultural expressions. The practice of hypericonomy, for O’Gorman, gets concretized in an exercise in which the student is asked to create a diagram according to a model, in which s/he is asked to combine a private childhood memory with one of William Blake’s (1757–1827) poems, as well as with a visual interpretation model from Mitchell and some other parameters. Out of this they will make a comment which blends the personal and historical with theory and popular culture. O’Gorman continues:

Hypericonomy is not about immediately throwing out our current discursive practices, but about provoking change and inventing transitional, even provisional, strategies that bridge the gap between print-centric and computer-centric practices. (O’Gorman 2006, 95)

This is not a brutal transformation of curriculum, but rather a thought-provoking practice with the intention of bringing together the “two cultures” I described above. Thus, for O’Gorman, William Blake’s writing is a prime example of “hypericonomy.” Blake’s images do not constitute conventional illustrations of the text, nor does the text form any obvious commentary on the image; instead, they create an intricate interplay of feedback loops and new insights.¹³

O’Gorman sees great potential in leveraging personal, and private, experience as a starting point in his “hypericonic” pedagogy. It is a subjectivity which, of course, is congenial to digital culture’s at once more private but at the same time more open logic. On the web we see constant interplay between the individual and the collective, an expression of which are the flickering identities on social media.¹⁴

The hypericon is an interesting point of departure, and W.J.T. Mitchell also uses it to point out the duplicity in the title of his well-known book. The hypericon is not an example of a picture theory but rather acts as an imperative, to picture theory. Images (like, one can argue, literary texts and all cultural artifacts) do something; they establish discursive practices that can point out different directions. Cultural artifacts shape and create (“picture”) theory. But if we push the media archaeological perspective a little further, it is clear that both O’Gorman and Mitchell—despite their historical perspectives—overlook some “hypericons” in their respective practices. We can now see that William Blake’s combination of text and images has striking similarities with the emblem as a mode of thought. And by turning our attention to several of the aforementioned pre- and early modern aesthetic expressions, we can find ways of thinking that correspond well with “hypericonic” practice. An example of this is the emblem. Returning to Peter M. Daly, he describes the emblem’s epistemological qualities thus:

Rather than describe a mode of thought by reference to motifs of clearly demonstrable hieroglyphic provenance, whether Egyptian, pseudo-Egyptian or Renaissance, I propose to use the term to describe an attitude to combination and composition. (Daly 1979, 82)

Thus, in digital pedagogy, Marcel O’Gorman sees a shift from “interpretation” to “innovation” (see Chap. 1). This coincides with Peter Daly’s observation that the “solution” to an emblem lies not in revealing the background of the components—not in their provenance—but rather in a productive approach between combination and composition (to “create” instead of “interpret”). The emblem’s and hypericon’s approach to its sources seems to coincide with the aforementioned principle of pertinence.

The emblem, in its many configurations, thus bears obvious similarities to hypericons as discussed by Mitchell and O’Gorman. The hypericon, in this appearance, is also a way of exploring cultural history in a productive and non-hierarchical way. It is about seeing the pedagogical situation not as a reproduction of existing knowledge, but as an opportunity—just like the in emblematic practices—to relate the search for knowledge, through the analysis of the artifact, to a world outside the material being processed. Combination and composition.

In this combination of digital pedagogy and early modern forms of knowledge, we approach Shklovsky and defamiliarization (ostranenie) again. When Agrell (1997) reads the emblematic form of thought as a strategy for defamiliarization, she emphasizes that Shklovsky’s essay does not draw attention to the artwork itself, but to the “processes of perception” it sets in motion: “The artwork is thus not autonomous, but focuses on a certain type of observation, which it, at the same time, through its built-in approach, evokes” (ibid., 28). Here we see a strategy aimed at the user, which we can now also translate to several digital practices such as hyperlinks, interactivity, immersion and so on. This aim involves a recognition: “The artifice here consists in manipulating the original. In the reuse, deviations and obstacles should be utilized, in order to de-automate the perception of the previously familiar, and thereby make it foreign …” (ibid.).

By combining a sensibility towards our digital contemporary with a curiosity about various early modern forms of thought, we achieve just such a defamiliarization—and thus it is a defamiliarization of both digital culture and our traditional cultural history. What until recently has caused digital culture to be an obstacle for our humanist colleagues is nothing more than a post-Romantic view of education—a legacy, that is, of modernity’s expurgation of early modern forms—where “the work,” “the genius” and “originality” (not to mention “History” and “the Nation”) was placed at the center of the analysis and the curriculum. Our digital practices point in other directions, just like early modern modes of thought and genres. The skepticism towards “the digital” that for a long time could be observed within the humanities could be related to an acceptance of a banal linearity of history (a view of history it ironically shares with both development optimists and technophiles). Because this skepticism, it turns out, seems to be rooted in the notion that the pursuit of digital means the end of the analog (although as we have seen in Chap. 1, they do not constitute a binary couple), multimodality becomes a threat to codex; the databases are a threat to writing history; the internet and Wiki culture are a threat to reading and education. In addition, it is not uncommon to view digital publishing as a threat to the monograph.

5.6 Conclusions and Challenges

My reasoning in this text leads to a vision of an educational situation where, with the help of technology, we can change the pedagogical perspective on its subject from provenance (origin, genealogy) to another, more associative, but not free, sorting principle—the principle of pertinence. There are a number of historically interesting but rather poorly explored modes of thought and concepts that could prove to be marvelously congenial with digital culture,Analog vs digital and which have only been hinted at here. In Chap. 1, I suggested that digital epistemology can be seen as a “digital humanities sans digital tools and objects”—yet the analytical examples in this chapter have been taken from digital works (albeit to illustrate digital practices). Let us, therefore, clarify that the point of this stipulation is to emphasize that it is possible to conduct teaching and research in line with a digital epistemology without using databases, algorithms, electronic works, fan fiction or topic models to any particular extent. It is possible to conduct “digital” humanities, exploring the modes of thought of the emblem and the cabinet of curiosities , and how they can be used to develop new (or old) learning processes in both primary and university education. You can encourage pupils’ and students’ work by using digital tools, or compile their surveys into emblematic or other pre- or early modern structures—loci communes, salon culture, the fragment and beyond. It is easy to imagine a situation where students explore emblematic thought forms and the principles of the Kunstkammer , and with these models in front of them produce exciting new compilations of “Edinburgh,” “The 1950s,” “Grass,” “The Color Blue” or “Simone de Beauvoir.” At the same time, they will teach us something about forms of knowledge in our own digital age. I actually see Gunnar D. Hansson’s aesthetic program (see Chap. 3) as a very productive source of inspiration here.

It would be a shame for those of us who are interested in digital perspectives on the humanities if we scare away colleagues who possess genuine historical expertise. That risk exists if we continue to cultivate the two tracks that traditional humanists and some digital humanities practitioners still maintain to some extent. One reason for this is that some of us still see “the digital” as a set of tools and practitioners, and not as an epistemological endeavor, a digital epistemology.¹⁵ By raising our eyes from the apparatus towards epistemology and cultural history and viewing academic practice through this lens, we can suggest some possible directions and challenges for educators and researchers:

• 1. Update humanities’ working methods from Gutenberg to Jobs, from a book-bound practice and theory paradigm to a multimodal, media archaeological and transmedial ditto.

• 2. Do not limit the notion of “the digital” to digital objects or even digital tools (although the latter are a good prerequisite).

• 3. Explore and establish multimodal relationships between multiple cultural expressions, showing that all culture always already is intermedial/heteromedial (Bruhn 2010).

• 4. Link historical perspectives to the present, connect humanistic topics to the private, create new research perspectives.

• 5. Encourage a curiosity for the materiality of media and thus for “tactile” cultural history.

• 6. Encourage multitasking capabilities and associative ability.

• 7. Get away from regarding digital tools as a problem (“cheating,” “plagiarism”), but see them as tools for education, by encouraging creative combinations of information—text, image, sound; present, past, future.

• 8. Encourage traditional teaching methods, but at the same time encourage the student to put this information into new contexts.

• 9. Encourage a productive defamiliarization of both contemporary media expressions and cultural and aesthetic history, and not least to establish a de-automation of educational practice as such.

With what has been stated here, it may seem that digital epistemology is paving a path away from traditional humanities, and away from publishing monographs. The purpose here, however, is quite the opposite. By looking at digital culture epistemologically, it becomes possible to regard the printed monograph precisely as an expression of an epistemic discourse (a discourse we have long taken for granted, and therefore not considered as such). Digital culture gives us the conditions to finally realize what the monograph actually means (the medium being a message), and that it must therefore be preserved, not as a genre but as a mode of thought among others, an interface and a tool for knowledge production with special characteristics and effects. A mode of thought that most likely is different from the collection of articles, the practice research, the peer review article, the seminar and the digital Kunstkammer .

The idea in this reasoning is, finally, to initiate a process that can lead on to establishing a platform where traditional historians and digital archivists, exegetes and multimodal pedagogs, theorists and graphic designers, can meet and discuss the future of the humanities.