The socio-technical humanities: reimagining the liberal arts in the age of new media, 1952-1969

2014-08-19This dissertation is a study of the aims, interests and rationale underlying the endeavors of a distinct group of humanists who sought explicitly to guide the meanings, uses and developing customs and habits of new educational, informational and computing technologies in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, this study examines and historicizes the emergence of a new cadre of humanists in this period—""socio‐technical humanists,"" as I have labeled them, who advocated for a new kind of humanities made socially relevant and publically engaged via this hands‐on intervention with new media technologies. Ultimately, socio‐technical humanists laid the groundwork for humanists' contemporary engagement with digital formats. Yet, because histories of early humanities computing have been fixated on more recent eras—since the rise of personal computing and the Internet—socio‐technical humanists of the 1950s and 1960s have remained invisible to analysts and commentators on the “digital revolution” the “digital humanities,” and the “crisis of the humanities.” This dissertation seeks to recover that lost history. ❧ This study is based on an analysis of published scholarly discourse, conference proceedings, personal and organizational papers and reports from the U.S. Office of Education. It lies at the nexus of three separate scholarly literatures: 1) the history of academic humanities; 2) the history of early humanities computing; and 3) and new media studies. The history of the academic humanities, while a topic of great concern in recent years, has been singularly focused on humanists' efforts to incorporate new subject matter and materials into their research and curricula in the 1950s and 1960s and has thus completely missed the ways in which humanists struggled, in the same exact years, to integrate electronic technologies into the humanities enterprise. While histories of early humanities computing have examined the relationship between the humanities and technology in the post‐WWII era, they have missed altogether the degree to which the arrival of audio‐visual—television and the rapid rise of multimedia instructional systems in the 1960s—sat alongside computation in the minds of humanists as part of the same overall electronic threat to the printed page. Finally, while new media scholars have recently began to study how, in the past, new media have entered into established media ecosystems, they have failed to examine cases in which the custodians of an older media negotiate, openly, the terms by which an older media's associated habits of mind could or should be transplanted to the new media which they sought or were compelled to embrace. ❧ Beyond these much‐needed historiographical interventions, this dissertation offers a number of findings, each critical for a fuller understanding of the contemporary status and standing of the humanities today. First, humanists' engagement with the computer and multimedia educational systems in the 1960s played a significant role in pushing the humanities away from a mid‐century culture of limited scholarly social responsibility and back towards a turn‐of‐the‐century ethos of broad social engagement. Second, humanists' efforts to use new media to update their social relevancy and to bridge the gap between academia and the outside world goes back, not to the beginning of the Internet, as most scholars today would maintain, but to their widespread use of educational television in the mid‐1950s. Third, humanities computing of the 1960s—the predecessor of today's digital humanities—was never limited to quantitative humanities research, but was, rather, from the very beginning, an effort to rethink the nature of the printed‐page and, ultimately, a humanities‐oriented effort to curb the information explosion of the 1960s by guiding the nature of an emergent electronic textuality. ❧ Structurally, each chapter in my dissertation examines humanists’ responses to a particular feature of electronic culture: In chapter one, its status as mass culture (television); in chapters two and three, its multisensory, associative and affective nature (multimedia); and in chapter four, its ability to be stored, retrieved, disseminated and processed as data (machine‐readable text)