Why make an Electronic Thesis in the Humanities?
by Dr Craig Bellamy
RMIT University, Australia 1 July, 2003In comparison to many other countries-most notably Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom-the disciplines that constitute the humanities in Australia have made modest efforts at progressing humanities knowledge online. Although there are a number of humanities scholars that have digitised a corpus of significant archival material and made it available to a broad public; there are few projects that actually explore the full potential of online interactive media and progress it within the broader skills of the humanities. Regrettably, Australia has no dedicated humanities computing centres, there are few individuals working in the field, and Australians are not well represented on international committees (or conferences) that discuss how new online technologies and techniques can effectively address humanities problems.
Australia's lack of innovation in terms of advancing online technologies in the humanities is most likely due to a funding crisis. The humanities have largely been defunded in Australia in favour of research agendas that placate the immediate demands of industry. For instance, ten years ago there were four hundred historians employed in Australian universities, now there are only two hundred. And some of our newer universities have no humanities schools at all.
Accordingly, individual humanities scholars within Australia that have an interest in new technologies, often have to navigate through a treacherous and confusing intellectual landscape of somewhat rootless media and cultural theories haphazardly applied to proprietary consumer technologies. It seems that many academic researchers have little or no investment in maintaining humanistic autonomy, or even have a clue what this may mean in terms of the application of new technologies. Some researchers may be simply inviting academic legitimisation of 'corporate aspirations' that are very rarely compatible with the aspirations of the humanities.
The values of online humanities scholarship are 'maximum expression and minimum obsolesce', free and open access, and the advancement of scholarly knowledge through the 'interoperability' of that knowledge with other humanities projects. Conversely commercial software is predominantly driven by the demands (and technical techniques) of maximising economic profit.
Thus the humanities must be cautious with transitions into newer communication mediums because there are technologies that may critically disable our academic legacies. Technologies that do not advance our cognitive and critical capacities or become obsolete quickly are not suitable for scholars that may be dealing with public debates and knowledge that may have roots that are decades or even hundreds of years old. At a time when humanities budgets are taut, it is even more important to appreciate what we actually do and adapt and construct technologies that assist us, rather than adopt 'fashionable' technology that may adversely undermine our skills.
In my own experience as a post-graduate humanities student, I discovered that an inexpensive and palatable cognitive segue into the technological jungle is through the structure of an Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD). The ETD is useful for a number of reasons, most notably because it is like the traditional thesis in which most humanities knowledge advances. The traditional thesis is an inexpensive, robust and well understood technology and does provide a transitory position into new technologies from a position that most humanists can identify with.(1)
However, the ETD does not really have a stable definition even though it is based on the understanding of the traditional theses that does. But like all technology, it is shaped by the people that construct it, or as Colin Cheery states in his discussion of the telephone:
Inventions themselves are not revolutions; neither are they the cause of revolutions. Their powers for change lie in the hands of those who have the imagination and insight to see that the new invention has offered them new liberties of action, that old constraints have been removed, that their political will, or their sheer greed, are no longer frustrated, and that they can act in new ways.(2)
The principal University that advocates the model of the ETD is Virginia Tech in the United States. They define it as follows:
An ETD is a document that explains the research or scholarship of a graduate student. It is expressed in a form simultaneously suitable for machine archives and world-wide retrieval. The ETD is similar to its paper predecessor. It documents the author's years of academic commitment. It describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work as recorded in the literature, the research methods used, the results, and the interpretation and discussion of the results, and a summary with conclusions. The ETD is different, however as it provides a technologically advanced medium for expressing your ideas.(3)
And another promoter of the ETD is UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation) who have formed a group of one hundred and forty universities worldwide whose aim is in part, to unlock the huge potential of research produced by post-graduate students through the ETD. There goal is to:
…identify "technologically innovative" theses and dissertations. We want to provide models of new media scholarship for the next generation of scholars and researchers.(4)
Within Australia, there is an ETD project that is administered by UNSW (called the Australian Digital Theses Project) that has as its primary function the creation of standards for the distribution of the traditional thesis in electronic form (and to a lesser degree to promote newer forms of electronic scholarship). (5) And there is the Arrow project (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World: a consortium of three Austalian Universities and the National Library of Australia) that have the objectives to "identify and test software to support best-practice institutional digital repositories at the ARROW Consortium member sites to manage e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing" and to "develop and test a national resource discovery service using metadata harvested from the institutional repositories by the National Library of Australia" (6) It also has the ambitious task of creating E-presses for academic publishing with the overall hope of creating an 'opensource' and 'interoperable' digital repository for Australian scholarship that promotes 'communities of practice' for an emergent 'network society'.
The ETD serves a similar function as the traditional thesis; however as a 'container for knowledge' it allows postgraduate researchers to include digital objects in their work. A musician, for instance, may find it useful to include sonnets in their thesis, or an art-historian, paintings, or an historian, oral history. The objects in an ETD can be arranged and analysed in such a way that it might bring new meanings to the work. Furthermore the ETD retains and broadens the 'cognitive capital' of post-graduate research; something that is perhaps more important now than in any time in our recent past. This is because as tides of information lap at our door, books and the academic monologue provide an important historical, political, and academic solution for cognition. These skills are not something that we must diminish whilst discovering how to communicate our ideas online. Those that incessantly tell us that all technological change is progress towards the removal of privilege are probably profiting handsomely from these shifts. We need to find a productive transition into new technologies in terms of what we think is important.
And perhaps the greatest benefit of building an ETD in terms of humanities practice is that the researcher learns to communicate their ideas through one of the most promising (but misunderstood) new mediums in a generation. In the mid 1990s, the Internet captured the popular imagination fuelled by a wave of market fundamentalism, utopian Libertarianism, economic rationalism, and entrenched popularist conservatism. Many of the norms that we took for granted became dis-rooted, re-branded, and rehashed in contexts that we never thought imaginable. Suddenly conservative laissez-faire politics became 'radical', academic merit became 'hierarchy', democracy became 'unrepresentative' and boundaries became not healthy and robust components of a respect for difference, but walls that contain privilege.
But the turbulent period over the past few years have been incidental initial conditions of a medium that reached critical mass during the superstitious times of the fin de cercle. The technology is still very much with us even though many of the popular discussions in which it débuted are not. At this significant historical juncture it is imperative that the humanities engage with newer communication technologies such as the web, but with our own models and on our own terms. The ETD is an appropriate model because it is anchored within what we do (and what we do well) whilst providing an intellectually-tangible-transitory-position into newer communication mediums. It retains the research skills and relevance of the humanities researcher whilst providing a potentially inexpensive solution to advancing the digital communication capacities within the humanities (within our limited resources). Sure, it may be a transitory position, but it is a transition towards unlocking the enormous potential of postgraduate research and the possibilities of online digital technologies for the humanities.
Footnotes
(1) Colin Cherry, "The Telephone System: Creator of Mobility and Social Change", in Ithiel de Sola Pool, The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge MA, 1977): 112-26.(2) There are still not a whole lot of models to work with within the humanities. The first two ETDs (that were produced as PhD qualifications), were by Simon Pockley of RMIT University and by Matt Kirschenbaum of the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. They were both produced in 1995.
Simon Pockley, "The Flight of Ducks" PhD Degree, RMIT University
<http://www.acmi.net.au/FOD/> (Accessed 26 May, 2003)
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum "LINES FOR A VIRTUAL T[y/o]POGRAPHY: Electronic Essays on Artifice and Information" PhD Project Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The University of Virginia
<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/dissertation/title.html> (Accessed 21 September, 2002)(3) "Definition of an ETD" Virginia Tech
<http://etd.vt.edu/background/whatis.html> (Accessed 26 May, 2003)(4) "The Guide to Electronic Thesis and Dissertations" UNESCO
<http://www.etdguide.org> (accessed 26 May, 2003)(5) "The Australian Digital Thesis Project" The University of New South Wales
<http://www.ceenet.org/workshops99/Jean_Claude_Guedon/Australian-theses.htm> (Accessed 26 May, 2003)(6) see: "Project Description" ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World)
<http://www.arrow.edu.au/docs/> Accessed 26 August, 2004Bibliography
1. "Definition of an ETD" Virginia Tech
<http://etd.vt.edu/background/whatis.html> (Accessed 26 May, 2003)2. Bellamy, Craig "Milkbar.com.au: Globalisation and the Everyday City" An ETD submitted for the fulfilment of the PhD qualification, RMIT University, 2002
<http://www.milkbar.com.au> (Accessed 26 May, 2003).3. Cherry, Colin"The Telephone System: Creator of Mobility and Social Change", in Ithiel de Sola Pool, The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge MA, 1977): 112-26
4. Kirschenbaum Matthew G. "LINES FOR A VIRTUAL T[y/o]POGRAPHY: Electronic Essays on Artifice and Information" PhD Project Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The University of Virginia
5. <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/dissertation/title.html> (Accessed 26 May, 2003).6. "The Guide to Electronic Thesis and Dissertations" UNESCO
<http://www.etdguide.org> (Accessed 26 May, 2003).7. "The Australian Digital Thesis Project" The University of New South Wales
<http://www.ceenet.org/workshops99/Jean_Claude_Guedon/Australian-theses.htm> (Accessed 26 May 2003).8. ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World)
<http://www.arrow.edu.au/docs/> Accessed 26 August, 2004