Digital Lounge

Flew last week to Madison for a gathering of administrators in Big-Ten German departments, where, aside from exchanging professional information and pleasantries, I made two realizations.  Both were surprises in their own way.  The first came about by accident—as I was flying the many legs from my university to Madison, I happened to sit at an airport gate next to three graduate students on their way to Madison for a conference called NAVSA.  I had never heard of this organization; I could not even spell it, but they were talking loudly in this airport lounge about their papers and who all they were going to see.  Most importantly they were complaining about what it was like to be a graduate student, and since I never get hear graduate students speaking that way anymore, I decided to eavesdrop.  This meant simply sitting there with a zombie look on my face, because these three women were speaking so loudly that the whole lounge was taking in what they were saying.  I simply pretended to be a burnt out, middle aged, pudgy businessman staring blankly off into space—a convincing disguise, and one I could naturally pull off.

            So what did these three young graduate students reveal—well, first that graduate students complain about pretty much the same things we all did.  Dissertation chapters, finishing conference papers, should I go to this other conference, getting a job—nothing surprising there.  But then the conversation took a turn, and these three women started unburdening their souls about---digital humanities.

            What shocked me the most, was that they spoke about digital humanities without the slightest worry about defining what the heck was.  Tenured professors hem and haw as if no one really knows what digital humanities is, and then they all laugh out loud together, nervously.  These graduate students talked about it as if it were just their TA assignment.  Two of them had paying jobs in digital humanities.  One of them apparently had landed some nice post-doc in the field, another was working in some help desk capacity. She complained at length and in detail, as only a grad student can, about clueless, old professors who call her help desk with the simplest problems, one after the other, asking the same stuff—and all she wants to do is yell at them “Read the FAQs page!”  This made me cringe appropriately.  But she continued, “They need someone to hold their hands.  Can’t they read.  I mean they are trained in reading and critical thinking. Can’t they read the help page and figure it out for themselves.  I have to answer the same questions over and over again. I want to shout at them, but I don’t.”  Well in fact, she had just done that, because as I slowly turned to look up, I noticed that the airport lounge was filled with several obvious academics, all of whom had assumed the same blasé attitude while listening in.

            What was most obvious from their continued dialogue was that they all studied software programs as if they were foreign languages.  They knew how to build websites, run complex searches through corpuses of data, and generally treated the entire field of website design as just another part of writing a PhD thesis.  Digital humanities was nothing more than another self-evident part of their training, one that came with the usual institutional complexities.  So while I am a hopeless old professor who has taken seminars on web site design, but who has a better chance in holding a lecture in Latin than posting his own page, the lesson is that graduate students will learn and carry out these tasks directly because everyone they know is doing the same thing.