Digital Innovation in the Liberal Arts

Digital technologies are profoundly changing the landscape of higher education, because they are transforming how knowledge and information are generated, communicated, analyzed, archived, and disseminated. Guided by its Task Force on Digital Transformation, EDUCAUSE defines digital transformation (Dx) as "a series of deep and coordinated culture, workforce, and technology shifts that enable new educational and operating models and transform an institution's operations, strategic directions, and value proposition."¹

Among the unique challenges of Dx in higher education is the undeniable emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), business, and health sciences. Whereas the arts and humanities are valued for enabling graduates to get the "soft" skills necessary to move up career ladders, the "hard" skills make them truly employable. This divide is not new, of course. In 1959, C. P. Snow, a British scientist, writer, and civil service commissioner, lamented the divide in his Rede lecture "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." Snow argued that between the scientists and the literary intellectuals (humanists, by extension) was "a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other." There are fundamental differences rooted in the scholarly languages they speak; their subject matter, methodologies, approaches, and practices put them at such odds that when they do (rarely) speak to each other, they speak at cross-purposes. Snow went further: "Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites."²

Notwithstanding legitimate criticisms of Snow's arguments, it is worth noting that he spoke in 1959, prior to the digital revolution or, more specifically, at its nascent phase. The digital world of today, however, compels us to bridge with greater urgency the divide between the sciences and the arts/humanities for a simple reason: the digital has tremendous disruptive power; it radically alters knowledge production, meaning-making, and communication.

Far from privileging the sciences and technology, Cathy N. Davidson, professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), suggests an alternative: "Perhaps we need a paradigm shift. Perhaps we need to see technology and the humanities not as a binary but as two sides of a necessarily interdependent, conjoined, and mutually constitutive set of intellectual, educational, social, political, and economic practices."³ What Davidson says as an academic professional is, interestingly enough, similar to what Steve Jobs once said about Apple, the world's top technology company: "It is in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing."⁴

It was such an approach that led a group of us at the University of Southern Maine (USM) to embark on a series of innovative projects. Faculty and staff from liberal arts programs came together as a Digital Humanities Research Cluster and sought funding from the Maine Economic Improvement Fund Program, which was established by the Maine Legislature in 1997 to invest in target areas to enable Maine's public colleges and universities to contribute to the state's economic and social needs. Among the seven target areas is information technology.

Our first project, called Digital Maine, brought together artists and scholars with a shared interest in Maine-based research and creative activity. Members of the Digital Humanities Research Cluster came from the disciplines of art, computer science, economics, English, history, geography, and library science.

The Slow Hunch and Digital Innovation

My USM colleague Eileen Eagan, associate professor of history (now retired), collaborated with students, colleagues, community partners, and local businesses to develop a mobile application called Portland Women's History Trail. Eagan's earlier collaborations—including those with Polly Welts Kaufman (former project director at the Maine Humanities Council), Patricia Finn (former administrative assistant of the history department, USM), and Candace Kanes (former curator of Maine Memory Network)—had resulted in initial versions of the Trail, including a hard-copy booklet.

When considering how to use digital tools to enhance this work for Digital Maine, members of the Digital Humanities Research Cluster investigated the option of making the booklet available online for open access. With additional information and images, the booklet could be designed as an attractive PDF and be featured online  at USM Digital Commons, our institution's research repository. Another option was to digitize the booklet for a website; doing so could enable us to focus more on the trail's visual elements, using graphics, animation, and audio as supplements to the main content. Over extended conversations with our colleagues Jan Piribeck, professor in the Department of Art, USM, and Stephen Houser, adjunct faculty, Computer Science, USM, and currently senior director of academic technology and consulting, Bowdoin College, we decided to innovate by taking the following actions:

• Create a mobile app of the Trail
• Make the app freely available on iOS and Android platforms
• Enable users to physically walk the mapped trails with the help of the app or to walk the trails virtually anywhere, anytime

In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson calls the process of arriving at such ideas the "slow hunch": a gradual building up of exploring, testing, guessing, observing, assessing, and risk-taking. Our Trail app was not the result of, to use Johnson's words, "snap judgments of intuition" but, rather, was the product of work several years in the making. Its "long incubation period" led us to the moment where we could take an innovative risk to create a digital environment in which audiences outside our university could interact with academic research through not only text but also audio and video.⁵

Meanwhile in Digital History, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig write that digital media have quantitative and qualitative features. Quantitatively, they increase the capacity to store information, provide access to vast numbers of peoples spread across national and international regions, and enable multimodality (e.g., the mixing of sound and text with images). Qualitatively, digital media create hypertextuality (nonlinear connections to pieces of information) and interactivity (viewers become users whose input changes the content or form).⁶

In this sense, our Trail mobile app connected the quantitative with the qualitative: it uploaded humanities scholarship online, made that scholarship more accessible, and integrated diverse modes of communication (e.g., texts, images, maps) to generate multimodal content, while using mapping tools to chart walking trails featuring women's histories, so that users could interact with the app's content as they saw fit.

Designing Workflow

Using digital tools to develop an app for the Trail involved adopting a certain workflow, along with a plan that described important phases in product development and also a strategy that integrated the phases in order to create a smooth workflow. Houser sketched our workflow as follows:

Conducting fieldwork:

• Photos and GPS locations are gathered in the field for each site.
• Textual information about each site is taken from the original trail pamphlet and revised, and new content is added.

Pre-processing:

• Text is converted to markdown, spell-checked, etc.
• Photos are normalized; resolution and orientation are fixed for best display on most devices.
• GPS data are calibrated on Google Maps and updated to get the location of the site (rather than the location of where the photos were taken), and a "path" is created for each trail. These are stored in a Keyhole Markup Language (kml) file, which formats geographic data and renders it visually.

Creating the app:

• Jekyll, a static site generator, is run against the markdown and images, which applies the template and creates HTML pages for all the sites, trails, and other screens in the app.
• Cordova, which scales applications to function across multiple platforms, is run to create the native app bundles for iOS and Android formats.
• The app is then published to the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

To develop the Trail, Eileen Eagan, Jan Piribeck, Stephen Houser, and I walked all seven trails that make up the larger trail, taking photos, adding and revising information about the sites, and rerouting trail paths. We used MotionX, an iOS app, along with Bad Elf, a GPS receiver, to record GIS information of the trails and tag photos with metadata.

Our students also played a central role: USM alumni Lucie Tardif and Tracey Berube (history graduates) gathered information, tagged data, and researched the trails, while Hans Nielsen (art major) took site photographs.

Information Technology + Humanities

We gave these digital assets to Houser, who proceeded to build the Portland Women's History Trail app, using a combination of technologies including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Jekyll, and Apache Cordova. He described his use of these tools:

The application is primarily an HTML/JavaScript/CSS-based application using the jQuery framework and Google Maps. jQuery is a JavaScript framework used for high-level manipulation of the HTML code that makes up all the pages (or screens) within the application. It allows fluid transitions between screens and a rich environment for navigating the interactions within the application. Google Maps is used to display and interact with the maps of the trails themselves.

Apache Cordova packages the complex HTML/JavaScript/CSS into native iOS and Android applications. This allows the primarily web-based application to be available in the Google Play and Apple App stores. Cordova makes the application look and act like any other native mobile application on those platforms.

Jekyll is a static website building tool. In the Portland Women's History Trail it is used to apply a template to the numerous pages that represent each site. With seven trails and over a hundred sites, having the ability to make an interface change in one location and then apply it to all the trails and sites greatly eases development.

As Houser started building the app, we began partnering with Big Room Studios, a Portland consulting company, to focus on graphics and design while working with Justin Verbarakis, a USM alumnus. He worked on font styles, sizes, color combinations, and logos. Eventually, after several months of digitizing and programming content, Houser developed the app and made it available on iOS and Android platforms.

Innovation—To What End? Reimagining Maine

Stories give shape to the past, orient us to the present, and influence our approach to the future. For most people, Maine conjures images of freshwater lakes and ocean shores, havens for fishing, kayaking, and swimming. Visitors are drawn to Maine by its craggy mountains and pinewoods, the habitats of moose, bears, and other wildlife, and by the chance to hike, camp, bike, and ski through wild, austere beauty.

People imagine colonial settlements and ancient forts. They recall historical figures such as the 19th-century governor and college president Joshua Chamberlain, as well as authors such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Stephen King, and political figures such as Nelson Rockefeller, George Mitchell, Margaret Chase Smith, and George H. W. Bush.

Visitors come to explore the Portland Museum of Art, Longfellow House, Victoria Mansion, the Portland Headlight, Spring Point, and the Ocean Gateway Pier. They visit L.L. Bean, G.H. Bass, and other Freeport outlet stores, dine at restaurants serving Maine micro-brews, clam chowder, and lobster, or check out seasonal farmers markets showcasing homegrown, organic produce.

Repeated in daily conversations and tourist brochures, these ideas of Maine have become common sense, a lens through which Maine society and culture are understood. All these aspects of Maine compose one of its stories and the state slogan: "The Way Life Should Be." It's not an untrue story, but it is a limited one, and its ubiquity is deceptive.

The Portland Women's History Trail invites app users to reimagine Maine from the perspective of women's history. It introduces important and revealing characters in Maine's story: Alice Fisher, who was a member of an African American family that lived in Maine for over seven generations; Louisa Titcomb, who edited a newsletter, The Crutch, and served during the Civil War at the Naval School Hospital in Maryland; Lillian Ames Stevens, who became the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1898; the Sisters of Mercy, who ran schools and orphanages throughout the city; Hattie Branch, who moved from Virginia to settle in Maine and became well known for her Southern cooking and her skills as a seamstress; Captain Susan Clark, who was the first woman to be inducted into the Portland Marine society; and Joan Benoit, who won the first women's Olympic Marathon in 1984.

The Trail app also marks the site of hat and match factories, fruit and vegetable canneries, and hospitals and orphanages where women worked. By looking at Portland through the eyes of its female residents, many of them immigrants, the Trail helps tell a different Maine story, not only offering a new perspective but also giving additional meaning to existing stories and updated context to those images of blueberry heaths and riverside mills.

"Without the work, contributions, and insights of women, Portland—and the world—would be a very different place," notes Eagan. "Because women's lives, in many ways, have been different from men's lives, so has women's history been distinct. By walking this trail, you can begin to connect with the lives of your figurative sisters, mothers, aunts, and great grandmothers in all the diversity of backgrounds that these women represent. You will never see the city of Portland in the same way again."⁷

By digitally documenting the lives and stories of women, the Trail shows Maine history not as the static stuff of tourism brochures but instead as a dynamic place where questions about the past, work, identity, power, gender, and culture can be studied with new tools and diverse narrative strategies and from a plethora of perspectives. Thus, digital innovation can be the key to bridging the divide between the sciences and the arts/humanities.

Notes

My thanks to Suzanne Nadeau and Judson Merrill, adjunct faculty of English, University of Southern Maine, for insightful suggestions.

1. EDUCAUSE, "Dx: Digital Transformation of Higher Education" (website), accessed June 9, 2020. ↩
2. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 4, 22. Collini offers an informative discussion of the historical and cultural contexts in which Snow's arguments gained resonance. ↩
3. Cathy N. Davidson, "Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions," chapter 28 in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). ↩
4. Jonathan Ponciano, "The Largest Technology Companies in 2019: Apple Reigns as Smartphones Slip and Cloud Services Thrive," Forbes, May 15, 2019; Jobs quoted in Jonah Lehrer, "Steve Jobs: ‘Technology Alone Is Not Enough,'" New Yorker, October 7, 2011. ↩
5. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), p. 77. ↩
6. Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). ↩
7. "About the Trails," Portland Women's History Trail. ↩

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John Muthyala is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern Maine.