in praise of inefficiency & multiplicity.
In planning for Digitizing Folk Music: The Berkeley Folk Festival, the moment when I knew that I was indeed teaching a digital history/humanities course came through my wonderful interactions with the various offices of the Northwestern library. A discussion with one librarian quickly, in virtually one email, became a communication with ten librarians. It was then I knew that this kind of digital pedagogical and intellectual pursuit not only encourages, but also demands cooperative work.
Which led me to thinking…the digital does not create more efficiency of labor. And that’s a good thing. While digital technologies do foster other efficiencies, particularly of distribution and communication, they demand more people involved in an intellectual and creative project rather than fewer. This is great! It means we need to hire more teachers, more librarians, more professors, more researchers, more technology consultants, more programmers, and set them to work in a robust environment of cooperative and meaningful engagement with students, ideas, tools, narratives, past experiences, and more.
To work!
PS This post demands the creation of a joke. Question: how many librarians does it take to help a professor plan a digital history course? Answer: the more, the merrier!