Those of us using digital technologies for teaching often think of technologies as helpful and interesting tools that can help us make the humanities relevant, or that are fun and interesting to teach, in and of themselves. I have been teaching a unit in my library cataloging and classification class in which I use an example from the humanities to think about technology, rather than the other way around. I would like to think of other ways that the humanities can help us train technologists to design better tools for human (and non-human) flourishing.
The unit in my class is small, but I draw it like a thread through the course material, which is about using library cataloging standards (a specific form of metadata application) to develop consistent and easy access to the entire library collection. We read a short piece from a queer poet who is also disability rights advocate. It becomes our touchstone for thinking about how technological infrastructures necessarily create inclusions and exclusions. We also read some excerpts from Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out, in which the authors make clear the moral force of categories (including categories writ small, as manufacturing and interoperability standards) and the moral obligations of the designers of technical systems to surface the exclusions their systems create even in a good-faith effort to create ease of access and functionality across local and global scales.
I am trying to help my students avoid the traps of technological determinism, the idea that technologies will do their own things, irrespective of humans, and that it is up to humans to adapt. What other ways can the humanities illuminate how we use, assemble, and patch together technologies, and the consequences of doing so? And how can we be diligent in showing that the humanities are also fully germane and foundational to technologies in society, rather than appearing always to say that digital technologies bestow relevance on the humanities?