The Downside of Going Digital
There’s no question that the Internet has been a boon to the humanities. But there’s a digital divide in academia, and sooner or later, most faculty and students are likely to find themselves on the wrong side of it.
As colleges and universities emerge from almost two years of contingency planning, it is perhaps a good time to take stock of the costs — and benefits — of the turn to digital in higher education. Even as it curtailed interpersonal gathering and disrupted supply chains for books and media, the pandemic forced Luddite professors to put their classes online, prompted museums and archives to offer their public programming online, and gave a broad swath of Americans a crash course in technologies and techniques for digital learning. There are certainly ways that this push toward digital access has been democratizing. A wide range of citizens, for instance, suddenly has the ability to attend academic conferences, book talks, and public lectures at institutions around the nation and world. But in other ways, this increasingly digital world has reproduced existing social hierarchies and power disparities, and exacerbated the educational inequalities across lines of geography and wealth.
My own experiences in various research and educational settings illustrate some of the pros and cons of the increased reliance on digital resources. During my time in graduate school, a professor I knew at another university hired me to dig up 19th-century newspaper articles about the events he was researching. I was familiar with ProQuest’s historical newspaper databases, and so would send him the relevant articles within minutes after receiving his requests. He was ecstatic about my efficiency, but I found it unnerving that he was paying me to do research that could be done almost instantly.
I didn’t realize until later that the reason I was used to having access to these expensive databases of digitized resources is that universities that grant humanities Ph.D.s often, by their very nature, include a large enough community of database users to make subscription worth the cost. Most institutions of higher education, however, do not. This professor was employed at one of those universities, where there were no history majors, and humanities departments existed to round out the education of science and technology students. What this dynamic means in practice is that when the majority of newly minted Ph.D.s take their first job, they move from affiliation with a well-funded institution to a smaller school where standard databases of historical sources are often not available.
I made this transition in steps. While I was still writing my dissertation, I took a full-time position as a non-tenure-track instructor at a regional campus of a public university in West Texas with a large number of first-generation and Hispanic students. Moving for a job meant that I could no longer take advantage of my university library’s physical collections, though as a tuition-paying student I could still access its extensive digital holdings. That kept my own research humming along, but I was not able to extend my login credentials to my students. When I taught research methods or assigned individual projects, I was forced to lower my expectations of my students, not because of their scholarly capacities, but rather because they could not access many of the digitized sources that would have made their research smoother and more fruitful.
When I finished my degree and lost my affiliation to my Ph.D. granting institution, I relied much more on interlibrary loan. This slowed down my research considerably, as it took weeks to get resources I had instant access to before. Additionally, the more institutions that keep resources in digital-only formats, the fewer there are to loan hard copies. If a resource is prevalent in hard copy, you can probably get it from one of the many public libraries across the country; if it is only digital, you had better be affiliated with an institution that subscribes to the content provider for that resource, or you’re out of luck. The upshot is that research is often slower, more expensive, and more difficult for students and faculty at both geographically remote and smaller teaching-focused institutions.
For all the headaches around access to digitized journal articles and primary sources, the digital realm can also open up a vast array of new possibilities in the classroom. My most frequent and rewarding use of digital resources has involved assigning audio and video along with reading homework. I’ve seen how documentaries and podcasts can make history come alive and capture students’ imaginations in ways different from print. But while “fair use” may justify sneaking a photocopied journal article to your whole class, assigning a video or podcast to 200 students requires sticking to unpaywalled streaming platforms or subscription services that your institution supports. Films on Demand and Kanopy were two such services that greatly expanded the engaging sources I could share with my classes – until I realized how impermanent their assets were.
One year, Films on Demand removed the video I used in the first unit of my U. S. History survey class. It was a 20-minute documentary from 1994 that demonstrated the ways scholars have collaborated across disciplines to learn about the prehistoric Ancestral Pueblo people. The film had never been released on DVD, and I didn’t have another copy. But I couldn’t find another documentary with the same methodological focus. I could buy a VHS copy, but copyright prevented me from digitizing it and the classroom technology no longer accommodated VCRs. Should I track down a cathode ray television and a VCR on a cart, and have my classroom of 55 students huddle around the screen? Not realistic. I had built lessons and discussions and assessments around that video, chosen other resources that complemented its content, and built subsequent lessons upon the themes this one introduced. The time and energy involved with redoing the entire unit would be significant.
Another way instructors can lose access to digital resources, of course, is if their institution stops subscribing to the databases where they’re stored. Print resources incur a one-time purchase cost, whereas digital resources require expensive annual subscriptions that can eventually become untenable for universities. There is also the problem, increasingly common in today’s academic world, of faculty losing access to databases when they move to other institutions. After moving away from Texas, I taught the same class I had been teaching at an elite liberal arts school in Massachusetts. But despite having more financial resources, this school did not subscribe to either of the video databases I drew from. I had to find new resources and rebuild the class around them.
However, as a Visiting Assistant Professor, I did not have access to the university’s digital resources until the start date of my limited-term employment. Thus, I had to plan all my courses without any institutional affiliation. The Boston Public Library is wonderful, but it does not subscribe to the same set of resources that the university did. And while I had physical access to the libraries at Boston’s other world-class universities, their digital resource licenses do not permit use by unaffiliated users. I ended up leaning heavily on open-access resources that are freely available to the public, including Backstory and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
That was in the spring of 2020 — a semester in which faculty and students at all types of institutions had to make an unexpected, abrupt transition to fully online learning. On the one hand, this transition was easier for me than it was for many of my colleagues because I was already incorporating a range of digital resources. On the other, some of my students lived in other countries, and while the American Archive of Public Broadcasting had digital streaming rights in the U.S., the videos were unavailable beyond its borders.
I eventually left the classroom to become an archivist, managing a research library and manuscript archive at a small-town historical society that definitely could not afford subscriptions to the expensive databases. At least visitors could read all of the town’s old newspapers on microfilm! Until the microfilm reader broke. It turns out that repairing microfilm machines is also quite expensive — beyond the budget of this historical society. Might it be better to simply digitize the microfilm collection, and make it publicly accessible on computers in the reading room? Perhaps, except that ProQuest holds the rights to the microfilm copies, and would be unlikely to allow another institution to digitize something it monetizes through its subscription service. Digitization is also quite expensive, and while PDFs may be easier to use than microfilm, they are still less efficient for researchers than databases. As of this writing, in any case, the historical society still cannot access its own newspapers. Intrepid researchers can go to a bigger city with a library that subscribes to the historical newspapers database. But in addition to the added time and cost of travel, most library reading rooms have been closed through the pandemic, and digital resource use licenses often allow off-site digital access only for card-holders, i.e. that city’s residents.
So what have I learned from this journey in digital scholarship? In aggregate, our trend toward the digital is a boon to research and learning. But in practice, it often makes research and learning more difficult for those who lack access for any number of reasons. That lack of access is often compounded by the profound disparities in academia. As New American History Executive Director Ed Ayers puts it, “Our most disadvantaged students are being taught by our most disadvantaged faculty.”
Some of the elements that exacerbate inequity in higher education come from far beyond the academe. The racial and economic inequalities ingrained in our social and political structures affect the people who become students and faculty long before they enter the gates of a university. This stratification is further reinforced by choices being made within the higher education industry, such as the move toward more part-time, limited term, low-paid adjunct faculty who bear a greater burden of undergraduate teaching, especially of introductory classes for first-year students.
But there are also myriad little ways in which seemingly small differences in the range of digital resources available to students and educators translate into large disparities in teaching and learning. These disparities sometimes fly under the radar of people who hold privileged positions in academia, make education policy, or build and disseminate digital resources. But they’re increasingly a part of life for many — if not most — scholars, as our training, research, and jobs take us from one institutional affiliation to another. And when these small differences in institutional resources align with larger social and economic inequalities, as they often do, they intensify the urgency for a new way of thinking about digital access.
At New American History, we are committed to the project of facilitating access to high-quality digital content for learners and educators. If you have ideas about how scholars, educators, and content providers can collaborate in this project, please get in touch. We’d love to keep the conversation going.
