Guest lecturer Bryan Alexander tackled the effects of technology on academia in his “Digital Humanities” talk March 6.  Alexander focused on how social media and other technologies are reinventing the humanities for scholars, professors and students alike.

“I believe in the possibility of the digital humanities to refresh and revitalize the humanities,” Alexander said.

Alexander is a senior fellow for the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the liberal arts through technology. During his talk, he shared several new computer tools that modernize the humanities by implementing technology, such as a cartographic turn.

It’s a map that tracks sociopolitical trends online, which historians can use to see the relationship between two trends, make new connections and ask new questions.

Alexander also mentioned “Commonpress,” a blog tool that splits a blog into two: the left side displaying the blog’s content and the right showing the comments. Having the two side-by-side streamlines the process of peer review.

Other technologies include digital archiving, a citation tool called Zotero and a graphing tool called ngram. Technologies like these encourage more conversation among scholars online.

“Humanists can meet each other and talk to each other,” Alexander said. “Imagine the faculty lounge. Now scatter it throughout the web, spread across the planet.”

The digital humanities can also provide students with skills they can use to get a job.

“Archiving, data structures, Excel, server manipulation,” Alexander said as he listed off skill sets provided by digital humanities. “Digital Humanities is like a computer science minor in some ways."

Bringing the digital humanities to the classroom has its challenges, such as lack of staff, funding and visibility. But much of what the digital humanities bring to the classroom — student projects, collaboration, blogs and social engagement — can be done with just a click of the mouse.

“Arguably what happens when you bring digital humanities to the classroom is you change your students from passive receivers to contributors of knowledge,” Alexander said. “That could revitalize the humanities and make learning more exciting.”

See what people were tweeting about this event here:

Students tweeted to @BryanAlexander during his speech on digital humanities. Here's some of the best ones.

http://storify.com/laurylfischer/missed-the-lecture-read-the-tweets#publicize