Natalie Phillips is an associate professor of English and affiliated faculty in Cognitive Science at Michigan State University. As founder and co-director of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition lab (DHLC), she is devoted to pioneering interdisciplinary experiments that foreground the humanities as they explore the complex cognitive systems involved in our engagement with literature, music and the arts. Alongside her first book, Distraction (JHUP), her work in eighteenth-century literature, cognitive approaches to fiction, literary neuroscience, and the history of mind has appeared in high-impact volumes from Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Routledge, among others, and has been supported by grants including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon foundation, the Wallenberg foundation, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Alexander Babbitt has his bachelor’s degree in English from Michigan State University. While at Michigan State University, he studied the relationship between cognitive science and the humanities, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary pedagogy. Currently, he is an Elementary School teacher in Brooklyn, NYC. His current interests are centered around creating accessible and interdisciplinary instruction for childhood education.
Soohyun Cho is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Michigan State University, specializing in crime fiction, cognitive approaches to literature, disability studies, and digital humanities. Her current project focuses on the intersection of disability studies and popular culture studies, exploring the tradition of detectives with non-normative minds. Her ongoing digital experiment investigates the reader's experience with Kindle. In her time at MSU, Soohyun has served as a lab lead as well as a Graduate Research Assistant in the DHLC Lab.
Jessica Kane is the Associate Director of Community-Based Learning at Albion College. Her professional work focuses on supporting authentic, equitable campus-community partnerships to enhance civic engagement and positive social change. Her scholarly work focuses on gender, genre, and narrative authority in eighteenth-century British literature. The link between the two is an emphasis on how the relationships we create and stories we tell can change the world.
Cody Mejeur is Visiting Assistant Professor of Game Studies at University at Buffalo. Their work uses games to theorize narrative as an embodied and playful process that constructs how we understand ourselves and our realities. They have published on games pedagogy, gender and queerness in games, and the narrative construction of reality. They are currently Associate Director of Palah Light Lab at UB, researcher with the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, editor at One Shot: A Journal of Critical Games & Play, and serve as Diversity Officer for the Digital Games Research Association.
Craig Pearson has bachelor's degrees in Neuroscience and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from Michigan State University, with an additional major in English and, as a Marshall Scholar, he earned a PhD in clinical neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He is now a medical student at Washington University School of Medicine. His interests include art, fiction, and narrative medicine, and he has contributed to several collaborative projects that showcase the perspectives of people with different abilities and health status.
This is the source
The Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition (DHLC) lab at Michigan State
University was founded in 2012 with the mission of bringing together scholars
from disciplines including literature, neuroscience, education, computer
science, and digital humanities to investigate the cognitive processes involved
in reading texts of all kinds. The real story is much more complicated: emerging
through a combination of institutional risk-taking and serendipitous accident,
the lab was — and remains — an example of how conventional definitions of a
This is a case study describing the creation of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition lab at Michigan State University and the interdisciplinary research efforts made within the lab.
The Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition (DHLC) lab at
Michigan State University (MSU) emerged not through top-down strategic
planning, but through a combination of university proactivity and
serendipitous accident, with an emphasis on the latter. We use italics
here and throughout to represent the voice of Professor Natalie
Philliips, Director of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition
lab. When we switch into non-italic font, this indicates the collective
voice of the article’s six authors. It emerged organically from
interactions between me and excited students, newly interested MSU
colleagues, collaborators from Duke and Stanford... and at times, people who
just happened to be walking by and came in. This odd beginning is precisely
what makes our lab such an interesting case study, similar to the
development of other humanities labs . One
common way to approach building such a lab — a trend you might say — is by
creating a digital scholarship or digital humanities center, a space devoted
to supporting as many different fields, departments, and faculty as
possible: building websites, provid[ing] a support
mechanism for the growing areas of e-research and digital
scholarship, and facilitating the use of big, expensive pieces
of technology (or even better, the analysis of big
data) . We have a version of this
at MSU, the Digital
Scholarship Lab, and it’s amazing. That’s not quite what we do. I
can run an MRI and conduct advanced brain imaging, but I can’t build a
website to save my life, so I’m glad that others aren’t relying on me or the
lab to do this type of DH. Instead, the DHLC began with a specific research
question about close reading and literary neuroscience. Now, we design and
run a variety of new experiments, opening up the space for ever-growing
grassroots engagement with others across campus and with our
community.
In 2012, the lab wasn’t what most would call a
lab. One day, I was working with three students —
one from English, one from education, one from neuroscience — at a table
we’d dragged from a supply closet. Clustered over our laptops, we were so
focused we scarcely looked up as a team of technicians walked in and began
installing computers around us. For a DH lab, the moment when the technology
appears is normally a glorious occasion; looking back, I can see why the
arrival of these computers wasn’t treated with the usual tech-centric
revelry. The actual lab was already there — in full swing, fueled by the
energy being brought by everyone around the table. The lab was the students,
the people. And with them, we got momentum, a combination of student energy
and brilliance that would propel us for the next seven years.
It’s the energy of the people in the lab that sustains me as I
navigate the balance of my own work and these new fields we’re engaging. I’m
an eighteenth centuryist who gets excited about Margaret Cavendish’s
seventeenth-century jokes about the brain, and I also put (willing!)
students in brain scanners to see if we can learn more about the cognitive
intricacy and uniqueness of reading literature. Fortunately, I work
alongside equally interdisciplinary folks. The computer scientist who helped
us code our sonnet study at MSU loves poetry so much he actually memorizes
it, down to the punctuation (you should hear him recite Whitman or Keats).
My co-lead on our music study was a major in violin before he switched to
computer science; only later did he jump to cognitive science, focusing on
rhythm and music. This sort of interdisciplinary work is not without its
limits. As Urszula Pawlicka points out with Bruno Latour, just the name
humanities lab risks assuming an ideologically
dangerous scientification of the humanities. If
the laboratory is a place that has been socially
constructed so as to project the mythos of science onto the world
outside its walls, she writes, then
humanities laboratories may begin by borrowing the foreign glamour of
science and end by reproducing its ideological parochialisms
The sounds of the lab on any given day include the clack of typing, the light squeak of pen against dry-erase board, and music — live streaming everything from classical to indie-rock (one undergrad lab lead’s favorite band is Rainbow Kitten Surprise). Academic conversations about our latest lab project on music and narrative intermix with light cursing over how to change font size in E-Prime (the requisite software for taking our poetry study to fMRI). It’s a space for kvetching about grad school applications. Most importantly, it’s a space for laughter, be it a fierce debate on whether the lab’s next event will be an escape room or laser tag, or an equally fierce argument over whose favorite candy is actually disgusting. Entering the lab means joining a warm, rich, chaotic space full of work, odd debates, and enjoyment. The collegial and even goofy atmosphere of the lab is not a weakness — if anything, it energizes our work and makes it more generative. This is our kind of interdisciplinarity.
One of the real strengths of an interdisciplinary and comparatively young field
like digital humanities is the sheer amount of experimentation and invention
that digital humanists engage in on a daily basis. We have to, because the work
we do is often the first of its kind. We can’t help but be cutting-edge, unique,
and integrative, because we have limited models to draw from in terms of
literary neuroscience. Even as digital humanities labs at prestigious
universities such as Stanford, MIT, and CUNY have become well established, there
remain many interdisciplinary areas (i.e. literary cognition) that are only just
starting to be explored. As the field continues to grow and mature, however, we
have the opportunity to build on one another’s wisdom, to create new models and
best practices for present and future digital humanities scholars to follow.
That is part of what this article seeks to do, inviting readers to learn from
the
We cannot, however, give you a template. We do not have a model you can simply copy. There is no formula for how to create your own cutting-edge humanities lab — such a thing does not exist, because the most effective labs and programs build on the specific strengths of a given community. Instead, the following case study it is an exploration of one lab, our Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition (DHLC) lab, with a discussion of some of the approaches and strategies we used to create it. In our current moment when the question is shifting from whether or not to have humanities labs to how those labs should operate in more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable ways, our experiences in the DHLC offer some practices for those working in labs old, new, and yet to be. As you read the specifics of how the DHLC works and why we set it up that way, we invite you to imagine yourself and your own situation — to dream of what your own lab could be.
The Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition (DHLC) lab was founded in 2012. Its
first seven years provide a powerful and unique case study that reveals what
interdisciplinary work in DH can be, including points of promise and innovation,
points of disciplinary tension and translation, and most importantly, lessons
that point to the power of actively involving students in a humanities lab. At
its core, the DHLC’s mission is to understand how humans think in and through
genres of literary art. In other words, we want to understand the intertwined
cognitive, neurological, emotional, and cultural processes by which we engage
with art, relate to it, and use it to make sense of ourselves. We call our
research in cognitive and digital humanities
In 1959, C.P. Snow famously described the humanities and sciences as two cultures
separated by a gap
of mutual incomprehension.
It
seemed the two were unable to communicate, and the increasingly siloed nature of
disciplinary knowledge throughout the twentieth century did little to help. The
present situation is a paradox. As many institutions call for interdisciplinary
scholarship and teaching, arts and humanities programs continue to be defunded
The DHLC works hard to be a truly interdisciplinary space — we actively integrate methodologies, approaches, and scholars from different disciplines on equal footing. As one example, we always insist on capturing both qualitative and quantitative data whenever we design experiments, and we further ensure that our qualitative data includes space for narrative. The stories and reflections of our study participants are as important as the numbers on an aesthetic pleasure scale, and our student researchers specializing in both humanistic and scientific methods work directly with each other in small groups to analyze the data in tandem. In this way we bring together the strengths of both sciences and humanities, which gives us a richer set of data that enables us to talk to people in different fields in their own languages and concepts.
In pursuing such a significant cultural and academic goal, it can be easy to get lost in the sauce, so we try to keep our day-to-day research practices in perspective. Walking into the DHLC means walking into a space enclosed by the usual four walls, one of which is a window that stretches from floor to ceiling, offering a gorgeous view of trees and the occasional sunset. Double layered, bright green blinds — technologically advanced to move with the changing daylight, yet broken beyond comprehension — seem to have a mind of their own and close and open over the window randomly, making temperature regulation uniquely difficult. To counteract this, we have an ancient box fan, named
gender?!?There are four different styles of chairs, ranging from the foldable to the
spinnychairs that allow for a dramatic turn to listen to someone talking. A portrait of Jane Austen looks over the lab, observing the years of inside jokes written around the room. Most importantly, this physical room we call our lab — the DHLC — not only brings together students from English, Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Rhetoric, Business, and Art; it creates unique points of contact between them. Neuroscience students read poetry, debate Austen’s irony, and listen to excerpts of orchestral music. Scholars of literature and psychology work together on interdisciplinary fMRI experiment design while artists join computer scientists to develop new digital tools for making art accessible across museum spaces, digital platforms, and coffee shops. There are not many places where a freshman undergrad in political science can talk literary cognition theory with a 5th year English PhD, or where you find professors taking careful notes about sophomores and seniors’ latest project insights. But this is what it means to be at the DHLC.
Our lab has never adhered to traditional hierarchies, and we actively cultivate a
lab culture that resists the neoliberal, top-down power structures of the
contemporary university
Bringing together science and humanities in the study of cognition and literary
art is certainly a tall order. We
At the beginning of each semester, lab leads for each of the three major research projects present broad semester goals. At the same time, if any group members come up with a hypothesis, they are given a semester or two to play around with the new approach. If the research idea seems sustainable, it becomes a long-term project and is incorporated into a future beginning-of-semester goal presentation. If not, we store detailed notes on the process in a
Our projects range from fMRI studies of novel reading, to experiments on poetry
and pleasure, to cultural explorations of the stories we hear in music. Outside
the world of interdisciplinary experiments, the DHLC also organizes exhibitions
that blend art, medical humanities, and disability studies to create accessible
art installations in museums where everyone — including those along the visual
disability spectrum — can
This highly collaborative nature of our digital humanities research makes our lab
a comprises both physical and
virtual
framed simultaneously by the physical space, the virtual space
and the relationship between the two
The role space plays in defining research becomes even more apparent when that
research involves placing people in circular magnetic tubes. As Joshua Mann
notes of digital technologies used to represent the past, nothing about this
present technology is hermeneutically neutral
Head movement in an MRI machine means the scan will pick up on the wrong brain
regions, so we make a participant as comfortable as possible, providing
ear-plugs to drown out the noise of pulse sequences, as well as foam pillows
under their knees, for their elbows, and alongside their head for comfort. In
this case, we accept the unique constraints on physical space inside an MRI
scanner (we can’t change Radiology...yet), but we use our humanist background to
push to the very edges of what’s traditionally allowed to be seen inside a
scanner. In a radical humanist departure from MRI tradition, our participants
read long sections of novels and poetry
The lab’s first project,
Ultimately, this study and the other DHLC projects we describe in the coming pages reveal how digital humanities labs can take an active role in championing the humanities in our communities. We believe that the interdisciplinary, non-hierarchical structure of our lab is valuable philosophically, politically, and practically. We see the different fields represented in the lab as equally important partners in our work, rather than science chasing humanities or humanities chasing science. In the same vein, the members of our lab are equally important partners in our work, regardless of university rank. Together, these approaches shake up the relationships between fields and between people, giving everyone ownership in what the lab does and reminding us that everyone can and should be part of the process of expanding human knowledge.
We could say that the international recognition our first study
of Austen received naturally led to a second project, Neuroaesthetics: Poetry and Aesthetic Pleasure. We moved from
novels to poetry, conducting an experiment that emerged organically from a
research group centered at NYU on the neural and cognitive dimensions of
aesthetic experience. In reality, I was grading papers for a course on the
eighteenth-century novel with a friend when an unexpected email arrived from
a Dean at NYU declaring she and her colleagues had been following my
research and inviting me to join a global collaboration on neuroscience and
art. I knew if I wanted to take this on — that is, involve the lab in
designing three new experiments on literature, music, and art — I would need
to bring the lab with me. I said yes, and boarded a plane to New York… with
three students in tow.
What I didn’t expect was that it was absolutely necessary that
the students be there. Sitting at the table in a group of neuroscientific
leaders, I watched in awe as they offered insights (and even experimental
critiques) again and again, gaining the respect of famous scholars in the
neuroscience of music, vision, and art. Yet, as we all know, most of the
work — and many of the decisions — happens, not in the conference room, but
over dinner. During the wining and dining, the students mixed and mingled
with enviable ease, picking up comments that would prove invaluable. Had
they been virtually present over Skype, all that would have been lost. On
our final night, free from the formality of fine dining, we ordered to-go
Indian food and clustered over our laptops in my hotel room. As we pieced
together our notes from the weekend, and laughed over the comic tidbits we’d
overheard, we dropped all previous expectations and began to design a
totally new experiment on poetry — one that would advance Neuroaesthetics
and further define the DHLC. As we worked and laughed, I realized the lab
had been moved, so to speak, to a small hotel room in New York, with plastic
knives and chana masala in styrofoam cups.
Forging ahead with the energy from that first trip to NYU, and in ongoing
collaboration with G. Gabrielle Starr, we designed a study looking at real-time
responses to poetry
wine-weakenedeyes as particularly aesthetically pleasing
The data for each sonnet was so rich, with so many things to explore, that
students involved in the poetry study decided to pursue two distinct research
questions. One group (nicknamed cheerless domes;
similarly, in Michael Ferris’
rage and wonder battle cruel, and strange
In the new experiments, Psychology majors highlighted what they loved (and didn’t) about poetry, providing key data to match up with the previous data from English majors. Immediately, we noticed radical differences in aesthetic pleasure, with Psychology students generally loving Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and English students delighting instead in the far lesser known poem, Catherine Chandler’s
Or so they say; for I have yet to spy the shy, elusive bird, or hear its song, except in Audubon recordings. I admit to shaky faith, but play along; and though my yard’s a skirl of jays and crows, someday it might show up. One never knows.
One never knows.In a world where students notoriously complain that they don’t like poetry because they don’t know what it means, the English majors are
never know [sic].
What students highlighted as particularly pleasing (or not) grew more and more riveting to us as we gathered more responses. Some phrases in poems stood out to a majority of readers, either positively or negatively. But before we could answer that, we had to be able to see it. We tried bolding words that participants had repeatedly highlighted, but this method couldn’t represent the magnitude of students who loved or hated a phrase. Based on the number of likes we tried changing the font size by statistical increments but the rest of the poem was too small to be read. The best answer we could find was to create a statistical highlighting system where words and phrases got darker and darker, in green for pleasure and red for displeasure, which worked well enough until we reached a point where so many people liked or disliked a word that you could no longer see it. Our lab solution was to just turn that word white (see Figure 4). Fortunately, MSU is invested in DH beyond the lab, and had just created a Digital Scholarship Lab in the library. We reached out with a rough idea in mind to solve the visualization problem and they quickly set us up with someone who knew a technology for heat mapping. Together, their GIS specialist and an English undergrad from the lab solved the problem that we had been staring at for a year using ArcGIS, a geographical mapping software. The result was a heatmap that showed where participants collectively found the most pleasure and displeasure in the sonnets they read. Amusingly, we later returned to the Digital Scholarship Lab as invited presenters, with our co-created poetry heat map on display. The presentation received many excited questions for our innovative use of ArcGIS — a testament to how interdisciplinary scholarship can generate new, often unexpected engagements with digital tools that push our questions and how we answer them further.
The poetry study epitomizes the crucial role physical place and in-person interactions play in advancing the work that goes on in and beyond the lab. Being in the same physical space allows us to rapidly iterate on experiment design, data analysis, and digital tool development in our studies, responding to theoretical concerns and practical considerations as they emerge. However the poetry study also demonstrates how the physical, the virtual, and the digital are increasingly blurred in an interdisciplinary lab. As our most recent study on music and narrative cognition reveals, online collaboration and digital tools for both communication and community research are just as essential for understanding how we encounter literary art in the twenty-first century.
Some studies come from concerted effort and invited
collaboration, as at NYU. Others emerge by serendipitous accident. This was
certainly the case for our study on the stories we hear in music. I had gone
to Nashville with my fiancé for one of his (many) music cognition
conferences. I’d skipped out of most of the talks and spent much of my time
exploring the streets of Nashville, with its eccentric restaurants, huge
musical billboards, and fabulous collection of old bookstores. But one
poster session caught my eye, so I made my way back to the conference,
keeping my badge face-down to stay blissfully incognito. As I read over a
poster on close listening to music, I marveled at the
structural similarity to our Austen study’s exploration of close and
pleasure reading. All of a sudden, the presenter appeared and said: Oh my goodness, it’s you! I swiftly learned she
had designed her study at Stanford intentionally building off our previous
work. She had tons of questions and I was happy to help, delving into a
conversation that lasted far beyond the poster session and carried us down
the stairs toward lunch. I saw my fiancé deeply engaged in a conversation
about budget practicalities with the new treasurer for the society, and told
her we’d need to meet up later, exchanging cards. When she turned to me on
the last step and said, I can’t believe we met. The
Brain on Jane! the acoustics of the space magnified her voice so
that (it seemed) the whole room heard. Certainly, my fiance’s conversation
about treasury suddenly ended; his companion, Lisa, evidently familiar with
our study, promptly turned to me and said, You’re a
cognitive narratologist? There’s something I need you to
see.
Lisa Margulis, it turns out, is an interdisciplinary scholar who runs the Music
Cognition Lab in the Music department at U. Arkansas (soon to be
moving to Princeton). She ran a study where she had participants listen to music
without words and asked them to describe any story they heard; a surprising
number of people did indeed hear a story I know we have a lot going on at the lab — too
much already. I’m tired, you’re tired… still, is it interesting enough for
us to run with it anyway?
Everyone was fascinated. And, despite the
amount of work we had, it was too interesting to
Supported by a number of fellowships (written together over Skype), an
ever-accumulating number of collaborators, and a National Science Foundation
(NSF) grant, we began to explore whether — particularly how and when — we use
narratives to understand music. In other words, when trying to make sense of a
new piece of music, do we begin to cat-and-mouse story
(see Figure 5).
For the excerpt from Telemann’s
In order to assess how much cultural context affects these narratives, we are
partnering with researchers at the U. of Hong Kong to compare results of our
narrative listening studies at U. Arkansas and Michigan State with participants
from rural China. In this new cross-cultural version of the study, participants
from U. Arkansas, MSU,
If you look next to her, on the same side of the lab is an English major, who jumped into our poetry study so early and deeply that he taught himself E-Prime, the standard tool for creating computerized experimental design and data collection. Now, having finished designing macros for our lab computers to make certain common lab tasks easier, and having finished developing an algorithm to map word count for our ever-increasing data-set of stories that people heard in music, we find him deep in network analysis, looking to see how often key terms and phrases from the music-inspired storylines intersected for different pieces of music. He’s never lost his English side — you should hear him go on about metaphor theory some day.
Across the lab, with headphones in and deeply focused, is a tech-savvy grad
student in English and DH developing a tool in R to improve sentiment analysis
for our narratives, seeking to assess subtle similarities and differences in the
strongly negative.
Other less
comic cases of this abounded, and, knowing that we must be thinking critically
about these tools, we decided, why not just create our
own.
Thus, our brilliant grad student developing a tool in R to
better analyze the sentiment of our narratives and capture moods that will
always slip by word count.
At the end of the day, no matter how many different tools we’re working with (or
how many people are at the lab), someone usually jokingly admits that candy
isn’t cutting it. I’m going to need a drink after this…
does anyone want to join?
and off we go to a local bar or
restaurant. We stay away from work as much as we can at the bar but conversation
often includes laughing over the inside jokes and funniest stories we’ve seen.
Some of our favorites examples include: I imagined a fight
between two squirrels,
This music sounded like a mixture of Michael Myers and
clowns,
and plz stp playing songs that stress
me out.
While all of these last examples happened
I imagined animated shadows creeping over the wallsas an abstract narrative without characters or agents, students were able to offer feedback as equals. When our undergraduate lab lead pointed out that shadows (as well as colors, objects, animals, etc.) could be considered agents (i.e. characters), traditional professorial power dynamics went out the window. Lisa simply said
I trust your intuition as a literary scholar.
It is this same spirit of equality and open-access that motivates our development
of Adagia, an online app that collects
and maps the narratives of users who listen to a short musical excerpt and share
any story they heard (see Figure 6). Their response is immediately visible to
them (and others) on a GPS-based map, allowing us to explore how local and
cultural influences shape the stories. Our long-term goal for Adagia is to allow
users to enrich and reshape the project (adding new music samples online,
suggesting new questions, or proposing an easier coding platform). Crowdsourcing
traditional scientific research, rendering it online, and making it
humanities-friendly, this digital work will also yield an ever-expanding set of
stories ripe for DH text analytics. We view Adagia as filling a similar role to
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online platform often used to scale up psychology
research, but without the corporate overlords or problematic labor practices
In Lab Girl, Hope Jahren has a beautiful and moving description
of her lab space: My laboratory is a place where the
lights are always on. My laboratory has no windows, but it needs none.
It is self-contained. It is its own world. My lab is both private and
familiar, populated by a small number of people who know one another
well. My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers and I
do things….In my lab, whatever I need is greatly outbalanced by what I
have. The drawers are packed full with items that might come in handy.
Every object in my lab — no matter how small or misshapen — exists for a
reason, even if its purpose has not yet been found….The door is locked
and I know everyone who has a key. Because the outside world cannot come
into the lab, the lab has become the place where I can be the real me.
(18-19)
I find this gorgeous because it captures such a strong part of
how I feel about the DHLC. Yet there’s a part of the lab that’s different;
something central to its beauty. Yes, the lab is its own world and a
sanctuary to me. Yes, it’s stocked with objects whose purpose may not have
been found (yet). But every time I go into the lab, I see both people who I
know well and people I’ve never met before. And it’s just as often the
people I’ve never seen before who have suddenly (I learn) solved an
experimental problem — or a problem with complex software and coding — I
didn’t even know existed. This shows what it means to be an
open humanities lab. We have IRB to protect the
confidentiality of brain data, but since the IRB training is essential and
free, the lab is radically and powerfully open. This means that problems are
solved from the ground up, not top-down. And that the students come up with
new questions to ask about each and every project we do, with an energy that
carries it far beyond the original idea.
The ultimate proof of this came when I had to go down briefly
for medical leave. I’ll admit, egocentrically, I worried that the lab would
come to a complete and grinding halt without me. Instead, it flourished as
much it always has, possibly even more, since the students knew, deeply now,
that what I’d been telling them — that they had the leadership, they had to
trust their own instincts, and they could take it forward — was true. They’d
been trained for it. This is the ultimate proof that the lab is not
vertically driven, nor hierarchical by nature; it continued and prospered
while the director was down. Two English majors from a class I taught who
joined the lab while I was away ended up, in their first semester, designing
and running an entire new branch of the poetry study, getting scientists to
highlight the aspects of the poems they found most powerful (or not).
Another group went out into the dormitories and hallways and gathered
everyday students’ definitions of aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps most
impressively, an Accessible Art event that I’d been working on, pulled out
of my hands by necessity, expanded based on student innovation to include
not just students — as had been my original model — but local community
artists and a week-long public exhibition. While away, I found myself
missing the lab more than I can say; going in to the DHLC had always meant
going into a space where things were happening...where students always had
new projects and ideas (not that three experiments and an accessible art
project weren’t enough to keep us on our toes). Not that I’m back, I realize
what I missed most; the vibrance in the atmosphere — and the sanctuary it
provided, always showing, rather than telling that humanists and scientists
could do things together...at times, brilliantly...and in ways that expand
beyond experiments into the community.
One of the most powerful ways the DHLC breaks the mold of what labs usually do (obscure experiments behind closed doors) is through a series of multisensory and inclusive art exhibits that have come to be known as Accessible Art. In 2015 the student editor of
This changed the paradigm of art for me, before this event I only thought of art as visual and did not consider the fact that art can and should engage all senses and be accessible for all people.Another put it this way:
it was actually accessible to everyone. QR codes were available to have the literary aspects of the art read aloud and then of course we were encouraged to touch the art, which is something unheard of in a museum.Our events were never only about opening museum spaces to visitors with visual disabilities, important as such work is. Instead, we sought to encourage every visitor to think about engaging with art in a different way. The enjoyment that comes from the multi-sensory indulgence of touching the untouchable opens people’s minds to consider what a more inclusive and accessible world might look like (see Figure 7).
It was precisely this call for art to engage all senses and all people that guided our vision for the 2019 exhibit. Natalie was on medical leave, but it didn’t occur to us to question whether a group of students could pull off the project ourselves — our collective years with the lab had taught us we could. We began with the pattern of the two previous exhibits, and in August 2018 a few graduate students attended a folk art festival and met a local quiltmaker. Her fidget quilts — lap blankets with tassels, beads, textural patterns, zippers, and ribbons — give people with Alzheimer’s and dementia something to play with that soothes the restlessness than often accompanies those diseases (see Figure 8).
We wanted her art as part of the exhibit, and started dreaming of an event that brought together student and community art. The project grew to include almost a dozen undergraduate and graduate students on the planning team as well as nearly fifty undergraduate students and community members creating multi-sensory art, designing the exhibit, documenting the exhibit’s accessibility, writing grants, and organizing tours for local schools. In addition to the fidget quilt, our art pieces included other textiles, like a piece of embroidery that uses both Braille and the Latin alphabet. Another installation was a mirror hung at forty inches from the ground, the proper level for someone in a wheelchair, surrounded by selfies the artist has taken of herself in mirrors around the MSU campus; the pictures are mostly the top of her head and empty space, because the mirrors are too high. Visitors were encouraged to take selfies in this mirror — people who don’t use wheelchairs will mostly get torso shots, demonstrating what it feels like when the world is not set up for you. Numerous sculptures played with texture, like one that is mixed metal and ceramics, another that incorporates moss, and a third that is a window box full of fake flowers created from materials like yarn, tulle, pipe cleaners, and feathers.
The 2019 Accessible Art exhibit is a testament to the way the DHLC empowers its
members not only to take on independent work but also to take it outside the lab
itself. Our
The brief sketches of the DHLC and its projects, students, and
possibilities that we’ve included here are only the beginning of where our
lab has been, and where it is going. It certainly hasn’t always been easy to
organize and run an interdisciplinary DH lab, but thankfully I’ve had the
support of many fantastic colleagues — including my students — in doing so.
In so many ways, the DHLC is driven by student innovation and research,
including students creating their own studies using the skills and tools
they learned in the lab. For example, graduate students Cody Mejeur, Soohyun
Cho, and Jes Lopez have designed experiments that identify the neural
networks involved in narrative comprehension in video games, investigate the
cognitive and cultural effects of Kindle Popular Highlights, and analyze the
representations of autistic characters in literature and film through
embedded sentiment, respectively.
If I could sum up the most important lessons I’ve learned along
the way for those interested in building and running similar labs, these
would be my main points:
In the Chronicle of Higher
Education, Jonathan Kramnick claims we are living in an academic
moment governed by The Interdisciplinary
Delusion
Interdisciplinary work is a shift of view, not a truth claim.
No one in the lab and none of my colleagues feel that we will somehow find
the absolute truth about poetry and pleasure. Far from it. Instead we are
simply using a different set of tools to get a glimpse into what 30 students
love, or hate, about sixteen sonnets. Our music and narrative study may
extend to China, but it has the same limits. The excitement isn’t all an interdisciplinary fantasy of the moment. It
comes from real students, professors, and colleagues around the world who
have their own deep disciplinary training and are contributing it to
illuminate a new facet that otherwise would never have been seen about how
we engage with literature, music, and art.
The common fear of digital humanities and other interdisciplinary fields like
literary neuroscience is that we are attempting to scientize the humanities,
making them more quantifiable, measurable, and profitable
In an age where human life is increasingly shaped by digital media — indeed,
where we seem to be evolving alongside our technology, as N. Katherine Hayles
argues — brain imaging technology can give us new insight on how human
meaning-making is embodied, and how it operates in different digital contexts
Our work in the digital humanities and literary cognition is just one of many
possible sites for interdisciplinary collaboration and research. Imagine, for
example, what humanities-based ecocriticism labs might look like, or consider
what the humanities could bring to the critical coding and computing centers and
networks that have sprung up in recent years
Of course there are good reasons to be suspicious of these trends, and thankfully
the humanities draw our attention to questions of access, privilege, and power
in pursuing them
arts lab