Technology has been changing traditional academic fields for years. Still, for many scholars, utilizing technology to advance or to shape their research can seem a lonely or quixotic journey. Supported by the Humanities Center at Harvard and by the GSAS Research Workshop Program, the Thinking with Technology series sought to create a community for scholars in the digital humanities, a field that looks at the influence and evolution of technology in the humanities and helps researchers understand emerging forms of scholarly discourse and analysis. The series examined professional research and pedagogical instruments, along with the many popular tools that are rapidly altering how people learn, think, and  collaborate. Its objective was not to master the technologies themselves, but rather to assess their promise — and their limitations — for scholarly work.

“The workshop evolved from humanist scholars, graduate students and faculty at Harvard, who wanted to get together to talk critically and productively,” says workshop coordinator Suparna Roychoudhury, a PhD candidate in English. “I myself didn’t have a complete picture of what the digital humanities entail, and wanted to have more conversations about it. We wanted to create a forum where people could discuss, critique, and describe that enterprise. As humanists, we critique and assess what people are doing. It’s a place for productive and inclusive conversation as well as meta-commentary.”

Alexander Parker, Director of Research Computing in the Humanities and one of the drivers of the Digital Humanities Initiative at Harvard, says scholars today live in “a hybrid world of research, both the technological and the traditional. We no longer confer only with researchers down the hall, but with researchers across the world.”

The two forms of research can be mutually enriching, says Parker, an advisor to the workshop series. “Visiting an archive may be a richer or denser experience because researchers can do more work online before going to the archive. That doesn’t mean traditional methods are obsolete, but [working with technology] can enhance the richness and depth of scholarship.”

The interdisciplinary nature of the series indicates the extent to which technology is altering approaches in all disciplines, and the importance of examining and discussing that influence. “It’s not easy or perhaps even necessary to get a consensus (about technology),” Roychoudhury says. “The aim is to get a range of views, and the bigger the range, the better.”

Parker agrees, pointing out that the workshop examined not only new forms of technology, but also the ways in which that new technology can advance research across a wide spectrum of fields. “The Thinking with Technology workshop offered a broader communication among quasi-savvy researchers,” he adds. “The goal is to develop a group of people who can get beyond the headlines to the opportunities and a sophisticated discussion. The question is how can we move our practice of being scholars forward?”

One of the workshop’s goals, Roychoudhury says, was simply to educate humanists about technology. “Thinking about technology is a skill,” she says. “There’s a difference between expressing an opinion and having an intellectual assessment of a piece of technology. Even popular technologies, such as Kindle, have changed practically everything in their fields. To be able to process all of that and communicate with people in these new ways is a skill that needs to be practiced and learned, and this is not one of the things that we train humanists to do. It helps to be able to practice doing that with a number of other people in the profession. It’s an invaluable skill no matter what you do to engage in discourse at that level.”