Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Disability's Digital Pharmacy: On Accessible Writing


"The leaves of writing act as a pharmakon
to push or attract out of the city
the one who never wanted to get out"

Plato's Pharmacy
Jacques Derrida
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Digital Accessibility

It is the goal of many writers and the challenge of many academic writers to be accessible. Yet it is an open secret that the ivory tower policies of university work and scholarly publications set up many levels of gatekeeping. Thus, even when our prose approaches wide-spread readability, able to be comprehended by those in and outside out specialties, those who are able to access our books and articles are relatively exclusive due to copyrights, high prices, and library subscription limitations. Add on to this the compounded divisions of audiences by language proficiency, the availability of translators, and geographic region and it may be surprising that anyone is able to read our work. Indeed, the echo-chamber of academic writing is a significant factor in what drives many, like myself, into the digital humanities and public scholarship. Through websites, such as www.ThingsTransform.com, I am able to share educational resources, works in progress, and lesson plans on transgender, disability, and medieval studies with a wider audience. While currently such digital platforms rarely count for hiring or tenure considerations, such digital humanists feel that we are extending our work in the academy into the realm of public intellectualism, getting information to those who need it, want it, or can challenge it, beyond the circumscription of the ivory tower.

Furthermore, such online databases and writing platforms allow us to continue an ongoing project of increasing the accessibility of education to those physically or socially disabled. The utopian dream of such digital humanists of disability is that the internet might offer a virtual answer to the long sought but elusive goal of a "universal design." We see universities taking up the flag to encourage us to promote, engage, and share classes, lectures, and conference experiences with those who cannot make it to the physical space. Blackboard, blogs, streaming video, skype, live-tweeted conferences, and Massive Open Online Courses urge on the desire that no matter your mobility, geographic isolation, time limits, or sensory modes that we might all be brought together in the digital classroom. Within this tantalizing technological revolution lays the fantasy that perhaps at last the digital pharmacy might offer a virtual cure to disability's limitations.


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The Pharmakon of DH

At the suggestion of virtual transcendence of physical embodiments, a disability studies advocate, or perhaps any practicing humanist, should start back and pause. For those of us who have read our Derrida know to mistrust any promise of technological cure for difference, seeing every cure as also a poison. For however Disability's digital pharmacy presents itself, as an accessible writing platform or a virtual classroom, the age old dialectic is at work. After all, what is online scholarship except an extension of the same technology that Socrates considered to be a deathly cure for matter and meaning; that is, writing itself. "Knowing he can always leave his thoughts outside or check them with an external agency, with the physical, spatial, superficial marks that one lays flat on a tablet, he who has the techne of writing on it will come to rely on it," writes Derrida. "He will know that he himself can leave without his tupoi going away, that he can forget all about them without them leaving his service. They will represent him even if he forgets them" (437-438). And here we begin to see the double movement of digital writing for disability. The "ghost" of disability serves the argument for the Digital Humanities, even as the presumption of accessibility leads to the forgetting of those to whom access is supposed to serve. 

In other words, the grander the accessible digital classroom becomes, the less we concern ourselves with making the physical classroom accessible. Online interfaces that are supposed to give another way for people to get access to the academic community becomes the only way for some to enter the conversation. When we praise the technology that allows the boy in a wheel-chair who can follow along from home, or the deaf girl to read the transcript, we give room for the suggestion that the historical struggle to bring more people into the physical space of the classroom is not longer necessary. In a sense, we give them a virtual presence at the expense of their physical presence. Digital Access reveals itself to be a Pharmakon, where "the leaves of writing... push or attract out of the city the one who never wanted to get out" (429-430). The dream of the digital pharmacy reveals itself an ableist dream, where physical embodiment and difference is transcended. Disabled bodies are eschewed from public space, forgotten. Only the sign of disability remains.


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Digital Disability

In light of the dream and nightmare, cure and poison, of virtual accessibility, what might we as disability advocates in the digital humanities do to make sure that more persons are not excluded from coming into the academic community while we bring our work out to the online public? We remember the ethical and social lessons of the humanities as we venture into the digital realm at the same time that the teaching of the humanities takes on a more digital form. Even if there are those who want us to surrender "the humanities" part of "digital humanities," we will never accomplish, as C.S. Lewis writes, An Abolition of Man. For the techne of digital writing is not totally other and external to humanity, but merely an enactment of age long operations of power. "Each new power won by man is a power over man as well," writes Lewis. "Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger... [Technology] can be withheld from some men by other men — by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods." The digital portal then is not an escape from the problems and promises of our world but an extension of it; full of old problems we've face in the humanities presenting in new ways.

If we in the humanities believe that something special happens when people come together in a room and share their thoughts, then writing technology, analog or digital, cannot replace the challenging and uncomfortable task of making an accessible community space. What our digital tools can do is remind us of the diversity of ways that we teach and learn, read and communicate, so that we can adapt the classroom environment to better serve those who show up - rather than predetermining who can show up by how we build our environment. As one blind student once told me: there are plenty of problems with technology that is supposed to be accessible. Screen readers have trouble with blackboard and PDF articles scan only as images without text. Yet technology will always have problems. We will always need the human factor because people can adapt; adapt our technologies, adapt our practices, and adapt our many intersecting worlds.


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