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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On Ambivalence: Medieval Swervers & Digital MOOCs

"Swerver. And that’s what I am, like it or not"

A Burnable Book

Bruce Holsinger

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The Digital Humanities Institute

A year after its official establishment, Digital Humanities Institute at the George Washington University has been quietly but productively been engineering significant foundations for the technological turn in scholarship recently gaining velocity. Co-founder and director, Jonathan Hsy has been hard at work developing the projects begun by Alexa Huang, currently on a much deserved sabbatical, and planting new seeds for the future. A few of these structural scaffoldings include the launching of an official DH Institute website to serve as a forum for online discussions and a node for digital projects, as well as making the Digital Humanities symposium at GWU, once supposed to be a one off event, into a regular conference for the evolution of the Humanities in the wake of a technological revolution.

In addition to co-sponsoring a variety of important digital events at GWU, the DHI invited the renowned scholar and author Bruce Holsinger to speak to students, faculty, and staff at a day long series of events. The day began with an intimate luncheon where Holsinger discussed his recently penned novel, A Burnable Book, with medieval seminars who had read it as part of a wider discussion about life in the late 14th century. Official events came to a close with a talk to a bustling amphitheater, where Holsinger shared a "A MOOC Postmortem" on his Massive Open Online Course on "Plagues, Witches, and War." Throughout his private and public remarks, Holsinger made frequent reference to an "ambivalence" that now distinguishes his current relations to texts and society. This, in part, accounts for why questions on Holsinger's work diversely characterizes his approach to volatile social matters as strikingly cynical to some and surprisingly optimistic to others. Indeed, Holsinger's ambivalence serves to critically frame how he presents discourses on medieval swervers and digital MOOcs.

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A Burnable Book

The Digital Humanities Institute timed Holsinger's visit to align with the end of the semester, when two courses, one taught by Jonathan Hsy and one by Jeffrey J Cohen, had completed reading A Burnable Book as part of their discussion on medieval literature and its antecedents. The novel follows a fictionalized John Gower (author of such works as the Confessio Amantis) as he is called upon by Geoffrey Chaucer (author of such works as The Canterbury Tales) to help solve a mysterious plot that seems to threaten the lives of royalty and the stability of England in the year 1385. While students and teachers had a variety of questions for Holsinger, on matters such as genre and composition, the conversation returned time and again to the rising role of another historical figure portrayed in Holsinger's book: Eleanor (a.k.a. John) Rykener. 

A medieval transgender prostitute, Eleanor has been discussed passionately in recent scholarship on queer and trans readings of the 14th century. In his own treatment of the politically charged figure, reflecting his critically ambivalence, Holsinger has the character characterize himself/herself as a swerver: “Swerver. And that’s what I am, like it or not. A man in a body, a woman in soul. One day a he, the next a she, a stiff cock for some, a tight arse for others. Provided they could pay, Eleanor would do all and be all for her loyal jakes, and she had plenty who liked taking it and giving it every which way.” (44) When asked how much he had been influenced by the critically queer and trans practice of attending to gaps in the archive and imagining erased histories, Holsinger responded by saying that he believes that this has long been a project of medieval studies. All scholars and authors, Holsinger contends, must on some level become "swervers" if they are going to make sense of the lived messiness, complexities, and contradictions of the past.

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Massive Open Online Courses

The main event of the day was Holsinger's postmortem on teaching a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that taught lessons on "Plague, Witches, and War" to thousands of students over the course of a few months. Once again, Holsinger found himself working amidst politically charged topics and circumstances. After a very public conflict at the University of Virginia, where he works, Holsinger was offered funds to teach a MOOC designed in part to help redirect the conversation and business of the university towards new areas. MOOCs are and were considered still very experimental, both in their structure and their consequences. The "Massiveness" of the course means that the teacher will have to change their usual pedagogical mode to respond to working with tens of thousands instead of tens of students. The "Openness" means the course will function according to different revenue and access structures, without the usual enrollment requirements on credits and tuition. The "Online" part requires teachers to change the format of their pedagogy, retooling discussions and term papers to work instead via digital lectures and forums. Many regard these changes as unmaking the very structures of community on which the Humanities depends, while others view these innovations as a mass democratization of knowledge. 

True to his ambivalent position, Holsinger neither shies away from the controversies that fuel and surround MOOCs nor gives into their respective despair and optimisms. Every way of doing things opens up certain opportunities while it shuts down others. For instance, while the massive and online nature of MOOCs disallow the intimacy of meetings such as the luncheon held earlier in the day, it encourages digital visits from high profile guests who are more interested in speaking to an audience of twenty thousand students (from the comfort of their home computer) than speaking to twenty (after traveling however long to be there in person). As a teacher, Holsinger tells fellow educators that despite the demands to learn and adapt technologies, the learning curve is rather quick and the pay off can be substantial. When polled, students of MOOCs generally were optimistic and excited about how online courses make education more accessible to populations that otherwise would be walled out by traditional universities. 

In the end, however, Holsinger's ambivalence also speaks to the mixed futures he sees for MOOCs. On the one hand, the "brick and mortar" classrooms will continue to serve demands for teaching that cannot be replicated elsewhere and (ironically) the expense of staging MOOCs (free of charge), as opposed to pay-to-learn online courses, will likely only be financially sustainable as the largesse of large traditional institutions. However we cut it, the changes that are opened up by Medieval Studies and the Digital Humanities requires everyone to be a bit of an amphibian, able to exist between different environments, discourses, and forms of embodiment. The ability to package and re-package yourself and your work is critical to navigating the demands of the past and the future. If we are to thrive, we need to take a lesson from the medieval swervers and the digital MOOCs to maintain our ambivalence. 

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