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The socio-technical humanities: reimagining the liberal arts in the age of new media, 1952-1969

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The socio-technical humanities: reimagining the liberal arts in the age of new media, 1952-1969

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Content The Socio-Technical Humanities: Reimagining
the Liberal Arts in the Age of New Media, 1952-
1969.

Curtis Fletcher

University of Southern California

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Abstract 3
Introduction 4
Instructional Television and the Rise of the Socio-Technical
Humanities

26
Instructional Media, the Information Explosion and the Challenge of
Electronic Culture in the 1960s

89
Instructional Media and the Socio-Technical Humanities

139
Electronic Networks, the Socio-Technical humanities and the
Invention of Literary Data

200
Epilogue
From Punch-Cards to Pixels: The Corporatization of Higher Education
and the Socio-Technical Humanities Today

242
Conclusion

265
Bibliography 271

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Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the aims, interests and rationale underlying the endeavors
of a distinct group of humanists who sought explicitly to guide the meanings, uses and
developing customs and habits of new educational, informational and computing technologies in
the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, this study examines and historicizes the emergence of a new
cadre of humanists in this period--"socio-technical humanists," as I have labeled them, who
advocated for a new kind of humanities made socially relevant and publically engaged via this
hands-on intervention with new media technologies. Ultimately, socio-technical humanists laid
the groundwork for humanists' contemporary engagement with digital formats. Yet, because
histories of early humanities computing have been fixated on more recent eras--since the rise of
personal computing and the Internet--socio-technical humanists of the 1950s and 1960s have
remained invisible to analysts and commentators on the “digital revolution” the “digital
humanities,” and the “crisis of the humanities.” This dissertation seeks to recover that lost
history.
This study is based on an analysis of published scholarly discourse, conference
proceedings, personal and organizational papers and reports from the U.S. Office of Education. It
lies at the nexus of three separate scholarly literatures: 1) the history of academic humanities; 2)
the history of early humanities computing; and 3) and new media studies. The history of the
academic humanities, while a topic of great concern in recent years, has been singularly focused
on humanists' efforts to incorporate new subject matter and materials into their research and
curricula in the 1950s and 1960s and has thus completely missed the ways in which humanists
struggled, in the same exact years, to integrate electronic technologies into the humanities
enterprise. While histories of early humanities computing have examined the relationship
between the humanities and technology in the post-WWII era, they have missed altogether the
degree to which the arrival of audio-visual--television and the rapid rise of multimedia
instructional systems in the 1960s--sat alongside computation in the minds of humanists as part
of the same overall electronic threat to the printed page. Finally, while new media scholars have
recently began to study how, in the past, new media have entered into established media
ecosystems, they have failed to examine cases in which the custodians of an older media
negotiate, openly, the terms by which an older media's associated habits of mind could or should
be transplanted to the new media which they sought or were compelled to embrace.
Beyond these much-needed historiographical interventions, this dissertation offers a
number of findings, each critical for a fuller understanding of the contemporary status and
standing of the humanities today. First, humanists' engagement with the computer and
multimedia educational systems in the 1960s played a significant role in pushing the humanities
away from a mid-century culture of limited scholarly social responsibility and back towards a
turn-of-the-century ethos of broad social engagement. Second, humanists' efforts to use new
media to update their social relevancy and to bridge the gap between academia and the outside
world goes back, not to the beginning of the Internet, as most scholars today would maintain, but
to their widespread use of educational television in the mid-1950s. Third, humanities computing
of the 1960s--the predecessor of today's digital humanities--was never limited to quantitative
humanities research, but was, rather, from the very beginning, an effort to rethink the nature of
the printed-page and, ultimately, a humanities-oriented effort to curb the information explosion
of the 1960s by guiding the nature of an emergent electronic textuality.
Structurally, each chapter in my dissertation examines humanists’ responses to a
particular feature of electronic culture: In chapter one, its status as mass culture (television); in
chapters two and three, its multisensory, associative and affective nature (multimedia); and in
chapter four, its ability to be stored, retrieved, disseminated and processed as data (machine-
readable text).

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Introduction

I. Preamble

By looking at large-scale humanistic engagements with new media in the 1950s and
1960s, this dissertation examines humanists’ intervention in what they saw as the potential
migration of education, information and culture from print to electronic networks and from the
codex to the screen in the first decades after WWII, an intervention analogous both to
renaissance humanists’ involvement in the migration of cultural authority from the scarce written
page to mechanically repeatable text in the 15
th
century and to humanists’ contemporary
engagement with the migration of our cultural heritage to digital formats. Humanists’ large-scale
engagement with new educational, informational and computing technologies, an engagement
which continues till today, emerged in these years, I argue, as part of a widespread, newly felt,
sense of techno-social responsibility in the humanities—a kind of humanistic-oriented,
technology assessment movement which sought to respond to the post-WWII information
explosion and take up the reigns of electronic culture in a way that ran counter to the social
sciences, educational technologists and the electronics and engineering communities. This
movement saw the emergence of a new cadre of humanities scholars and educators who began to
advocate for a new kind of humanities, one which was socially relevant, publically engaged and
involved in efforts to guide the nature, uses, and meanings surrounding new media.
The purpose of this dissertation is to uncover, define, examine and historicize the
emergence of this new cadre of humanists--"socio-technical humanists," as I shall call them-- in
the 1950s and 1960s. In the process, this dissertation accomplishes six main tasks, each critical
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for a fuller understanding of the contemporary status and standing of the humanities, especially
as they relate to educational and computational technologies—those phenomena which today
threaten to destabilize not just the entire humanities enterprise, but all of higher education. First,
by examining the emergence of the socio-technical humanities in the 1950s and 1960s, I offer a
much-needed corrective to contemporary histories of academic humanities which fail entirely to
examine the role technology played in shifting humanists towards broader social engagement in
these years. For the humanities in general, I argue, new media functioned like new subject matter
and materials in these years; both allowed humanists to speak more directly to student's
experience of a rapidly changing world. Second, I establish a four-part scheme for understanding
the "crisis in the humanities" from the end of WWII to the present, delineating four distinct, but
related crises, each with its own set of values and emphases. Third, by looking at humanists'
engagement with educational and computational technologies in the first decades after WWII, I
seek to amend histories of early humanities computing by showing the degree to which they
must ultimately be located within the larger history of humanists' efforts to come to terms with
all those features of an electronic world which potentially destabilized print-culture; in
particular, the degree to which the audio-visual, as constituted by multimedia educational
instruction, and most of all, television, sat alongside computation in the minds of humanists as
part of the same overall electronic threat. Fourth, by looking at humanists use of "new" media, I
seek to add to new media studies a unique case study, one in which the custodians of an older
media negotiated, openly, the terms by which it's associated habits of mind could or should be
transplanted to the new media which they sought or were compelled to embrace. Finally, by
looking at a moment in the history of the humanities nearly analogous to the contemporary
situation--a moment of crisis and crossroads, a moment in which new technologies were both
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seen as a total threat but also embraced as never before--I seek to say something about what it
means to have "been here before." Looking at this prior moment for instance allows me to
correct two major misconceptions regarding the humanities in general: the long-standing feeling
that new technologies have always been seen, by humanists, as anathema to the overall aim and
wellbeing of their enterprise and the notion that humanists have never been good at
demonstrating their social usefulness.

II. The Absence of Technology in Histories of the Academic Humanities

The history of the academic humanities, especially its challenges and trajectories since
WWII, has become a topic of great concern in recent years. No doubt this increase is part of a
larger moment of historical self-reflection in the humanities, a hallmark of the myriad books,
articles, conference panels, online forums and blog entries that make up the contemporary "crisis
in the humanities" literature. But alongside this literature a more intensive scholarly examination
of post-WWII humanities has emerged, supported in large part by the Academy of Arts and
Sciences’ Initiative for the Humanities and Culture. Meant to address many of the same issues
instigating current reflections on the humanities crisis, namely, the “new and increasingly
complex challenges — political, cultural, technological, and financial — [that] are profoundly
altering conditions for the humanities in the United States,” the Initiative has sponsored a
number of large-scale data collection ventures and reports surveying the current status of the
humanities as well as historical studies on the evolution of the humanistic disciplines in the
second half of the 20th century. The authors of this historical literature have been singularly
focused on examining the ways in which the humanities renegotiated their boundaries in the
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post-WWII era by incorporating non-western material, European social and cultural theory,
popular culture and the histories and cultures of traditionally underrepresented groups into
humanities' research and curricula.
1
Regrettably, these histories have completely missed the
ways in which technology offered perhaps the greatest set of boundary issues for humanist in this
period. After all, just as humanists struggled with the incorporation of popular culture or
women's history in the years after WWII, they too spent a great amount of energy performing the
boundary work--the self-reflection, public debate and institutional maneuvering--necessary to
make concessions with and assimilate electronic and computational technology. Like these
intellectual and cultural histories, my dissertation seeks a fuller understanding of the
contemporary status and standing of the humanities by looking at the critical years of
development in the 1950s and 1960s, but it does so by investigating their critical relationship to
educational and computational technologies.
The 1950s and 1960s was a period of great social and cultural unrest. But it was also as a
period of massive media innovation and upheaval. What’s more, just as humanists were
compelled to respond to larger social and cultural developments in American life in these years,
they too were forced to come to terms with large-scale developments in non-print electronic
media. Put another way, in the exact same years that social history, cultural studies and feminism
were on the minds of many humanists, potentially destabilizing their field’s methods and
curricula and forcing them to respond to the demands of a new social and cultural environment
outside academia, so too the television, computer and multimedia systems were potentially

1
The central texts here are Hollinger, David A. Ed. Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since
World War II. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Bender, Thomas and Carl E Schorske
Eds. American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines. (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1998); Daedalus. Vol. 135, No. 2, Spring, 2006, On the Humanities;
Daedalus. Vol. 138, No. 1, Winter, 2009, Reflecting On the Humanities.
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destabilizing their print-nurtured, print-enabled and print-inhibited fields and forcing them to
respond to the demands of a new media environment inside and outside the classroom.
Electronic media of the 1950s and 1960s was, in its various manifestations, immersive, affective,
associative, multi-sensory, non-linear, machine-readable and transferable over air waves, satellite
transmission and electronic networks. It was everything that print was not. The 1950s and 1960s
were the first years in which humanists endeavored to come to terms with these critical features
of non-print electronic media and their direct bearing on the humanities enterprise. They were
the first years when significant numbers of humanists began to admit that large-scale social
forces were changing the way people engaged culture and information, and that to remain vital,
they must help instill critical interpretative skills for these new modes of media engagement.
These were the first years, that is, when humanists endeavored, on a large scale, to find a way to
help guide new cultural and informational practices associated with non-print, electronic media
and at the same time remain true to the traditional and perennially important aim of the
humanities—the measured, contemplative and reflective engagement of cultural objects.
So how did humanists’ engagement with new media force them to redraw the boundaries
of their enterprise? I argue that it did so by forcing them into significant new modes of social
responsibility. There are times when the dominant ethos in the humanities is one of limited social
responsibility. At other times, the prevailing mood is more activist, advocating an expanded
social role for humanities scholarship and education. The battle between these two ethos is, on
one level, the story of the humanities from the late 19th century to the present. In nearly every
period since that time there has been a movement in higher education which seeks to promote the
humanities as critically and crucially related to the world outside the academy, to the “actualities
of the real world.” In every period too, there have been those who resisted such a purpose. In
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some cases, the movement for utility is part of a larger emergent educational ethos which seeks
to steer education in general towards real world skills. At other times the humanities are singled
out as uniquely intractable in its resistance to being “applied” or “useful.”
The responsibility to create quality citizens capable of critically engaging ideas,
information and culture was a main feature of humanities promotion, or classical education, in
the late 19th century. So too was the responsibility to impart moral and mental discipline and the
responsibility to counter the technological, scientific and materialistic thrust of modern society
by nourishing the value-oriented, philosophic, even spiritual side of individuals. But as
humanities educators, in the first four decades of the 20th century, increasingly embraced their
role as specialized, discipline-specific researchers and scholars, and in particular, as they began
to adopt formalistic, analytical, sometimes positivistic, models of scholarship in the 1940s and
50s, they became less and less socially engaged . That is, they became less responsive to the
needs and interests of the public, less likely to offer broad moral guidance and less apt to think of
the humanities in general as serviceable to ends outside the academy. Of course such a story
focuses only on the emerging dominant ethos in humanities scholarship and education towards
specialized scholarship in these years. One can find in each of the first four decades of the 20th
century, a number of scholars resisting specialization and advocating a wider social and cultural
purpose to the humanities. But ultimately the dominant ethos in the humanities would not swing
back towards wider social engagement until the humanities began to respond to social unrest in
the 1960s.
In some ways, this is a familiar story. We know that the humanities opened its cannon
and its doors, in the 1960s, to new texts and materials, to new subjects and students. The authors
of the intellectual and cultural histories above have, in fact already examined many aspects of
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this latter shift. Joan Rubin, Gerald Early and Roger Geiger, for instance, have tracked the ways
in which humanists began, in these years, to reach out to a public beyond the university, how
they addressed subject matter and material vital to the interests of a more demographically
diverse student body and how they began to see themselves as responsible for providing a
unified culture in postwar America.
What we don’t know, and what this dissertation offers, is the sense of what role
technology played in this swing back towards social responsibility in the humanities. For, just as
addressing popular culture or feminists issues, for instance, in humanities instruction and
scholarship in these years allowed humanists to speak more directly to student’s concerns and
experiences of the world and in turn expand their cultural purview and social charge, so too,
humanists engagement with new media and technology directly expanded their sense of what
charges, concerns and duties fell within the purview of the humanist both inside and outside the
classroom.
Humanists’ engagement with new media in the 1950s-1960s—their efforts to come to
terms with their role and relevancy in an era of electronic culture—I argue, forced them into
significant new modes of social responsibility: a responsibility to explore the relationship
between new media and traditional print culture, to work toward a new form of electronic
literacy and to intervene in, and humanize, the increasingly automated structure and networked
transmission of knowledge. In short, the use of new media was a principal way in which
humanists were compelled to address key contemporary issues in an era of rapid social-technical
change. Indeed, two of the misconceptions about the humanities I hope to correct is, first, the
enduring impression that the humanities have always, by and large, been averse to new
technologies, and second, the notion that humanists have always poor at demonstrating “the
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benefits the academic humanities confer on society,” or put another way, have been poor at
putting themselves “in play, at risk, in the world."
2
In the 1950s and 1960s, humanists did all of
this; not only did they put themselves at risk in the world, and argue for a new kind of social
usefulness, but they did so by engaging that phenomenon in human affairs which to this day,
many within and without, assume is anathema to the humanities—technology. Humanists large-
scale, hands-on engagement with electronic media in the years from 1952-1974, after all, found
them caught up in endeavors rare for humanists in the first half of the twentieth century—
endeavors to explicitly guide the uses and meanings of new media both within academia and
society at large.

III. The Absence of the Audio-Visual in Histories of the Digital Humanities

Recent histories of early digital humanities have examined the relationship between
technology and humanistic disciplines in the post-WWII era, but they have done so with a very
limited scope of inquiry. Scholars such as Dolores M. Burton, Susan Hockey and Thomas Winter
have ignored everything but the computer; more limited yet, they have focused only on the
computer in humanistic research.
3
Most importantly, they have ignored completely the realm of
electronic educational media (the cutting-edge of electronic culture)--instructional television,
language and listening laboratories, teaching machines, programmed instruction, computer

2
Daedalus. Vol. 138, No. 1, Winter, 2009, Reflecting On the Humanities, Pp 6.
3
Burton, M. Dolores. "Automated Concordances and Word Indexes: The Early Sixties and the Early Centers,"
Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Aug., 1981), pp. 83-100. Hockey, Susan. "The History of
Humanities Computing," in A Companion to Digital Humanities. Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John
Unsworth (eds). (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Winter, Thomas Nelson, "Roberto Busa, S.J., and the
Invention of the Machine-Generated Concordance" (1999). Faculty Publications, Classics and Religious Studies
Department. Paper 70.
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assisted instruction, "electronic classrooms" and "electronic study carrels." In short, they have
missed entirely humanists' responses to, and interventions in, the automation of information
storage and transmission in education and society .
By looking at educational television in my first chapter, educational technology in my
second and third chapters and early humanistic encounters with computing hardware and
software in my fourth and final chapter, it is my aim to locate the history of early humanities
computing within the larger story of humanists’ attempt to come to terms with all the features of
electronic culture—it’s capacity to store, retrieve and analyze information (computers) as well
as its capacity to impart information in a multisensory, immersive and associative fashion
(multimedia educational technology) and its power to deliver information via the greatest mass
medium in history to that point (television). In so doing, I have tried to put prophets of the
electronic age focused on television and multimedia environments, scholars like Marshal
McLuhan and Neil Postman, into conversation with prominent early computing humanists
focused on the nature of literature as data, scholars like Stephen Parrish and Louis Milic, I have
done so in order to show that, in the minds of humanists (and plenty of others), coming to terms
with the mechanization of information via computers was ultimately part of the same effort to
come to terms with information in audio-visual formats . Put another way, the computer was not
the only vacuum-tube-based electronic technology of the 1950s and 1960s which threatened to
destabilize print-culture and potentially the entire humanities enterprise. The television, and by
extension multimedia educational systems, was just as destabilizing—and my dissertation has
attempted to show that together, they constituted, in total, the new technology of the electronic
culture with which humanists, both those focused on computing power and those focused on
audio-visual formats, were forced to come to terms with.
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IV. The Socio-Technical Humanities

Thus my dissertation charts the emergence in the 1950s and 1960s, of an as yet unnamed
genre of humanities thinking—what I have termed the “socio-technical humanities.” Socio-
technical humanists, from the 1950s up to the present, have certain critical defining features.
They are advocates and activists for the use and relevance of new media and informational
technologies in the humanities. They emphasize humanistic technological interventionism, media
literacy, the immersive benefits of electronic media for humanities instruction (what I am calling
the “immersive humanities”) and the necessity to move beyond print culture. They have an
overriding belief in the power of technology to make the humanities relevant again and often
focus on the need for the humanities to broaden their interests and appeal beyond the academy.
Most importantly, they advocate, first, for a critically socially engaged humanities, and second,
argue that the primary way for the humanities to be socially relevant and engaged is for its
practitioners to be involved in guiding the nature, use, associated customs and habits of new
media. That is, they endeavor to turn the threat of electronic media for the print-oriented world of
the humanist on its head, by thinking through and rhetorically negotiating between the critical
features of those new media as they relate to the printed page; by then embracing the critical
features of those media for humanities research and pedagogy specifically; and ultimately, by
advocating for a humanities-oriented intervention in the uses of, and practices surrounding, those
media. In this way, the socio-technical humanities link both traditional and reformist principles
of humanistic research and pedagogy to the use and critique of new media and information
technologies.
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Ultimately the central feature of the socio-technical humanities is this: they defend the
humanities, in times of crisis, by linking what the humanities traditionally do, and now need to
do in order to remain relevant, to the critical and hands-on embrace of these technologies. They
are at the same time, and for the same reasons, the first to advocate the use of new media and the
first to engage the terms of the humanities crisis in which they live. Thus, it can be said, that in
doing so, the socio-technical humanities, have continually confronted, each in their own time, the
terms of the humanities crisis in which they live head on. For since the 1950s, crises in the
humanities have always been intimately linked up with the threat of electronic media—or more
specifically, the eminent threat of a post print world, and questions concerning the role and
relevancy of the humanities in that world.
Despite wide-ranging interest in the status of the humanities crisis today, no one has yet
offered up an examination of the ways in which the terms of that crisis have shifted over time as
humanists responded to social, cultural, economic and technical developments both inside and
outside academia. My dissertation offers a four-part scheme for the understanding the crisis in
the humanities from the end of WWII to the present. From the early 1950s to early 1960s, the
dominant ethos of the crisis can best be described by invoking the title of C. P. Snow’s famous
1959 Read lecture, “the Two Cultures.” The crisis of the two cultures, as I call it, was a period in
which humanists felt distinctly threatened by large-scale advancements in science and
technology, and by the expansion of scientific authority in American politics and culture. In the
mid-1960s to early 1970s, conditions changed. The unrest of the period made humanists’
disengagement with major social issues more of an issue than their disconnect with science and
technology. Within this period, which I call the crisis of engagement, the two sets of concerns
came together and as such humanists’ engagement with technology—especially educational and
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computational technology on campus—became a vital way for them to become more socially
engaged. In the mid-1970s through the 1990s, the humanities suffered what I call a crisis of
confidence as enrollments plummeted and, most importantly, a conservative backlash within the
humanities itself began a war over the meaning and mission of the humanities. Finally, from
roughly 2000 to the present, in a period I call a crisis of power, humanists have become
increasingly worried about the corporatization of higher education and its effects on their
standing at colleges and universities.
While I focus on the emergence of the socio-technical humanities in the 1950s and 1960s,
that is, within the first two periods of the overall post-war crisis, and then take up the
contemporary situation in my conclusion, my dissertation reveals the ways in which the socio-
technical humanities, have in each period, mobilized the language of crisis to advocate for the
use of new media and technology. In doing so, I argue that the terms of their advocacy have thus,
by and large, been dictated by the specific features of the humanities crisis in which they live and
make the case that the socio-technical humanities have thrived most fully in those periods in
which they have been able to successfully mobilize the language of crisis in their defense.
It’s important to understand that in each of these cases there isn’t a tidy causal line
between humanists’ engagement with new media and the expansion of their social role. In the
minds of socio-technical humanists the two are not separate enough to be causally related. Socio-
technical humanists did not decide to take an interest in television, multimedia systems and
machine-readable text, and then, once involved, realize that they, or humanists in general, could
or should expand their sense of social responsibility. Nor was it the other way around. They did
not decide to be more socially responsible, look around for something to pertinent to be engage
with, and then ultimately land on new media and informational technologies. For socio-technical
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humanists, the two simply went hand in hand. To figure out the exact relationship between the
traditional strictures of print culture and the emerging habits of mind associated with new media
is to bring the humanities into the realm of social responsibility. Doing so automatically puts
them in a place where they can, for instance, shape people’s understanding of the function,
meaning and viewing habits of new media, guide student’s critical engagement with a rapidly
changing, largely multisensory world and affect the nature of new electronic information
networks. In other words, for the socio-technical humanist, trying to guide the nature of a new
technology while it is still up for grabs, endeavoring to invert or subvert the use of new media by
other practitioners and attempting to turn the threat of electronic media for the print-oriented
world of the humanist on its head—that is, in total, trying to figure out the role and relevancy of
the humanities in an era of electronic culture—is to push the humanities into larger social roles.
Socio-technical humanists are advocates for both because they are, in a significant sense,
indistinguishable.

V. The Absence of Agency in New Media Histories

If humanists’ expanded use of new media in the first decades after WWII reveals
something significant about the development of the humanities enterprise, so too, it tells us
something about how the uses of and meanings surrounding new media are negotiated and
formed in the first years after they emerge. From one perspective, my dissertation is an cultural
history of humanists’ engagement with new media; from another, it is a media history that
examines one groups’ attempt to come to terms with the emergent meanings and uses of new
communications technologies at a time when they were socially un-fixed. In recent years, a
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number of media scholars have become interested in recovering the contests that emerge over the
meanings, uses and associated practices surrounding particular media in the first years after their
emergence. Carolyn Marvin, perhaps the first practitioner of this brand of new media studies,
argued famously in When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication
in the Late Nineteenth Century, that the use of electronic communications technologies of the
late 19
th
century became occasions for contesting critical social issues—who should speak, who
should be connected and who should be believed. More recently, scholars like Lisa Gitelman and
the authors in her edited volume, New Media, 1740-1915, have become interested in recovering
the "uncertain status" or "identity crisis" of given media at the moment of their emergence, a
moment when, according to Gitelman, a media’s “meaning--its potential, its limitations, the
publicly agreed upon sense of what it does, and for whom--has not yet been pinned down.”
4

Drawing on Rick Altman’s notion of “crisis historiography,” these authors show how media
when they first appear on the scene, pass through a phase of identity crisis, a crisis only resolved
after a negotiation between the nature of the new media and the established environment of
representational methods and practices into which that media emerges. As an emergent set of
technologies, electronic media of the 1950s and 1960s (television, education technology and
machine-readable media) were conceptually un-fixed in the first years after their emergence.
How did humanists insert themselves and their own designs, uses and meanings for
electronic media into this heady, but still open-ended, mix of theoretical and futuristic visions?
And how did they do so while negotiating with both the established and shifting missions of the
humanities enterprise? Missing from Marvin, Gitelman and others’ accounts of the “newness” of

4
Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Ed. New Media, 1740-1915. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2003. Pg. xv.
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new media is the sense of what is at stake when a particular group’s long-standing enterprise
hangs in the balance between the preservation of an older media, or rather, it’s established
method of engagement, and the adoption of a new media at a time when its meanings, uses and
practices are still up for grabs. I argue that within this open-ended moment, humanists attempted,
for their own survival, to re-assign essential features of an older, print-based, media
engagement—select critical textual skills—to an entirely new electronic media environment.
Also missing from these prior accounts of emergent new media is a sense of open contestation.
Instead of focusing on the ways in which an “unthinking social consensus,” as Gitelman puts it,
ultimately shapes, or even governs, future uses of media, my story is one of open, articulated
struggle for the meaning of new media. The difference is key. Marvin and Gitelman et al
examine instances where tacit representational practices, customs and habits are negotiated and
formed as new media are introduced. By focusing on academic discourse, my story instead
emphasizes the fundamentally intellectual nature of media, and technology in general.
Traditionally, we tend to think of the speculative end of human affairs—the arts, religion or even
political institutions—as those phenomena by which humans think through their relationship to
each other and to the rest of the world. Likewise, we tend to think of technology, largely, as the
means by which people accomplish certain practical goals, typically those goals for which the
technology is initially designed. But I want to emphasize the ways in which technologies,
especially when they first emerge, are in a fundamental way, the most compelling means by
which people think through humankind’s relationship to critical features of the world—in my
case, the relationship between human nature and the nature of information, culture and
knowledge.

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VI. Don't Panic: The Humanities Have been Here Before

Finally, in telling the story of humanists’ engagement with educational and computational
media in the 1950s and 1960s, my dissertation seeks to uncover and examine compelling past
corollaries to today’s situation and in general reveal the astonishing degree to which the
humanities “have been here before.” Today, new media is transforming higher education, and in
particular, those sectors of it bound to print culture. In the last decade, educational technology
and academic computing have developed at a rate only comparable to an analogous period of
growth in the late 1950s and 1960s. The parallels are in some ways uncanny. The sudden rise of
massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the last few years precisely parallels the abrupt growth
of educational television in the 1950s and early 1960s, a format which looked and functioned
quite similarly to MOOCs, and which were a response to parallel educational crises. Scalable,
automated, online instruction now performs almost exactly as intercampus computer assisted
instruction (CAI) was hoped to when it was first developed in the early 1960s. Artificial
intelligence-driven, automated grading of student prose, a newly viable service widely discussed
by educators in the last few years and the final vestige of automated education, began in earnest
in the mid-1960s as well. Screen-based, multimedia educational technology was designed by
educational system engineers of the 1960s to function essentially as present-day day interactive
digital textbooks do. Even the availability of primary texts and lecture material online acts as the
contemporary counterpart to the widespread vision of the “networked campus” of the 1960s. In
general, many of the grand visions of educational technologists, administrators, educators and
information systems specialist of the 1950s and 1960s are just now, in the last ten years, starting
to come true.
| 20 |

Take for instance, the recent rise in major mergers and acquisitions between textbook
publishers and software companies. In 2010, McGraw-Hill Education, for example, purchased
Tegrity, a software company whose latest product automates the recording and subsequent on-
demand streaming of college campus lectures. “The move supports a feature of the company's
new breed of textbooks, called McGraw-Hill Connect, which lets professors embed their own
video lectures inside one of the company's e-textbooks,” Jeffrey R. Young reported in the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
5

That same year Macmillan, another major textbook publisher, entered a
partnership with Panopto, a competing lecture-capture company… In October,
John Wiley & Sons, another major textbook publisher, bought a company called
Deltak.edu, which helps colleges run online courses…Textbook publishers do far
more than print books these days. The five biggest players in the textbook market
have collectively invested more than a billion dollars in the past five years buying
software companies and building technology-services divisions.

Young’s report, “The Object Formally Known as the Textbook,” was one of a number of
articles to cover these mergers, to comment on the digitization of textbook material, and in
general, to prophesize the end of print culture in higher education. Yet, this isn’t the first time
that a spate of mergers between educational publishers and software or electronics firms has
signaled the end of print. Rewind and replay. The mid-1960s saw a rash of large-scale mergers,

5
Young, Jeffrey R. “The Object Formally Known as the Textbook,” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
January 27, 2013.
| 21 |

acquisitions and joint ventures between the nation’s leading electronics firms and publishing
houses specializing in educational material. In 1964, IBM acquired Science Research Associates,
a company specializing in programmed instructional materials while R.C.A. made public
negotiations to purchase Prentice Hall, a large publisher of textbooks. Talks between R.C.A. and
Prentice Hall fell through in April of 1965, but meanwhile a number of other firms were
negotiating similar arrangements. In the summer of 1965, Xerox purchased American
Educational Publications and in 1966, Litton Industries acquired the American Book Company, a
publisher of elementary, high school and college textbooks and educational records. In that same
year, Raytheon Inc. purchased D.C. Heath, another textbook concern and in March, R.C.A.
ended up acquiring Random House, the largest of these electronics and publishing arrangements.
Joint research ventures between electronics and publishing interests were also popular. In the fall
of 1965, General Electric and Time Inc. formed a joint company, the General Learning
Company, to produce educational materials, systems and services. The next year, Sylvania
Electronics and the Reader’s Digest Association announced a joint group to investigate the
potential of electronic systems in education. Alongside these more conspicuous, large-scale
transactions, other partnerships were being formed. By 1968, this “rash of mergers of ‘hardware’
and ‘software’ companies” included over one hundred new partnerships, signaling to many the
end of the book as the definitive setting for information storage and transmission.
6
“Publishers
are the people who can collect and present learning materials,” George Haller, president of

6
Sharpes, Donald K. “Computers in Education.” The Clearing House. Vol. 43, No. 3, Nov., 1968. Pp.
135. Behrens, Carl. “Publishing Goes Electronic.” Science News, Vol. 92, No. 2, Jul., 1967. Pp. 44.
| 22 |

General Electric, stated in a typical characterization of these mergers, while engineers “can do a
better job of transmitting the material.”
7

As the principal guardians of print culture, humanists of the period were forced to come
to terms with these potential shifts in the delivery of culture, information and education. Yet,
many, if not most, humanists today feel certain that this is the first time they have had to deal
with the potential threat or opportunity involved in the migration of culture from print to
electronic formats. Take educational television of the 1950s and 1960s and today’s MOOCs as
another set of instructive corollaries. Humanists regularly talk today as though they only now
have to reckon with the large-scale implications for print culture of the rising demand and use of
massively broadcast, visually-oriented courseware. Yet from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s,
as educational television surged, many humanists were compelled to engage the new medium, to
adapt humanities content to televisual formats, and in doing so, to think through the relationship
between new media (broadcast television) and the printed page. Likewise, educational television
of the period reveals the longer history of humanists' effort to use electronic media to broaden
their public appeal, to update their social relevancy and to bridge the gap between academia and
the outside world. Even now, when it appears most relevant, humanists’ large-scale engagement
with television in the immediate postwar period remains a largely forgotten history.
Within the current moment of self-reflection in the humanities, one finds the near
ubiquitous statement that only now, with the advent of the internet, does there exist a real
opportunity to "broaden the humanities" beyond the academy and the k-12 classroom. "New
digital media open opportunities for humanists inconceivable during the [1950s and 1960s],"
asserted Edward L. Ayers, professor of history at the University of Virginia and co-creator of the

7
Gilroy, Harry. “Newest Bookman Program the Future,” The New York Times. May 27, 1966. Pp. 40.
| 23 |

digital-history website, Valley of the Shadow, in a special 2009 Daedalus issue on the status of
the humanities, "Websites, lectures, and videos on popular humanities subjects attract millions of
visitors from all over the world and all kinds of backgrounds ... Humanists enjoy a range of
venues and audiences unimaginable to those who wrote for a few small magazines in the
celebrated heyday of public intellectuals."
8

The overall sense that humanists have only recently begun to embrace modes of popular
culture as legitimate objects of investigation combined with the enduring impression that the
humanities have always, by and large, been averse to new technologies has led to a view of
postwar humanistic, and especially literary, intellectuality as based entirely in print culture--
scholarly journals, monographs and little review magazines. Indeed, it seems almost
counterintuitive that professors and teachers of English would widely embrace television as a
unique medium for "literary experience" and actively broadcast their literary lessons across the
nation at the exact moment when our most celebrated postwar literacy set, sometimes referred to
as the New York intellectuals, was busy publishing countless diatribes against the new electronic
medium in those "small magazines." Engagements with multimedia educational technologies and
machine-readable textuality provided similar fears and opportunities for humanists in these
years. Ultimately, these first engagements with electronic culture and computing are the crucial
backdrop to present tensions and interactions between the humanities and digital technology and
my dissertation clarifies current humanistic attitudes regarding technology in society, education
and scholarship by looking at their development in the critical years of the 1950s and 1960s.

8
Ayers, L. Edward. "Where the Humanities Live," Daedalus, (Winter), 2009. Pg. 33.
| 24 |

VII. Plan of the Present Work

Each chapter in this dissertation examines humanists’ responses to a particular feature of
electronic culture: its status as mass culture (television), its multisensory, associative and
affective nature (multimedia) and its ability to be stored, retrieved, disseminated and processed
as data (machine-readable text). As a media history, each chapter examines the ways in which
humanists worked to come to terms with these features of electronic culture as they directly
related to the traditional behavioral and intellectual habits associated with print media. As an
intellectual history, each chapter examines the ways in which humanists’ engagement with these
features of new media allowed and or compelled them to redraw the boundaries of their field.
Chapter one looks at the ways in which humanists' used instructional television in the
1950s to fashion a new initiative sometimes dubbed "television literacy"--to convince the first
T.V. generation that the television screen was an electronic plane for information retrieval and
analytical-somatic experience (even literary experience) as much as it was for entertainment, and
in doing so, to reorient the landscape of television programming, and reshape the associated
customs, habits, expectations and the publically agreed upon meaning of television altogether.
Chapter two examines how practitioners in education, academia and the electronics industry
responded to the social implications of the information explosion in the 1960s by embracing a
broad range of new educational media, establishing inter- and inner-campus information
networks and in general wrestled with shifting notions about the nature of information and the
fate of traditional print-based culture. Chapters three and four then examine humanists’ particular
responses to the developments of chapter two. Chapter three looks at humanists’ efforts to re-
orient, repurpose and “humanize” the widespread incursion of educational machinery into
| 25 |

campuses and classrooms by behavioral scientists, systems engineers and the electronics industry
in the 1960s by using multimedia educational systems to convey the sensual, affective and
experiential nature of humanities content, to invoke the full sensorium in getting students to
critically engage and interrogate reality and in general, to impart to their students a critical
mastery, or literacy, of their new electronic environment. Chapter four looks at early computing
humanists and their efforts, at key conferences and institutes, to help shape the nature of
electronic textuality and the character of bibliographic control in the 1960s. Together, these
critical engagements with new information and computing technologies in the 1950s and 60s
reveals the longer history of humanists' effort to use electronic media to broaden their public
appeal, to update their social relevancy and to bridge the gap between academia and the outside
world. Finally, in my epilogue I take the socio-technical humanities through their quiet years of
the 1980s and 1990s—the “crisis of confidence”—before explicating the relationship between
the current crisis in the humanities—the crisis of power—and thriving nature of the socio-
technical humanities today.

| 26 |

Chapter 1 || Instructional Television and the Rise of the Socio-Technical Humanities

I. Introduction

This is a story about the instructional television movement of the 1950s, and in particular
about the ways in which English professors and teachers--those self-described guardians of print
culture--used instructional television as a way to link the new medium to the printed page. In this
chapter, I argue that, like the impulse towards "television education" in the English classroom in
these years, literary instructional television allowed professors and teachers of English in the
mid-to-late 1950s to work through a series of increasingly salient and increasingly interrelated
questions: How do we maintain the core principles of a liberal, humanistic and “bookish”
education, and at the same time embrace the potential cultural and educational benefits of
television? How do we broaden the appeal of the humanities in an era of curricular reform geared
towards science, technology and engineering? And what is the role of the humanists in an era of
electronic culture? Ultimately, this chapter tracks the emergence, in the late-1950s to early
1960s, of what I am calling the socio-technical humanities—those who sought to answer these
questions, and in turn, to use educational television as a way update the social relevancy of the
humanities in a period of perceived crisis.
Tracking the emergence of the socio-technical humanities in these years allows me to
accomplish three further historiographical tasks. First, I hope to add to a recent literature which
seeks to uncover the productive partnerships between the world of television--that lowliest of
lowbrow objects--and highbrow practitioners in the 1940s and 50s; in my case, professors and
teachers of English. Traditionally, cultural historians of television have positioned T.V. in the
| 27 |

minds of contemporary thinkers at the losing end of a number of related cultural binaries--class
vs. mass, high vs. low and avant-garde vs. derivative.
9
That is, beyond a few cultural critics like
Gilbert Seldes and Jack Gould, artists and serious intellectuals of the 1940s and 50s have been
consistently characterized as unwavering and unified in their opposition to the "vast wasteland"
of television.
10
The opposition was so animated, according to Cecelia Tichi, in her 1991
Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture, that it constituted a second "Two
Cultures" front for literary intellectuals of the period.
11
More recently scholars like Lynn Spiegel
have attempted to complicate this picture of early television by revealing the intellectual and
material connections between television and the art world; in particular, the classical training of
network art directors, the recognition among artists and curators that television could play a role
in the large-scale dissemination of modern art and the relationship between television's
developing aesthetic and postwar art movements.
12
While Spiegel asserts her story as a needed
historiographical course-correction to Tichi and others, still missing is a sense in which

9
The distinction between the realms of highbrow and lowbrow cultural production has been a particular
sticking point for intellectual and cultural historians focused on the immediate postwar years. After all,
artists, art critics and intellectuals of the period appeared so unified and unwavering in their distaste for all
mass culture. From Theodor W. Adorno, Clement Greenberg and Dwight McDonald to Harold and
Bernard Rosenberg, scholars in these two decades established an almost impenetrable conceptual
framework for popular culture as a product of media regimes who pacified their audiences and left little
wiggle room for interpretive agency. Thus, even when cultural historians in the 1980s began to expose the
fully constructed and ultimately shifting nature of the highbrow-lowbrow distinction in American society,
they did so only by way of explicitly articulating a rejection of those prejudices established by writers and
theorists of the 1940s and 50s.
10
Newton N. Minow, "Television and the Public Interest."Address to the National Association of Broadcasters,
Washington, D.C., May 9, 1961.

11
See chapter two, "Two Cultures and the Battle by the Books," Tichi, Cecelia. Electronic Hearth:
Creating an American Television Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
12
Spigel, Lynn. TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. (University of Chicago
Press, 2008).

| 28 |

intellectuals and academics--literary scholars and educators, in my case--embraced television as
an exciting cultural and informational medium.
Second, I draw upon the insights and interests of new media scholars--media
archeologists, in particular--who seek to recover the "uncertain status" or "identity crisis" of a
given medium at the moment of its origin, a moment when, according to Lisa Gitelman, "its
meaning--its potential, its limitations, the publicly agreed upon sense of what it does, and for
whom--has not yet been pinned down."
13
In doing so, I hope to show the degree to which the
meaning of television--at least for educators--was up for grabs in the years following the
emergence of instructional T.V.

II. Early Development of Instructional Television

The first television broadcast took place in 1927. In April of that year, Secretary of
Commerce Herbert Hoover sat down to view moving images on a 24 inch screen broadcast from
Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey to Washington D.C. The first full decade of
television, the 1930s, saw a marketplace acutely divided by two incompatible transmission-
receiver models, one electromechanical, the other electronic plus a near bedlam of technical
standards. Anyone buying a T.V. set in these years had to make sure its method of display was
compatible with the mode of transmission from their local station. Their set had to display the
same number of lines, both vertical and horizontal, per frame and the same number of frames per
second as the broadcast. It also had to be compatible with the sound frequency at which their

13
Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Ed. New Media, 1740-1915. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2003. Pg. xv.
| 29 |

local station broadcast. Finally, just before America entered WWII, in 1941, the FCC established
industrial standards for transmission and receivers.
After the WWII, T.V. antennas began sprouting on rooftops and commercial broadcasters
wasted no time setting up shop. In 1947 one half of one percent of American households owned
a television set; seven years later that figure had risen to 56%. But even in these earliest days,
there were already advocates who wished to turn television broadcasting, "the social branch of
electronics," towards education. Shortly after the War the FCC began its charge of licensing
television stations to commercial broadcasters. By 1949 there was a vocal faction of educators,
lead by the U.S. commissioner of education Earl J. McGrath, who urged the FCC to reserve
broadcasting frequencies for non-commercial educational use. From 1949 to 1951, each year the
FCC's table of assignments failed to do so, but in April of 1952 in their Sixth Report and Order,
242 of 2,000 channels were set aside for educational purposes.
Nineteen fifty-two also saw the establishment of the Educational Television and Radio
Center (ETRC). The ETRC would soon shorten its name to Educational Television Network
(ETV) and in the late 1960s would, after the establishment of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting by President Johnson in 1967, merge to form the Public Broadcasting System
(PBS). In its early years the ETRC was a major resource center for educational television,
maintaining exchange programs between local educational television stations. In 1954 they
began producing five hours of original ETRC programming (kinescopes
14
) per week for
affiliated stations. The material the ETRC exchanged and produced was of two types,
differentiated by educational technology professionals as educational television and instructional
television. Educational programming is of the type that PBS would become most known for, an

14
A kinescope is a film recording of a television program made by pointing a film camera at a video monitor during
broadcast.
| 30 |

alternative to televised commercial entertainment which focuses on public affairs, children's
programming, literary dramas and coverage of the nation's arts and culture. In other words,
educational programming is not intended for formal instruction. On the other hand, formal
instruction is the very function of instructional programming. Unlike educational programming,
instructional programming is arranged in a series to assist cumulative learning; it is most often
planned by or in consultation with educational professionals; it is often accompanied by other
instructional materials such as primary reading, textbooks and study guides; it is often evaluated
by education professionals for its effectiveness in learning; and finally, it is often offered for
credit via an educational institution.
15

By the late 1960s, the moniker of "educational television" would come to denote PBS
style "public television," or educational programming. But in the early to late 1950s, educational
television, to a large degree, meant instructional television. By 1959, for instance, though there
were already many educational programs, fifty-three percent of all programming broadcast from
educational stations was instructional in nature, or lecture-oriented, and forty-one percent of all
programming consisted of for-credit telecourses.
16
In the early-to-mid 1950s educational
programming--children's programs, cultural affairs shows and talking-head television--was
harder to come by. "Programming for educational stations developed on a trial and error basis,"
Paul Saettler asserts in The Evolution of American Educational Technology, "Many stations
began broadcasting without any plans for programs. In the early years of educational television,
it was not unusual for stations to carry programs that had been put together a few hours before

15
The first four of these five characteristics for instructional television are offered by David Hawkridge
and John Robinson in Organizing Educational Broadcasting. London: UNESCO Press, 1982. Pg. 25.
16
in 1959; The Impact of Educational Television, Wilbur Schramm 1961 ed vol
| 31 |

broadcast time."
17
It was easier for educational television stations--even those not associated
with educational institutions--to hit the ground running with instructional programming since it
already had an established content and format, the lecture. Most educational television stations in
the 1950s were associated with educational institutions. After all, the chief reason for the
instructional character of so much educational television in the 1950s was the massive
institutional demand for alternative means of instruction, itself the result of critical teacher
shortages and the Sputnik-inspired curriculum crisis (see below). As a result, the first decade of
educational television in the United States was dominated by professional educators--k-12 and
higher education administrators, professors, teachers and education scholars.
The first two educational television stations in the United States, for instance, KHUT and
KHTE, both established in 1953, were owned by educational institutions--the University of
Houston and the University of Southern California, respectively. Both aired for-credit
instructional programming. The first three educational stations in the United States were in fact
owned by universities and by 1955, 8 of the eleven existing stations were university owned. By
1961, of the 63 stations in existence, 22 were owned by intuitions of higher education, 19 by
community corporations for k-12 broadcasting and 5 were run by state authorities also for public
education (K-12). In addition, by 1959 there were also 133 closed-circuit television systems in
use by 119 educational institutions in forty states.
18
Finally, there was the Midwest Program of
Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI), established in 1959 (in conjunction with Purdue
University) whereby a combination television stations and circling airplanes broadcast courses to

17
Saettler, Paul. The Evolution of American Educational Technology. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries
Unlimited, Inc., 1990. Pg. 365.
18
Bretz, Rudy. Educational-Instructional Television and Closed Circuit TV: A Manual, Directory and
Bibliography. Los Angeles: National Institute of Leadership, 1959. Pp. 4.
| 32 |

2,000 schools and an estimated 400,000 students in 6 states. By 1961 over a million students
were receiving some kind of formal instruction via television.
Telecourses could function in a number of ways. With closed-circuit systems, students
gathered in multiple classrooms or lecture halls to view instruction broadcast from either another
classroom or a studio somewhere on campus. Tests would be taken in the rooms where students
viewed their lectures. In some cases, two-way communication was set up so the instructor could
field questions from students in the multiple classrooms. In higher education, the first full scale
use of a closed-circuit system for instruction was operated by Pennsylvania State University at
University Park. In the 1954-55 academic year, the institution offered three classes--two in
psychology and one in chemistry--as closed circuit telecourses. The following year, they offered
fifteen such classes, in sociology, psychology, economics, air science, accounting, music
appreciation and metrology. Forty-two hundred students in total were enrolled in telecourses that
year. So confident was Pennsylvania State in the future of television teaching in higher education
that by 1957, the year of their first report to the American Council of Education, they were in the
process of wiring the entire campus for closed circuit and broadcast television.
19
In the case of
open-circuit, or over-the-air, broadcasting, students could be assigned to classrooms to view
instruction. But for the most part, administrators saw instructional television as a solution to,
among other things, space shortages on campus. Thus most over-the-air telecourses at the college
and university level were viewed at home or in the dorm. Homework was turned into offices or
by mail. In many cases, students were assigned a classroom for tests and the final.

19
Adams, C. John, C. R. Carpenter, Dorothy R. Smith. Eds. College Teaching by Television: Report of a
Conference Sponsored Jointly by the Committee on Television of the American Council on Education
and the Pennsylvania State University at University Park, Pennsylvania, October 20-23, 1957.
Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1958. Pg. 5.
| 33 |

At the elementary and secondary level, students would typically go to a classroom set up
with a television for a given period or subject or a television would be wheeled into their
classroom. In smaller systems, instruction would be broadcast by closed-circuit from another
classroom or studio at the same school. In larger systems, instruction was broadcast either by
closed-circuit or via a local educational television station to all schools in a given school district.
The first such systems appeared in 1955 when both Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and St. Louis,
Missouri began television lessons broadcast from local stations. In the first year of broadcast in
Pittsburgh, 639 5th graders from twenty separate schools in and around the city sat down five
days a week to watch three half hour lessons in reading, arithmetic and French. By the second
year, 1400 more students were added to the roster as was a lesson in 5th grade social studies and
a high school course in physics thought by a University of California physics professor. By the
third year new courses in 6th grade reading, 7th grade English, 9th grade general science and two
additional courses in French were added. Nineteen fifty-five also saw the first state-wide
educational television network established in Alabama. Set up in an effort to raise the standard of
instruction throughout the state, a total of three stations, WAIZ, WBIQ and WCIQ, transmitted
telecourses to 158,000 students at the elementary and secondary level. The Alabama system
represented a higher level of infrastructural commitment to television teaching than in the

| 34 |

Figure 1.2 Props and posters used at an
educational television studio, 1956.

Figure 1.4 Teaching U.S. government, 1956.

Figure 1.6 English teacher illustrating sentence
structure, 1956.

Figure 1.1 Biology teacher giving a lecture on TV,
1956.

Figure 1.3 History teacher illustrating the
balance of trade between England and the
colonies, 1956.

Figure 1.5 Principles of sculpture, 1956.

| 35 |

Pittsburgh system, a level of commitment more representative of systems built in the later 50s
and early 60s. In Pittsburgh schools, televisions were added to traditional classrooms, often
wheeled in just before broadcast time. The Alabama system employed newly constructed
experimental classrooms which functionally centered on the television. Students went to these
classrooms to take lessons in French, Spanish, reading, social science, physical science,
mathematics, art and music.
Historically, instructional television was the latest extension of "visual instruction" in
American education. "Visual instruction," or sometimes "visual education," essentially denotes
the use of visual aids in formal instruction with the express purpose of providing students with a
concrete visual experience for a given situation, theory or concept. From the beginning, the
dominant theoretical rationale behind visual instruction has been the idea that while certain
concepts are more amenable to the type of abstract descriptions provided by language others
require concrete visual experience to grasp. The leading theoretical justifications for visual
instruction, those around which the movement has always rallied, all employ a "concreteness in
education" thesis and specify spectrums, from abstract to concrete, along which all forms of
instruction and experience lie. Thus in 1928, 1937 and 1946, Joseph Weber, Charles Hoban and
Edgar Dale, respectively, all defined a range of teaching materials along such a spectrum with
verbal description at one end, field trips on the other, and models, films, stereographs and slides
somewhere in the middle.
20
"We can acquire visual experience from situations that are as
concrete as reality and as abstract as the scheme of typical visual aids which follows," Joseph
Weber wrote in 1928, "(1) actual reality, as we find it on a school journey; (2) pseudo-reality, as

20
Weber, Joseph. "Picture Values in Education," The Educational Screen, 1928; Hoban, Charles et al.
Visualizing the Curriculum. New York: Dryden Press, 1937; Dale, Edgar. Audiovisual Methods in
Teaching. New York: Dryden Press, 1946.
| 36 |

exemplified by artificial models and exhibits (3) pictorial realism, as depicted in drawings and
photographs; (4) pictorial symbolism--similes, metaphors, and plain language."
21

While it was not uncommon for educators in the 19th century to employ maps, graphs,
pictures or models in the classroom it was not until the introduction of the stereoscope, the
advent of film and the establishment of a more perfected and accessible process for photography
at the turn of the 20th century that a determined block of educators began calling for the
concerted and extensive use of visual aids in education. Still, the movement did not begin in
earnest until the 1920s, a decade of wide but dispersed growth for advocates of visual
instruction. From 1919 to 1923, five separate national organizations emerged--the National
Academy for Visual Instruction (1919), the American Educational Motion Picture Association
(1919), the National Academy of Visual Instruction (1920), the Visual Instruction Association
of America (1922) and the National Education Association's Department of Visual Instruction
(1923)--each in an effort to promote and facilitate visual instruction.
The first national survey of visual instruction methods, materials and equipment
conducted in 1923 provides an effective cross-section of visual education in these years. In that
year the National Education Association decided to take stock of the use of visual aids in the
nation's classrooms, appointing a committee to assess the state of the art in visual instruction
methods. The committee conducted a survey of sixteen cities with departments of visual
instruction to determine the types and amount of visual materials and equipment in use.
22
They
found the sixteen departments to own a combined total of 686 projectors, 1,642 stereopticons,
236,884 slides and 268,072 stereographs. In addition, eleven departments had established film

21
Weber, Joseph. Ibid. Pg. 126.
22
The sixteen cities were Chicago, Newark, Detroit, Kansas City, Pittsburg, Los Angeles, New York,
Atlanta, Berkeley, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Toledo, Washington, Birmingham and Oakland.
| 37 |

libraries which contained a total of 1,755 reels of film. The survey also found that departments
were not limited to the materials they owned. Many had set up distribution networks--circuits--
through which materials, mostly films, would circulate from city to city.
In 1932 the three remaining national organizations merged into the National Education
Association's Department of Visual Instruction (DVI); in the same year, the Educational Screen,
the official organ of the NEA's department of visual instruction absorbed its only large-scale
competitor, Visual Instruction News. Thus began a period of consolidated effort to centralize
information and discussion regarding visual instruction, centrally coordinate the distribution of
visual materials and equipment and promote and standardize courses for visual instruction in
teacher education. The 1930s saw the first national conferences for visual instruction, a rapid rise
of books published on the subject, especially handbooks and textbooks, and a number of states
requiring courses in visual instruction for teacher certification.
At the heart of the visual instruction movement from the 1920s forward was the
educational film, and WWII put a version of it--the training film--on the map for educators
everywhere. The Second World War created an immediate demand for the rapid and effective
training of soldiers and supporting personal for combat operations and for a myriad of technical
and procedural duties. With the help of the U.S. Office of Education's new Division of Visual
Aids for War Training, leaders in the field of visual instruction suddenly found themselves at the
heart of a booming wartime training-film production--films that ranged from how to dress and
how to behave on leave to lessons on the rapid assembly of weapons and the flying of airplanes.
After the war, educational films hit the nation's classrooms in earnest, and the visual education
movement found itself on more solid footing. Film use in the classroom, and visual materials
| 38 |

more generally, were seen less as a luxury and more as a compelling way to transmit certain
types of information.
Thus, in some ways the preponderance of educational and instructional films during and
after the war was a necessary precursor to educational television. They demonstrated the
effectiveness of screen-based moving-pictures for formal instruction. And in a few cases,
educational television stations did meet some of the demand for on-air hours early on by
broadcasting educational films.
23
At the same time, instructional films differed considerably
from the nature of instructional programming on educational television. Educational films were
primarily documentary-narrative or training-oriented in nature. Instructional television
programming was instead based on the style and conventions of formal education--on the lecture.
At the same time, instructional programming was in some ways the culmination of visual
education. It was the ultimate--or meta--visual aid. Instructional television allowed educators to
employ any and all other visual media--especially film--at the exact moment when they became
most useful or appropriate in their lecture. Many educators found early on that such a multimedia
method proved the best way to maintain students' interests in instruction on a fundamentally
visual medium. A lecture could be broken up in infinite ways. Science teachers broke up their
demonstrations of laboratory experiments with film segments showing the micro processes
involved at key junctures. English teachers compared the audio of various readings of particular

23
Films were broadcast over live television via a process called "telecine." In the simplest set-up, a film
projector was situated at a right angle from a broadcasting television camera; between them a mirror was
positioned (and sometimes treated) to invert the projected image picked up by the T.V. camera. Because
there was a difference in the frame rates for each medium (film at 24 frames a second and television at 25
or 30), the film was either sped up slightly, or select frames from the film were repeated. More complex
systems called "film chains," used in educational broadcasting, contained a television camera positioned
next to multiple film and/or slide projectors; in the middle a network of mirrors (a multiplexer) was used
to select the "channel" of transmission.
| 39 |

passages, showed clips from stage productions and even demonstrated how to print on papyrus.
For those willing to experiment, instructional television was truly multimedia.
Finally, instructional television must be seen within the overall context of 1950s
American education. From the beginning, "television teaching" was hailed as the greatest, and in
some cases only, solution to a series of educational crises which came to pass in the second half
of the 1950s. The first concerned a severe teacher shortage. In the mid-1950s the first wave of
children born just after WWII were coming of school age creating an immediate teacher shortage
in lower k-6 grades and the likely prospect of an analogous shortage in grades 7-12 in the
coming years. By 1958 k-12 classrooms across the nation would house 2.3 million students in
excess of "normal capacity." In these same years, enrollment in institutions of higher education
swelled from 2.6 million in 1955 to 3.6 million in 1960. For k-12, television teaching offered the
opportunity to bring one instructor into many classrooms. For colleges and universities
instructional television when broadcast from local stations solved not only their shortage of
qualified instructors, but the additional shortage of space since enrolled students could watch
lectures from home.
For advocates of television teaching, the new medium was more than a means for
keeping the educational system from collapse. It was also a means to raise the standard of
instruction in very specific ways. In 1957 the National Defense Education Act put into language
and law the shared concerns of politicians and professional educators across the nation. In
general terms the 1957 Act sought to elevate the level of education in America, to bolster the
ranks of the technical elite and at the same time create a more educated citizenry, one capable of
leadership on the world stage. But more specifically, the Act responded to the widespread belief,
especially after Sputnik, that the deplorable state of instruction in core academic subjects--
| 40 |

especially math science and foreign language--made it difficult if not impossible for the United
States to keep up with the Soviet Union. The second educational crisis of the 1950s amounted to
concerns over national security. Charles Siepman, long-time advocate of educational
broadcasting and author of TV and Our School Crisis, encapsulated the sentiment this way:

The arithmetic of our plight is clear. We face a certain and rapid decline in the
already diluted standards of education, and it needs little imagination to anticipate
the consequences to the welfare of a society demanding more of its citizens--in
wisdom, knowledge and multifarious skills--than was ever asked of any nation in
history. Should we be short of imagination, the challenge of the U.S.S.R. offers a
rude awakening ... there, engineers graduating from higher institutions increased
from 28,000 in 1950 to 63,000 in 1955 while in these United States the number of
such graduates plummeted from 52,000 to 23,000.

Television teaching provided a ready solution once again. For this reason, Title VIII of the Act
provided 18 million dollars for research and experimentation in effective uses for television,
radio and other audiovisual mediums for educational purposes. On the one hand, television
teaching was an answer to the problem of qualified teachers in these key areas, especially
science. On the other hand, critics and reformers called on scholars in the nation's colleges and
universities to get more involved in the improvement of k-12 education, and instructional
television offered them a way to do so. Foreign language instruction for instance, was thought to
profit uniquely academic involvement (more on science instruction below). "FLES' [Foreign
Language for Elementary School] greatest weakness has been its lack of qualified instructors," a
| 41 |

French instructor writing in Yale French Studies argued, "The aural-oral approach on which most
FLES teaching is based requires of the teacher an understanding very different from that which
may be acquired from a high school or college text. The texture and fiber of a language prove to
be of a different nature. [Instructors] must come, therefore, from institutions of higher learning ...
Because of this, television which permits one teacher to reach a large number of pupils suggests
itself as a solution."
24

III. Instructional Television and Mass Higher Education: The Sciences versus the
Humanities

Educational television arrived on the scene at a time when humanists felt increasing
pressure to compete with science and technology, and in general, to prove their worth in an era
of mass education. Because industrial society encourages the acquisition of technical skills and
practical knowledge, sustaining an interest in humanistic studies and preserving a secure place
for it in higher education had, according to contemporary practitioners, proved a serious
challenge at least since the turn of the 20
th
century. The latest instantiation of this challenge had
begun in the years immediately following World War II with the Servicemen’s Readjustment
Act of 1944. Known colloquially as the GI Bill, it ushered in what has since become known as
the era of mass higher education. The benefits from the Bill were quite robust, leading many to
take advantage. The Bill offered tuition, unemployment insurance, medical care and stipends for
books and other student expenses to any veteran enrolled in an educational program. Anyone

24
Kern Edith. "The Television Teacher - How Near, How Far?," Yale French Studies, No. 22. (1958), pp.
122-23.
| 42 |

serving for at least ninety days was awarded one full year of such benefits. Following that, each
month of service yielded a month of benefits. From 1945-51 nearly one half of the 15 million
returning veterans participated in the program; 29% attending college, others using their benefits
to pursue degrees at vocational schools and obtain on-the-job training. College and university
enrollments swelled with veterans, many doubling from 1944-46.
25

Humanists had their concerns about the changing nature of higher education. Many
became openly nostalgic for a pre-war campus populated only by “traditional students.” GIs
were after all a new breed of undergraduate. They were often in a hurry to finish their education,
participating in campus activities at a much lower frequency than others in their cohort. They
were practical minded and enrolled largely in institutions or courses teaching employable
fields—business administration and engineering foremost among them. And ultimately, at least
in the minds of many educators, they were little interested in using the elements of a classical
curriculum to work through the mysteries of the human condition or to fashion a philosophy of
life for themselves. To many humanists, GIs represented a massive influx of students for whom
higher education meant attaining technical literacy or mastery and not maintaining man’s cultural
heritage. For some, these fears reached beyond the implications of the GI Bill to concerns over
the potentially accessible nature of post war higher education in general. Returning veterans were
one thing; they were expected to keep their heads down and finish their degrees in time to enter

25
Kiester, Edwin, Jr. “The G.I. Bill May Be the Best Deal Ever Make by Uncle Sam,” Smithsonian 25
(November 1994); Cohen, Arthur M. The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and
Growth of the Contemporary System. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998; Thelin, John R. A
History of American Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
| 43 |

the work force. But already there was a nation-wide movement to extend the spirit of the GI Bill
to a new generation of American students, of radically expanding the access and affordability of
higher education. And already cries could be heard emanating from literature and philosophy
departments across the nation to the effect that colleges and universities had dangerously opened
their doors to the population at large—the very same general population who had always shown
a wicked indifference to the subjects of the humanities.
26
“State universities as well as private
colleges should have the right to select their students and not open their doors to all comers,”
wrote Douglas Bush, professor of English at Harvard University in 1957. Why? Because,
according to Bush, the massive influx of average students—the “unintellectual,” as he called
them—had forced colleges and universities to “water down [their] curriculum” as well as “put in
any kind of occupation or entertainment.”
27

According to Bush, students storming the gates of higher education now were those given
over to mass entertainment, not the literary experience: “Only the exceptional students [entering
college] have read anything that matters; as a nation, we are not given to reading books.” Thus,

26
If the post-war character of higher education placed the humanities in an ambiguous position the war
itself motivated many to make the case that a humanistic education was more imperative than ever before.
After all, the war was fought against an enemy whose very nature demonstrated the danger of taking
civilization and culture for granted. The Nazi war machine, advocates of the humanities made the claim,
could only develop in a society whose university system had so abandoned the teaching of culture and
values for that of technical expertise. The scientistic barbarism of the Germans during the war and the
moral susceptibility of the Nazi youth in particular were pointed to as products of teaching highly
specialized knowledge instead of imparting critical intelligence.
26
Thus, Ernest Martin Hopkins, president
of Dartmouth could conclude, “It would be a tragic paradox if, as a result of the war, we were to allow our
system of higher education to be transformed into the type of education which has made it so easy for a
crowd of governmental gangsters like Hitler’s outfit to commandeer a whole population.”
27
Bush, Douglas. “First of Two Views...: The End of Education,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 38, No. 5, Raising
Hob with the Status Quo. A Special IssueDevoted to Problems of Higher Education in a Period of Rapid Growth
(Feb., 1957); 165.
| 44 |

for some humanists, the inclusion of whole new sectors of society into the college and university
experience was intimately related to the rise of educational television. Mass education—that is,
education for the masses—meant education as mass entertainment: both appealed to the lowest
common denominator; both meant a move away from the printed page; both were damaging to
the humanities. From the beginning, select humanist constituted a core of outrage over the threat
of television teaching. So much so that James Finn
28
, USC professor of education and perhaps
the most prominent figure in the field of educational technology throughout the 1950s and 60s,
published numerous articles devoted to explicating the terms of the conflict between what he
called the "literary tradition" and the "audio-visual tradition."
29
At the heart of the conflict, as
Finn acknowledged, was a tradition of cultural hierarchy.
30
Among humanists, especially literary
scholars, resistance to the inclusion of visual instruction or television teaching into education in
the 1940s and 1950s, was in large part, just one front in a larger battle over mass culture. For
Joseph Wood Krutch, professor of English at Columbia University and perhaps the most vocal
opponent of television teaching, and of visual education generally, the educational arena--and
especially its humanistic component--was the final bulwark against the cultural tendencies of the

28
James D. Finn (1915-1969) was professor of education at the University of Southern California from
1949-1969. He published over one hundred articles on educational technology in his career, was the
director of numerous national studies on the topic and co-author of the field's organizing document in
1963, "Guidelines for the Assessment of the Unique Educational Potentials of the Various Media: A
Report to U.S. Office of Education." He was founder and senior editor of the field's central publication,
Audio-Visual Communication Review and president of the Association for Educational Communications
and Technology, Educational Media Council, and the National Education Association in the early '60s.
He also founded the nation's first Instructional Technology Department at USC in the late 1950s.
29
Finn, James. "A Look at the Future of AV Communication," Audio Visual Communication Review,
Vol. 3, No. 4 (Fall, 1955); "The Sound and the Fury of Rudolf Flesch," Teaching Tools, Vol. 2, No. 3
(Spring 1955); "Some notes for an Essay on Griswold and Reading," Audio Visual Communication
Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring, 1959);"The Tradition and the Iron mask," Keynote Address, Department of
Audio-Visual Instruction Convention, National Education Association. Miami Beach, April 24, 1961.
30
"The Tradition and the Iron mask," Pg. 8.
| 45 |

modern world. The introduction of audio-visual elements into the classroom, according to
Krutch, amounted to the wholesale infiltration of mass entertainment--its amusing, catchy and
effortless content--into education.

Are what our school principals grandly call 'audio-visual aids' usually anything
more than concessions to the pupils unwillingness to make that effort of attention
necessary to read a text or listen to a teacher's exposition? ...How often can it be
said that any movie, film strip, or recording teaches the so-called student--who
has dwindled into mere listener or viewer--more than could be learned in the same
time with a little effort, or that the mechanical method has any virtue other than
the fact that such effort is not required?

For many educators, Krutch included, the new inclusive nature of higher education--mass higher
education--made the introduction of mass culture even more problematic. The influx of students
into colleges and universities, principally the result of the GI bill, forced educators to cater to a
new lowest common denominator in student proficiency and expectation. Krutch called it an
extension of the welfare state into education. Jacques Barzun, in his 1958 The House of Intellect,
called it philanthropy, and designated it as one of three phenomena responsible for the rapid
decline in American education and intellectuality. The expansion of higher education was
problematic enough, these authors seemed to indicate, but the introduction of television
programming into the classroom threatened to bring their culture in tow with them--to
potentially take away the slow work of contemplative engagement with difficult materials and
replace it with the principle of the advertiser's jingle.
| 46 |

Thus, at stake too was a surrender to the efficacy of a new communications technology, a
surrender, as Krutch put it, to the mass delusion that mechanical techniques of communication
are inherently superior and "interesting in themselves."
31
Scholars like Krutch and Barzun
repeatedly chastised educators who had become obsessed with new modes of communication
beyond the printed page. "The grand question has now become," Krutch averred, "whether or not
the new techniques of mass communication inevitably and by their very nature weaken the
power to learn at the same time that they make being taught so easy." For Alfred Whitney
Griswold, historian, president of Yale and another vocal opponent of the audio-visual tradition,
mass communications, oriented as they were toward a uni-directional mode of information
transmission, was the killer of conversation in modern society and its introduction into education
was anathema to the intellectual dialogue which sustained Western culture. Speaking at the
1954-1955 opening convention for Brown University, Griswold, addressed television in
education specifically, ridiculing the new scholarly focus on communication. "The freshman
reads on in despair." Griswold sarcastically anticipated the near future, "He is looking for a
course in English. He can't find one. He goes to the Dean. 'English?' says the Dean. 'Oh we don't
bother with that anymore. We have developed more effective means of communication."
The phrase, "more effective means of communication," is telling here. Many of those
resisting the introduction of the television into education seemed to be acting on a shared fear
concerning the magnetic nature of television as a source of entertainment and information,
especially when compared to the conventional codex. The fact is, television did not just compete
with quality print culture by offering easily digestible mass entertainment. As a vivid, dynamic
and intimate interface for information, it also contested the efficacy of print, a fact expressly

31
Ibid. Krutch. Pg. 134.
| 47 |

articulated by educational television advocates and at least implicitly acknowledged by its
detractors. One catches a glimpse of such anxiety, not just in statements like the one above but
also, for instance, when scholars warned that education via television could compel students to
stop gathering information from multiple sources, relying solely on the television for information
about the world. Content emanating from the television screen was abnormally compelling,
detractors seemed to indicate. As studies had shown, people often took its content to be true
without question. Thus, instructional material via the television screen threatened to subvert
traditional book-based forms of information gathering, not just by encouraging passivity in the
learner but because its vivid content had such a definitive air to it. "The city of Chicago prides
itself on the number of hours weekly spent on each course before the TV screen," wrote Robert
Nossen, in advising English professors on how best to influence the new educational medium,
"This is the height of ridiculousness ... the student must learn from books." Telecourses, Nossen
went on, must "demand the discipline of library searching: to collect materials, to analyze them,
to collate them, and to conclude from them." Information in books began conversations, Nossen
and others suggested; books opened inquiry. Students go from one book to another and then
another, seeking out connections and related knowledge. Not only was it hard to do this with
television, but because information emanating from the screen was felt to be so conclusive, the
new medium simply didn’t encourage such intellectual activity either. These conflicts between
the printed word and television--between print and electronic culture-- led James Finn to
articulate a hypothetical manifesto of the literary tradition this way: "There is but one God and it
is the Word; there is but one human and he is the man with literary sensibility; there is but one
| 48 |

world, and it has been printed on a press for all to see. Everything else is either a false God, an
inhuman man, or a phantom world."
32

IV. Instructional Television and the Educational Crisis

While some, like Joseph Krutch, resisted entirely the incursion of educational television
into the realm of higher education and into the sacred realms of humanities instruction, in
particular, other humanists found in television their best chance to keep up with curriculum
reform in the 1950s, and specifically a way to compete with science and technology.
With the rise of instructional television, a real sense of urgency registered among
humanists that if they themselves did not find a use for the new medium, one would be found for
them. This particular sense of urgency would continue to haunt many humanists up into the
1970s, triggered again and again with the introduction of each new technology into the arena of
education. With television teaching in particular, it seemed clear that the basic conditions which
made it appear so attractive, even necessary, to administrators across the nation--the dramatic
rise in enrollments--would only continue into the next decade. Thus in a very basic sense,
television teaching wasn't going anywhere, and many expressed a kind of "if you can't lick 'em,
join 'em" attitude. "The medium of TV is with us," wrote the chair of the English department at
Lamar State College in 1958, "English teachers must face the reality; they must experiment,
must search for answers. Otherwise, inevitably, ready-made answers will be found for them."
33

32
Finn. Ibid.
33
Nossen, Robert. "TV and the Teaching of English," Improving College and University Teaching, Vol.
6, No. 3 (Summer, 1958). Pg. 98.
| 49 |

Figure 1.7. Block diagram of television color-
translating microscope at Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research. Source: V.K. Zworykin and
Fred L. Hatke. "Ultraviolet Television Color-
Translating Microscope," Science, Vol. 126, No.
3278 (Oct. 25, 1957). Pg. 808.

But 'joining 'em" meant more than just throwing traditional lecture content onto a screen.
Part of the pressure to keep up--to "experiment [and] search for answers"--was a sense that every
other discipline was busy narrowing in on its particular suitability to television teaching. With
the rise of instructional television came extensive experimentation within each discipline with
the character of the new medium. In nearly every field, teachers, scholars and administrators
sought to find the ways in which their particular subject matter and traditional pedagogical
institutions could be made amenable to television instruction. Again and again one sees a
working out of how best to take advantage of television's capacity for visual instruction--how,
practitioners from countless fields wondered, does the realism and immediacy of the moving
image in general, or the close-up, superimposition and split-screen, in particular, relate to our
subject matter. Advocates for television teaching always found their niche: in psychology, real-
time abnormal behavior could be scrutinized by students; in education would-be teachers could
see how best to perform in front of a classroom; in medicine students could gain an intimate
view of surgical techniques as cameras were brought into operating rooms; even in mathematics,
complex and abstract concepts could be demonstrated by turning to "dynamic cartoons" in the
middle of lectures. Put another way, in nearly
every field one could find advocates for
television teaching asserting that students who
encountered their subject as a telecourse or in a
lecture supplemented by television got more than
their counterparts in conventional classrooms.
Thus in most fields, just as with English,
there was a sense that the discipline would have
| 50 |

to find its distinctive relationship to the character of television in order to keep up with advances
in education. But among English scholars, enthusiasm for such an undertaking more often
appeared alongside anxiety that their hand was being forced. Put another way, in flourishing
fields--in psychology and biology, for example--experimentation with instructional television
was more often linked to an overall robust enthusiasm regarding potential new frontiers in the
field. That is, television was more often seen as a new device whose research and teaching
methods would organically take their place within an already developing field. In psychology for
instance, closed-circuit television used both to broadcast therapeutic lessons to inmates and
observe round-the-clock behavior took its place among a larger boon of successful
experimentation in new drugs and treatments in the 1950s.
34
The former in particular--"therapy
by television"--was born of cutting-edge work in psycho-cybernetics which pushed
communications theory to the center of diagnosis and inter-personal communications to the
center of healthy mental behavior. The mentally ill respond well to frequent encounters with
television, advocates argued, because "communication is the matrix in which all human activities
are embedded."
35
In biology the use of color television proved a fruitful area of experimentation
in the mid-to-late 1950s. Simultaneous manipulation of the color wheel on a camera and monitor
allowed investigators to track chemical data in specimens not available by direct photography.
The ultraviolet television color-translating microscopes--an ultraviolet microscope hooked up to
a color television via a number of amplifiers, pulse clippers and phase comparators--developed

34
Martin, Lee Gaither and Charles H. R. "Therapy by Television," Audio Visual Communication Review,
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1956); Tucker, Hyman; Lewis, Richard; Martin, Lee Gaither and Over, Charles.
Television Therapy: The Effectiveness of Closed Circuit Television as a Medium for Therapy in the
Treatment of the Mentally Ill. Agnews State Hospital, Agnew, California, 1955.
35
Ruesch, Jurgen and Gregory Bateson. Communication the Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: W.
W. Norton and Company, 1951. Pg. 13.
| 51 |

by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and RCA Laboratories in the mid-1950s
allowed biologists and medical researchers to observe specimens under ultraviolet conditions in
real time. Prior to the new contraption, researchers had to develop each individual photograph in
order to render the ultraviolet image visible.
36

By contrast, in English, classroom television was more often seen as the medium by
which teachers and scholars will be made to update the "talk and chalk" principles of yesteryear.
None of this is to say that educational television was not greeted with great enthusiasm by some
English scholars. It was, as I'll show below. It is simply to say that, it was more often the case in
English that such enthusiasm was tempered by the suspicion--conscious or unconscious--that
experimentation with instructional television was at least, in part, a response to the prevailing
belief that the humanities were, unlike fields like psychology or biology, on a decline.
Experimentation with curricular reform always feels different on the way down than it does on
the way up. The latter is exciting; the former stimulating but defensive. In 1956 Henry W.
Knepler, professor of Language, Literature and Philosophy at Illinois Institute of technology,
conducted interviews with 20 English professors for the National Council on Teachers of
English's Committee on College English for Non-Major Students. The purpose of the interviews
was to gauge reactions to the use of instructional television in their field. Knepler reported that
most respondents believed the use of television in the classroom to be "inevitable." What's more,
respondents' phrasing revealed the degree to which embracing television teaching in their field
could be seen as exciting and defensive at the same time. "Since I belong to the school which

36
Hovnanian, H. Philip Holt, Roland B. "Recent Developments in Color Translating Ultraviolet
Microscopy," Medical Electronics. Vol. 7 (July 1956); V.K. Zworykin and Fred L. Hatke. "Ultraviolet
Television Color-Translating Microscope," Science, Vol. 126, No. 3278 (Oct. 25, 1957); V. K. Zworykin
and C. Berkley. "Ultraviolet Television Color-Translating Microscopy," Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences. Vol. 97, No. 2 (May 1962).
| 52 |

believes that if you can't lick 'em, join 'em," Professor Miller of the University of Nebraska
responded to Knepler, "I believe we (English Departments) should lead the way." Edward W.
Rosenheim, Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago, argued
that the traditional lecture method could have a good deal to gain by television. At the same time
he offered this: "Like their brethren of the Chautauqua platform and the vaudeville stage, the
species is obsolescent, and unless their talents can be adapted to the demands of electronics, they
had better seek a living elsewhere."
37

What's more, when English scholars and teachers talked of 'joining 'em' or 'keeping up' in
the realm of educational television, they had the sciences particularly in mind. If the ascent of
mass higher education, and with it, the rise of educational television appeared to some to
challenge the aims and values of humanities pedagogy, the sciences appeared to many to threaten
the entire humanities enterprise. The vast techno-scientific output of the late 1950s and 1960s
appeared threatening to the humanities on several fronts. On the one hand, interest in the
humanities on the whole seemed to be at stake as the United States geared up for the space race,
spending thousands of times more money each year on science and engineering research. On the
other hand, humanists feared a loss of national leadership as they became increasingly cut off
from a progressively hermetic scientific culture.
Unparalleled increases in the amount of funding for the sciences due to post-WWII
national defense and the Cold War space race, as well as a downturns in humanities funding,
signaled to many the declining importance of the humanities in a technology-gripped America.
As a kind of quantitative marker many pointed to the funding within the National Science

37
Rosenheim is quoted in Knepler, Henry. "English Via television," College English, Vol. 18, No. 1
(Oct., 1956). Pg. 7-8..
| 53 |

Foundation which had been established as early as 1950. It began in that year with $225,000 in
monies, but immediately increased to a full 3.5 million the next year. In 1954 a cap on annual
appropriations was lifted and by the early 1960s it was spending near a half a billion dollars
annually.
38
By comparison the humanities were receiving somewhere near one percent of this
figure. Already in 1952, George Borglum of Wayne State University, expressed irritation at the
imbalance of power in the use of instructional film and television: "Must science explode in our
face because our profession can't command the equivalent in dollars of one or two modern
bombers per language for audio-visual materials?"
39
But such fears were only reified with the
passage of the 1957 National Defense Education Act. The Act sought first and foremost to
advance education in the sciences, a set of subjects thought to be especially emendable to
television teaching, For this reason, Title VIII of the Act provided 18 million dollars for research
and experimentation in effective uses for television, radio and other audiovisual mediums for
educational purposes.
In 1959 C. P. Snow, famed English scientist and novelist, raised an issue already on the
minds of many academics, assailing the growing breach between scientists and technologists on
the one hand and humanists on the other. In a widely read work, The Two Cultures, Snow argued
that the modern world’s large-scale problems could not be properly solved while there existed no
communication—and in fact much miscommunication—between the sciences, technology and
the humanities. What Snow and others writing on the problem of the 'two cultures' failed to

38
Keeney, Barnaby C. “The Humanities in American Society,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society. (112; 1. Feb., 1968). Pp 4.
39
Borglum, George. "Lest Science Explode in Our Face," The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 36, No. 7
(Nov., 1952). Pg. 315.

| 54 |

observe, at least explicitly, was the degree to which humanists appeared distraught over the fact
that Cold War science and technology threatened to edge out literary, artistic and philosophic
works as representing man's most significant contributions. The years after the War were self-
designated by the press as the era of "Big Science," an era of nuclear energy and nuclear
weapons, of rocketry and radar, and of computers and cybernetic machinery (all coming out of
the war). 'Science' itself was continuously referred to in these years by employing the almost
ubiquitous turn of phrase: “man’s greatest achievement.” In 1961, for example, Time magazine
declared "the scientist" men of the year and described him as the greatest contributor to man's
wellbeing in all of human history. "[They are] the true 20th century adventurers, the real
intellectuals of the day," the magazine declared, "the leaders of mankind's greatest inquiry into
the mysteries of ... life itself. Their work shapes the life of every human presently inhabiting the
planet, and will influence the destiny of generations to come. Statesmen and savants, builders
and even priests are their servants." Such assertions were made all the more real as humanists
watched the rapid promotion and tenuring of scientists and technologists across campus and as
they witnessed them become permanent advisors to Congress and the White House. "The
literary man as spokesman and prophet doesn't stand very high today," Joseph Wood Krutch
protested in 1958, "Any contemporary writing on 'Heroes and Hero Worship' would have to put
the man of letters pretty far down on the list and the scientist as hero at the top."
40

In this way, scientists and technologists threatened to eclipse humanists as the nation's
leading intellectuals at the same time that science itself threatened to attain the status of
something like "Culture." It wasn't enough that humanists due recognition was slipping or that

40
Krutch, Joseph Wood. " If You Don't Mind My Saying So," The American Scholar, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer,
1958), pp. 365.

| 55 |

that science and engineering were now being acclaimed as true expressions of individual
sensibility and imagination (a designation traditionally left to the arts and letters)
41
, but Homer
was everywhere being publically replaced by nuclear physics and genetics as the best examples
of human greatness and as the best hope for a collective good life. In this context the 'two
cultures’ conflict was not just the most recent confrontation between advocates for a scientific or
literary education and worldview—a replay of, or modern variation on, the debates between
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jeremy Bentham in the 1830s, and between Mathew Arnold and
T.H. Huxley in the 1890s, although it was this too. But it was also a continuation of humanists'
warfare against the cultural handiwork of the modern industrial-scientific complex, a replay of
T.S. Eliot and Van Wyck Brooks' early 20th century diatribes on the subject. Only now scientists
and engineers took the place of industrialists and the purveyors of commercial mass culture.
Homer, Chaucer and Plato had already taken a sound thrashing from the latter at the turn of the
century. These great thinkers, and the humanists who studied them, had never regained the
position of prestige held in the early-to-mid-19th century and now here again modern science
and technology were offering up to the public another serious contender.

Just as with mass higher education, the threat the sciences posed for the humanities in
these years was not unrelated to the rise of educational television. As a set of subjects, the
sciences were thought to thrive in the arena of instructional television.

41
Ernest Nagel recognized the shift in 1959, summarizing the older view as follows: "scientific inquiry is
frequently believed to be a routine grubbing for facts, and unlike literature and the arts to require no
powers of creative imagination." "The Place of Science in a Liberal Education," Daedadlus, (Winter
1959).
| 56 |

Instruction in the sciences was, many avered, especially suited to television teaching first
because as a subject it called for "master teachers." Many educators proposed that instructional
television allowed the best teachers to reach the widest audience possible, or put another way, it
provided a new educational arena in which the best teachers--the "master teachers"-- were no
longer limited to the same number of students as mediocre instructors. In general, this advantage
was hailed as yet another potential boon to education at a time of perceived crisis in the quality
and quantity of instruction. By "master teachers" advocates for television teaching had in mind
both teachers who had proved themselves exceptional instructors in the classroom and those who
were superiorly trained in a given subject. Thus instructional television made it possible that a
local English teacher in Providence, Road Island who was exceptional at communicating with
students could be picked up by an educational television network and broadcast to hundreds of
thousands of students. It also made it possible for cutting edge scientists to teach physics courses
to high school students, and in general for university professors who kept pace with new
developments in rapidly advancing fields to reach a k-12 audience.
The ability to broadcast lectures was especially critical for science instruction in the late
1950s, where teacher shortage was particularly severe. The National Defense Education Act was
not just a response to increased numbers of engineers in the U.S.S.R. but to the decreased
number of qualified science teachers in America. After all, the number of engineers in the United
States had also risen in the first half of the 1950s, but ironically, at the expense of science
instruction. From 1950 to 1955 the supply of teachers in the sciences fell 58.7 per cent from
9,096 to a 3,754. "Industry invaded the campuses, not just to interview young men about to
graduate, but to raid the college teaching staff as well," explained the author of the National
Education Association's 1957 annual report on teacher supply and demand, "Small wonder that
| 57 |

Figure 1.8. A course in chemistry at Pennsylvania
State University, Spring 1956. A camera is used to
televise demonstrations to six monitors along the
walls of an auditorium. Source: L. P. Greenhill, C.
R. Carpenter, W. S. Ray. "Further Studies of the
Use of Television for University Teaching." Audio
Visual Communication Review, Vol. 4, No. 3
(Summer, 1956). Pg. 206.

high school offerings in the sciences and mathematics, about which there has been such lament,
do not appear to be strong"
42
High school physics was the example everyone turned to. In 1955
48% of high schools in the United States had no physics course; they lacked a qualified
instructor in the subject. In 1956-57 the city of Pittsburg solved this dilemma by hiring Professor
Harvey E. White, chair of the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley to
broadcast three lectures and two lab demonstrations a week. The telecourse was hailed as such a
success in the educational community, the next year school systems across the nation signed up
to use the kinescopes produced from the original broadcasts. Other school systems began
employing their own professors from local universities.
Advocates of a televised science curriculum also seized on the potential star quality
inherent in the medium. If America needed more science careers from the coming generation of
junior high and high school students, they argued, what better way to convince those students of
the glamour of the subject than by way of instruction
from prestigious scientists. Time and again, they invoked
the image of the cutting edge scientist speaking to
thousands of students from his lab, animated with
singular passion and enthusiasm for his subject." The
guest scientist appearing on the television screen in the
classroom is sharing his talents and experiences with the
students." wrote Bess Barg, Radio-Television Assistant
for Philadelphia Public Schools, "His interest in them, at

42
Research Division, National Education Association, "The 1957 Teacher Supply and Demand Report,"
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 8, Number 17, 1957. Pg. 30.
| 58 |

that very moment, is evident in his every movement, his every word. He's alive and real and his
concerns at the moment are their concerns. Their emotions as well as their minds are stirred."
43

Finally, the very content of science instruction was thought to be especially suitable for
television teaching. As a set of subjects the sciences tended to rely less on discussion and direct
teacher-student exchange than did courses in the social sciences or humanities. What's more, the
sciences, though frequently abstract, were also often fundamentally visual. They required more
effective uses of demonstration materials--equipment, experiments, artifacts and specimens--a
fact made evident not just through the character of telecourses in science but by the uses of the
television as a visual aid in traditional science classrooms. In large auditoriums demonstrations,
like the chemistry experiment in figure one, could be broadcast to back rows by flanking seated
students with several monitors. "With TV each student has a front row seat!": ran a general
anthem of television teaching, but one often invoked in regards to science instruction. The
intimate, analytical and magnifying power of the camera and its related capacity to focus
attention was thought to be especially compelling for science instruction. In biology, for
instance, the camera could be directed towards the image in a microscope such that the entire
class could witness the exact same processes at the exact same time. Science telecourses also
took special advantage of another benefit of television teaching: objects that would be nearly
impossible to get a hold of for multiple classrooms, once used in a single television lecture, could
be broadcast to 1000s of students at once, or taped and broadcast endlessly. In science
telecourses, rare artifacts and live specimens could be more easily studied. So too could complex
experiments, rare apparatuses and hard-to-produce physical processes. Animals could be seen in
their natural environment. "How else could one teach this course except by use of television?"

43
Barg, Bess. "The Science Telecast in the Classroom." Education, Vol. 74, (October, 1953). Pg. 88.
| 59 |

quipped a university freshman regarding a televised course in zoology. Like the appearance of
prominent scientists on the screen, this vivid nature of televised science instruction was argued to
be a potential boon to the quantity of future science careers. "This is the age of science, an age
when the welfare of the human race, its security and freedom, must depend in large part upon
leadership in science." wrote Asa Knowles, president of the University of Toledo in 1958, "ETV
if properly used opens new horizons both to motivate interest of youth in science and to enhance
the effectiveness of science teaching."
44

V. “Television Teaching” in the English Classroom

Humanists, like Joseph Wood Krutch, who saw educational television as part and parcel
of a movement towards mass higher education and as an consummate threat to the experience of
the printed page resisted it outright; humanists who saw it as a way to keep up with curriculum
reform geared towards the sciences, embraced it, if half-heartedly. Finally, there were humanists
who saw educational television as a new realm of electronic culture, one which directly related to
their traditional domains of authority and embraced it enthusiastically. On the one hand,
embracing television allowed humanists the opportunity to work out the relationship between the
new medium and the nature of print and in so doing, work out the nature of their role in an era of
electronic culture. On the other hand, attempts to influence the overall nature of television
programming and direct developing viewing habits in these years allowed humanists the
opportunity, at least rhetorically, to shore up their relevancy by expanding the social
responsibility of the humanities to include the guidance of new media.

44
Asa Knowles. "TV and Science," The High School Journal, Vol. 41, No. 5, (Feb., 1958). Pg. 185.
| 60 |

Thus, just as there were forces pushing English professors and teachers into television
teaching--the desire to keep up in a period of perceived decline for the humanities--so too there
were forces pulling them in, qualities of television that had a unique allure to their traditional
domain of authority. After all, arguments to the effect that English teachers and scholars had to
get involved with television were also often bolstered by the belief that as specialists in language
and communication they were particularly suited to lead the way. "Television, like the printed
page, is not an intellectual discipline; it is only a medium of education," concluded Henry W.
Knepler, at the end of his exposé on instructional television in English, "It can become a
considerable educational force. It is up to us to take a hand in shaping it." What's more, the desire
among English teachers to get involved in television as a medium was also connected to early
optimism regarding the potential cultural benefits of television. First there was optimism
regarding the potential quality of general television programming, especially literary dramas, an
optimism that had faded by the early 1960s. Second, there was optimism regarding early
perceptions of the character and function of television as a communications device. The
existence of televisions in classrooms, indeed the idea of their potential omnipresence in spaces
of instruction, led some educationists in the 1950s to hope that the coming generation could be
convinced that the television screen was an electronic plane for information retrieval and
analytical-somatic experience (even literary experience) as much as it was for entertainment.
Such a notion was particularly attractive to those humanists who hoped to broaden their social
relevancy, by creating a unity of experience between what went on in the classroom and what
went on in the rest of the world. Arguing for the need for educational television in The English
Journal in 1951, Lieber Anker, a high school English teacher in Metuchen, New Jersey brought
these two elements of early optimism together: "TV or not TV is no longer the question.
| 61 |

Television is here to stay and certainly to improve the quality of its presentations. Now, while it
is still cutting its teeth, teachers can grasp the opportunity to help their pupils appraise offerings
intelligently and to realize that school has as much, if somewhat different, to offer in the way of
meaningful experiences."
45

The fact is literary scholars and teachers of English had good reason to be optimistic
about the quality of television in the immediate postwar years. The late 1940s and 1950s
constitute what media scholars and critics have since referred to as the "Golden Age of
Television." From the Spring of 1947, when NBC launched Kraft Television Theater, to roughly
1960, when television production abruptly shifted from New York City to Hollywood, primetime
television drama essentially emanated from New York theater houses. "It is a foregone
conclusion that we are never again to witness so splendorous and flourishing a time for drama
over American airwaves," wrote Larry James Gianakos, a television historian with typical
scholarly nostalgia.
46

Television networks that came on air just after WWII were required by the FCC to
provide twenty-eight hours of programming. Networks scrambled to put together shows, filling
those hours with whatever they could--variety shows, game shows and westerns, but also
wrestling matches, roller-skating derbies and parlor games. At the same time, network executives
sought to attract more esteemed sponsors in these early years and in general sought to improve
the public's estimation of television as a cultural medium--partly in response to the second-rate
quality of much early programming. Live television dramas met both challenges. Starting in the
late 1940s, television adaptations of contemporary plays formed a convenient and ready supply

45
Anker, Lieber. "Television, Here I Come!," The English Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Apr., 1951). Pg. 219.
46
Gianakos, Larry James. Television Drama Series Programming: A Comprehensive Guide, 1947-1979.
Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1980. Pg. xi.
| 62 |

of compelling dramatic stories to help fill the near endless electronic void of on-air hours. So too
did adaptations of established literary works--plays, short stories, novels and even poems. In
television's first decade, works from nearly every playwright in the Western canon were adapted
for the new medium. But as the television genre matured in the early 1950s, on-air adaptations of
contemporary and classical works were joined by high quality original compositions written
specifically for television. The superior quality of these later works compelled many to declare
the arrival of a new literary form--the fifty-two minute "teleplay." Thus in the 1955-56 season
alone one could regularly see, among others, works by Sophocles, Euripides, Shaw, Ibsen,
Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Henry James. One could also see all of Shakespeare's major
plays. When NBC presented a three hour version of Richard III on March 11 1956, it was viewed
by one of the largest television audiences yet--25 million. Alongside these adaptations one could
tune in each week to a new work by a critically acclaimed television playwright--Reginald Rose,
Tad Mosel, Robert Alan Arthur, Rod Serling, Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayefsky. For producers,
directors, playwrights and television executives, these were heady days: "We shall create the
Great American Theater," declared Pat Weaver, president of NBC in 1955.
But confidence in the new medium was not limited to industry. Many literary scholars
too were hopeful. Glibert Seldes was perhaps the most visible writer and critic to celebrate the
cultural quality of the new medium. He is, likewise, the figure historians of television most often
invoke when discussing the existence of positive critical reception for television in its early
years. But support was much more widespread among the literary set than a focus on these few
figures demonstrates. It reached into the deepest levels of the academy and into a extensive core
of English teachers, both at the k-12 and the college and university level. In fact, embracing the
new medium, and its potential "electronic renaissance" for particular literary forms, was thought
| 63 |

by more than one professor to be a potential boon for the humanities. As Patrick D. Hazard,
professor of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, indicated in 1956,
television bestowed the rather serendipitous opportunity to shore up the value and relevancy of
the humanities:

The English department office is more and more the GHQ of a beleaguered army;
dismal reports trickle in of a new foray from the Education department
...Enrollments dwindle, student calibre deteriorates, power and prestige diminish.
How different all this could be! Instead of the gloomy headquarters of a war of
attrition against plummeting standards, the English office could become a center
for intelligent criticism of American popular culture. ... These two
responsibilities-developing standards of criticism for popular culture and creating
a vision of creativity within the popular art forms-are, in one man's opinion, the
major tasks of the humanist in contemporary America.
47

Academic support for quality television also reached beyond published scholarly
discourse in journals. Throughout the 1950s a number of guides to television plays were
published by popular presses, often edited or with introductions from academics. For instance,
the Harcourt, Brace series, Best Television Plays, issued in 1950, 1954 and 1957 was
conspicuously positioned as a popular endorsement of the television drama by the academy. The
nominating committee for the series was comprised of over twenty-two university professors--

47
Hazard, Patrick D. “Yes, but the Question Is How?” College English, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Jan., 1956); 234.

| 64 |

thirteen of them from English departments. The 1957 edition opened with this endorsement:
"The very nature of this giant new industry, and its insatiable demand for fresh material--hour
after hour, day after day, week after week--led inevitably to an enormous output of writing. The
result was the discovery of fresh creative talents. The best writing by the television playwrights
has achieved a quality that deserves general critical attention and assures it of a place in
contemporary American literature."
Many scholars in fact held out the specific hope that television would generate a
renaissance for the drama. The democratization of literature in cheap print throughout the 19th
century had actually done the drama a disservice, many averred. It had made all literary genres
more readily available--from novels and poetry to short stories and essays. But, for instance,
while poetry's full aesthetic experience could be contained within its text, and while fiction was
written to reside on the page, drama always sought its final and essential form in the dramatic
act. With the expansion of print literature more and more people encountered drama in its more
underdeveloped form, a reason many sighted for a flagging interest in plays. Radio and
phonographs were thought to be a partial solution. But with the advent of television came a
greater opportunity--an opportunity to bring quality drama to the general public, at home and in
the classroom, and to reinvigorate an interest in drama--on T.V., in the theater and on the page--
generally.
Thus English scholars and teachers were encouraged about new opportunities for literary
experience via television, both in the new style of dramas unique to the medium--the teleplay--
and in the increased availability of literary works in television adaptations. But their cultural
interventions in, and encouragement of, the new electronic medium went beyond endorsements
in scholarly and popular print. Their interventions often took place in the classroom. Getting a
| 65 |

new generation of students to watch, engage with and appreciate literary television was key in
pushing this facet of the new medium forward. Sometimes these interventions were direct, like
when teachers encouraged their students to write into networks and local stations in an effort to
support quality programs. "The English teacher should take the lead in seeing that network
executives receive encouragement when they do succeed in bringing great literature to life before
their millions of watchers, " wrote James J. Brunstein, in a characteristic article from 1958, "Ten
uses for Commercial Television in the English Classroom." But most often efforts to influence
the cultural character of television--efforts mounted from the front of English classrooms--took
the form of instilling critical television skills in the upcoming "T.V. generation"--selectivity,
informed appreciation for superior work and dissatisfaction with narrative traits like "banality,"
"sensationalism," or "dishonesty."
English teachers employed a range of strategies. At the most basic level English teachers
took on the responsibility of letting students know when quality programs would air--though
there was considerable discussion about the most effective way to do so. Some simply made
announcements in class or wrote the communiqué on their chalkboard. Others created special
bulletin boards in their classrooms devoted to television programming. Neil Postman, in his
Television and the Teaching of English, prepared for the National Council of Teachers of
English's (NCTE) Committee on the Study of Television, reported one teacher who, in an effort
to advertise the upcoming broadcast of The Tempest, created a montage of drawings,
photographs and illustrative lines from the text and placed it on his bulletin board.
48
Still others
organized student television committees whose job it was to keep their class up-to-date on soon

48
Postman, Neil. Television and the Teaching of English. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.,
1961. Pg. 79.
| 66 |

to air quality programs. On another level, English teachers tried to get their students to examine
and critique television culture more broadly, creating unique assignments for their new charge.
Some created writing assignments for, among other topics, "Television's most outstanding
program," "The most Educational program on Television," "How Television Helps with School
Work," and "How Television Advertisements Influence Me." Others tried to empower students
by inviting them to play the imaginary role of television critic, having them coordinate, vote on
and act out their own television award shows. Still others had students keep television logs of
programs they watched with brief plot summaries and evaluations for each program.
But, by and large, the use of television in teaching English took two dominant forms:
having students watch literary adaptations as a supplement to their print analog and having
students watch original television dramas and then directing their curriculum towards an analysis
of its form and content. On the most basic level getting students to engage both literary
adaptations and original television plays was the most compelling way to encourage them to
regularly seek out literary experiences via television and generally to start thinking of the
electronic apparatus in their family room as a major vehicle for quality narrative culture.
But on another level, English teachers and scholars hoped for a kind of cultural cross fertilization
in which certain aspects of T.V. watching could be transplanted into the act of reading while
other, traditional aspects of quality textual engagement could be shifted to television viewing. By
way of the first, English teachers hoped that watching literary adaptations would enliven and
enrich students' experiences of classical works as they applied routine viewing practices to the
superior narratives, character development and dialogue of those adaptations. Miriam Goldstein,
a high school English teacher in Massachusetts, championed just this aspect of literary television,
citing a student's revealing reaction to an educational series by the Council for a Television
| 67 |

Course in the Humanities for Secondary Schools: "Things aren't going right for Oedipus.
Jocasta's trying to cheer him up, but watch his face as she tells him her story....And it's even
worse when the messenger from Corinth brings him the 'good' news."
49
Here, the close-up of a
distressed human face, so often employed in game shows, soap operas and elsewhere, was
instead leveraged towards productive literary analysis. Miriam characterized her students'
reactions generally along these lines, celebrating their "easy transition from TV as entertainment
to TV as education." "The filmed lessons," she concluded, "had bridged the gap between what
these boys and girls know as life and what they regard as a negation of life: the printed page."
50

In the other direction, English teachers hoped and expected that getting students to watch
literary adaptations and quality teleplays would help them to analyze the relationship between
traditional literary forms and television and thus learn to apply established textual modes of
evaluation to the new medium. With literary adaptations the link between the printed page and
television was forged by asking the same or similar questions of both versions and in examining
the nature of adaptation itself. How does one fit Moby Dick into two fifty-five minute programs?
Why is Ishmael's story fourteen years later narrated instead of being acted out? In the televised
version of Ibsen's A Doll's House, how does the camera take up the role of the narrator in
establishing Nora as the central character? With original television programming, students were
instructed to deploy traditional textual questions towards the new medium and in doing so link
"the serious business of evaluating literature to the seemingly passive business of watching
television."
51
Thus even bad television programming could aid in the appreciation of good

49
Goldstein, Miriam. “Humanities through Television,” The English Journal, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Apr., 1960);
252.
50
Ibid. 255.
51
Postman, 85.
| 68 |

literature, and thus ultimately, good television. In "Television and the Teaching of English" (not
to be confused with Neil Postman's book of the same title) Erwin R. Steinberg, professor of
English at Carnegie Institute of Technology, reported having his students examine the structure
of T.V. westerns--how many minutes did it take for the good guys and bad guys to become
clearly differentiated, how long until the central problem of the episode was clear, which side
gained ascendancy first and how long into the program did the climax come? He then had his
students write essays on the formal limitations of the medium which compelled a heavy reliance
on stereotypes and trite structures. Finally, he had them read short stories by respected authors
and then compare how "capable writers" dealt with the constraints differently--that is, how they
managed to fit complexity into a similarly compact form.
52

The felt responsibility among teachers of English to provide their students with the skills
necessary for a critical evaluation of television programming prompted them to organize
workshops and symposiums aimed at better understanding the new medium. From the mid-to-
late 1950s the Committee on the Study of Television of the National Council of Teachers of
English held several symposiums which brought together members of the television industry,
high school English teachers and professors of literature. The symposiums centered around the
nature of the television drama and the adaptation of literary materials to the new electronic
medium. On the surface they presented the opportunity for scholars and teachers to ask specific
questions of writers, editors, producers, managers and actors and actresses about the ins-and-outs
of the industry and in general to solicit clarity on how dramas were produced. Louis Forsdale,
Assistant Chairman of the Committee and associate professor of English at Teachers College,

52
Steinberg, Erwin R. "Television and the Teaching of English," The English Journal, Vol. 49, No. 7
(Oct., 1960). Pg. 484.
| 69 |

Columbia University, opened one such symposium on the television drama by framing its
purpose this way: "We are not sure that English teachers throughout the country are equipped at
the moment to talk as sensibly as they might about television. If one assumes that television is a
unique medium ... then it follows that in its uniqueness it has qualities about which we English
teachers should know, with which we should attempt to acquaint our students."
53

But just as with the teaching of television, ultimately these discussions functioned as a
way for professors and teachers of English to work through the character of the new electronic
medium by way of an analysis of its direct relationship to print culture. Underneath frequent
questions posed by the moderator and numerous topics broached by the panel, for instance, was a
constant concern over how well the literary canon would play on television. There was, for
example, a detectable anxiety over whether all literary genres were transferable to the new
medium. Satire, all agreed, was noticeably absent from literary television—both in original
teleplays and in adaptations from the canon. Some chalked it up to the tenor of the time,
specifically McCarthyism. Others attributed the lack of satire it to the larger problem which they
themselves were committed to resolving—general intellectual passivity surrounding the new
medium. “Satire requires active participation,” offered Milton Kaplan, Chairman of the English
department at George Washington High School in New York City,” and I think most of the
participation you get in television is passive on the part of the viewer.”
54
Poetry was another
genre of concern. Some thought poetry was ill suited for television because of its strict adherence
to the word. Poetry was not based so much on plot, character development or other narrative
elements which can be largely preserved while altering the original text. In television, especially,

53
Kaplan, Milton. Ed. "Television Drama: A Discussion," The English Journal. Vol. 47, No. 9 (Dec.,
1958). Pg. 550.
54
Ibid. 553.
| 70 |

where the writer had no final rights, producers, editors and actors and actresses nearly always
altered texts as they produced a program. Poetry suffered under such conditions, one writer
offered, “because it is written in a form that is difficult to violate.”
55
Others felt that poetry had a
promising life beyond the page, or rather, on the screen. Robert Herridge, producer of “Camera
Three,” offered an example. He had produced a forty-five minute version of Carl Sandberg’s The
People, Yes, whereby the camera broke between five separate characters reading their respective
parts. Sandberg later told Herridge that he had accomplished something Sandberg himself could
not. On the page, Sandberg had “only one voice,” he told the producer.
56
The televised version
had effectively set apart sections differing in tone by focusing the camera on distinct readers.
Here, as elsewhere, the close-up of the camera was key to adapting literary materials to
the television. The close-up was one of several features which contributed to the “intimacy” of
the new medium when compared to print, theater or film. Others were the size of the television
screen and its place in one’s home. This “intimacy” affected all areas of production and,
according to the participants of these symposiums, was the defining feature of the new medium
when adapting literary works into the new format. “The television camera … is the most
searching eye of all,” one participant put it. On the one hand, the close-up could give clarity to
obscure lines in Shakespeare and elsewhere, as one participant offered. On the other hand, all
seemed to agree that the intimacy of the new medium meant that character and not action had to
be the focus of quality drama on television, though participants disagreed on how best to meet
these formal requirements of the new medium. Many thought that adapting literary materials to
television required cutting subplots and extraneous characters, not just because of time

55
Ibid. Pg. 558.
56
Forsdale, Louis. Ed. “Adapting Literary Materials to Television: Part II,” The English Journal, Vol. 45,
No. 1 (Jan., 1956). Pg. 19.
| 71 |

constraints, but because the new medium was best geared towards a deep and meaningful
analysis of key characters. Robert Herridge took another tack. Claiming to do what Henry James
might do in the era of television, his show used a good amount of descriptive narration to set up
key scenes and then he hit the actor or actress with the camera right on top of his or her scene.
“The narrator builds the scene for the actor,” Herridge explained, using his production of Moby
Dick as an example, “As we dissolve into the scene itself, the actor can be turning toward the
camera at the point, let's say, which is at the top of his rage, and the narrator has set the whole
mood.”
57
Tethering these two elements together, a purely verbal narration and the unique
opportunities of the television camera allowed him to cover more ground and cut fewer sections
from the original story.
Thus, the subject of adaptation allowed participants of the symposia to work through the
formal connections between television and the printed page. But institutional differences were
also a concern. Especially at the Committee’s 1958 conference on “Television Drama” questions
of sponsorship, censorship and unease about the future of quality television drama came to the
fore. Producers spoke of sponsors pulling pieces without happy endings and of increased
negative viewer feedback following complicated or dark works. They spoke of the recent
deterioration of major programs and of the very real possibility that others would soon follow.
One by one, members of the television industry sitting at the table appealed to those with
classrooms. “I think the English teacher is in a perfect position to stress the classic dramatic
values, most of which should be in good television,” declared Ross Donaldson, manager of
program submissions for NBC. He appealed to teachers to get their students and to themselves
write in when they saw something of quality. A more vocal audience with developed taste, he

57
Ibid. 519.
| 72 |

averred, was one way to counter the mass of negative feedback that was presently driving quality
down. Herbert Brodkin, staff producer for Studio One at CBS and Peter Cott, press and public
relations for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, both urged teachers to instill
“selectivity” in their students. Teachers of English and literature stood as possible custodians of
continued quality television, they both argued, in their power to “create an audience for the better
things in drama.”

VI. “Television Education” and Instructional T.V.

Teachers of English had another way to influence the character of television in these years--
instructional T.V. For those interested, instructional television, like "television education" in the
classroom, offered them the opportunity--at least in theory--to affect the T.V. viewing habits of
the coming generation and even, potentially, the overall landscape of television programming in
America. It did so in a number of ways.
At the most basic level, instructional television put English scholars and teachers on T.V.
at the exact moment that they were attempting--perhaps more earnestly than ever before or since-
-to shape the nature of television viewing and the quality of on-air programming. At the very
moment, that is, when they believed, or at least hoped, that they could play a role in influencing
the landscape of television, they were also asked to enter the studio themselves and produce
engaging educational programming, to broadcast their guidance in literary and cultural matters to
thousands of local residents, and at times to a national network.
| 73 |

Figure 1.9. Baxter constructed his own
miniature model of the Globe Theater for
his Shakespeare on TV course. At nine
pounds and 22 inches high, Baxter used
the model to demonstrate key principles
of stage arrangement.

.
Figure 1.10. A model of the first printing
press, also used on Shakespeare on TV.
Baxter made both models in his garage in
South Pasadena.
Image source: "TV Prof Makes His Own
Props," Popular Science, March 1955.
Pg. 133.

Practitioners in the field of English were not the only
educators who hoped that instructional television offered the
means to overhaul the character of T.V. programming in
America. By the late 1950s, 8.5 million people were "regular"
viewers of educational television programming, with 2.5
million tuning in each week. What's more, in these early years
of educational television, dominated as they were by
professional educators, a full fifty-three percent of all
programming was instructional in nature, or lecture-oriented,
and forty-one percent consisted of for-credit telecourses.
58

Educational television, in the first decade of its existence, meant
largely bringing the instructional content of the high school or
college classroom into the home and thus to a broader public.
The audiences for telecourses were often hundreds and
sometimes thousands of times larger than those registered for
credit--a fact ubiquitously celebrated by advocates for
instructional television.
Alterative uses for the television in closed circuit
campus systems also played a role here. As mentioned above,
practitioners in many fields found the television exceptionally

58
Schramm, Wilbur. The Impact of Educational Television: Selected Studies from the Research
Sponsored by the National Educational Television and Radio Center. (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1960); 8.

| 74 |

useful in, among other matters, behavioral experiments, biological research and in-class
scientific demonstrations. By the mid-1950s, there was wide-ranging speculation about a variety
of other uses for on-campus closed circuit systems--for example, arrangements between
laboratories and classrooms (so that one experiment could be broadcast to several classrooms)
and between libraries and research facilities (so that researchers could consult texts by having a
librarian point a camera towards a book situated on a stand). In short, on-campus televisions
were being increasingly used--and increasingly imagined--more as communications systems for
the real-time remoting of visual information. The widespread existence of televisions in spaces
of instruction and research led some educationists to hope that the meaning and import of the
T.V. screen could be re-oriented for the coming generation of viewers. If students encountered
televisions in auditoriums, lecture halls, classrooms and study carrels, and if they encountered
their use in psychology experiments, biology demonstrations and anthropological research as
much, or even more, than they did in the home, then they might be convinced that television's
function was, in part, to transmit the world's knowledge. Thus, by the mid-to-late 1950s, when
the instructional television movement was in full swing and when closed circuit systems were
being used for a myriad of purposes on campus, many educators imagined that the meaning of
television was, in some sense, up for grabs.
Ultimately, it was within this overall atmosphere of optimism among educators that the
function of the television could be recast that professors and teachers of English hoped to foster
more literary experiences of the new medium. English professors and teachers hoped that
English instructional television programs would become part of the overall higher quality of T.V
programming in America, and in particular, part of the more literary-oriented landscape of such
programming. Audiences, they hoped, would start to watch English lessons just as they were
| 75 |

already watching quality TV dramas and literary adaptations and in this way, the two would
reinforce each other. An increase in quality television drama--literary television--in these years,
would take place, they imagined, alongside and in conjunction with the increased viewing of
educational literature lessons.
The most famous television teacher in the field of English, by far, was Frank C. Baxter,
professor of literature at the University of Southern California. In 1953, KNXT, the CBS affiliate
in Los Angeles offered USC an hour of "public service” each Saturday at 11 A.M. USC filled
that hour with a series developed and taught by Baxter, Shakespeare on TV. The series was an
instant success and the next year CBS picked it up for national broadcast. The following year,
Shakespeare on TV, or English 356a, was taken for credit by 332 USC students. Nine-hundred
people audited the course and a full 400,000 watched it.
59

Shakespeare on TV ran for three semesters by which time Baxter had moved onto other
ventures. In 1954 he developed and produced a series, Now and Then, which ran on ninety-five
CBS stations nationwide. The show covered a range of literature from Egyptian myths to
contemporary drama. The following year he designed his final series for CBS, Renaissance on
TV. In addition to his standard lectures and demonstrations on Renaissance art, music,
architecture, scholarship, politics and astronomy, Baxter interviewed renown scholars
specializing in the period. CBS advertised the series, “dedicated to your cultural heritage,” as a
televisual bridge between the centuries: “The world’s outstanding scholars on the Renaissance
recreate on television the Age of Enlightenment.”
60
In 1957, Baxter moved to two new networks.

59
"TV Students of Shakespeare Quit Screens to Take Final Examination." Los Angeles Times, Jan 24,
1954. Pg. B1.
60
Misc print advertisement for Renaissance on TV. Box 1. Folder 3. Frank C. Baxter Papers, Collection
no. 0263, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.
| 76 |

For NBC, he produced Harvest, a course in "man's achievements in art, literature, public affairs
and science." For the Educational Television and Radio Center, he produced The Written Word, a
telecourse based largely on a class he had taught for years in the Library School at USC, The
History of Books and Printing.
61

Baxter had high hopes for television. He, perhaps more than anyone, had reason for
optimism. By the late 1950s, he had spent more than half a decade bringing the great cultural
achievements of western civilization to hundreds of thousands every week. The potential for
educational television, his own edifying programs included, seemed vast. “What a wondrous
thing to awaken the curiosity, to stimulate the mind, to roll back the horizons of our world in
both space and time, the sweeping panorama of all mankind,” Baxter declared in an interview for
TV-Radio Life, “Considering that evolutionary process, television is a limitless realm for
developing the most widely learned and intelligent public in the history of man.”
62
Baxter
recognized his own shows as part of a new and promising landscape of television programming
in America. He even, at times, imagined his own shows as vehicles for affecting the national
mood. “This is a time of ferment, of complexity and conformity,” Baxter declared, in talking
about his 1959 series, Harvest of American Literature, “I think it is a good time for a close look
at our historic American institutions. There were certain values by which our democracy lived in
those days. They are worthy of more familiarity today.”
63

61
Memo from the Educational Television and Radio Center announcing the new series. Box 1. Folder 5.
Frank C. Baxter Papers, Collection no. 0263.
62
“Give your IQ a lift with Television,” TV-Radio Life, November 18, 1955. Box 1. Folder 5. Frank C.
Baxter Papers, Collection no. 0263.
63
MacCann, Richard. “TV-Teacher Explores Literary Past,” Christian Science Monitor. December 22,
1959. Pg. 5.
| 77 |

But Baxter wasn’t just encouraged by the rise of instructional television. He was equally
optimistic about the parallel ascent of literary television in the mid-to-late 1950s. Again and
again, in interviews, Baxter talked about the conspicuous improvement of television drama in the
mid-1950s and linked it to his overall optimism regarding the potential of the new medium for
the dissemination of knowledge and culture.

Think of the youngsters today who have the great heritage of our western world
brought into their homes… Through the intimacy of the television the play is
brought to him for his inspection at close range, and though he may not realize the
full import of the language, the concomitment gestures and facial expressions of
the actor carry the meaning, he is learning, enjoying, tasting, savoring one of the
great geniuses of all time. Shakespeare of course is but an example, an example
that can be multiplied on all fronts of the horizons of knowledge … it is an
indication of the tremendous impact television is having daily on millions of
viewers.
64

In fact, Baxter didn’t just promote quality television drama, he was for a time,
intimately involved in its production. “In the last two years there has been an obvious
rise in the quality of program offering, the mere novelty of television has worn off,” he
claimed in an interview with the Oregonian in 1957, “There are things now to be seen on

64
Ibid.
| 78 |

scheduled television at which the civilized man can look with delight.”
65
He then
provided examples: G.E. Theater, Studio One and his own show, Telephone Time. In
1957 and 1958 Baxter hosted the second and third seasons of Telephone Time, a drama
series which featured the plays of John Nesbitt. Like his educational series on American
literature, Baxter characterized the import of the show’s dramas as a possible cultural
antidote to conformity and complexity in the post-war era: “The stories on this show are a
delight because they are stories about people who dare to be themselves, dare to do
something. In a world paralyzed by the desire for security it is difficult to be an
individual. It is heartening to see these strong people. It reassures you about the human
race.”
66

Like others in his field, Baxter was won over by the potential cultural, and in
particular, literary, benefits of the twin endeavors of instructional and literary television.
Literary adaptations of Shakespeare, like those he celebrated, quality original teleplays,
like those on his own Telephone Time and literary instructional programming, like that
for which he was famous, were all part of a possible shift towards a more literary
conception of television viewing. Each was an attempt to raise the cultural quality of
television programming in America, to be sure. But each also endeavored to transplant
the “literary experience” of the theater and the page to the home screen at a time when
the meaning of television viewing was still up for grabs. Like others in his field, Baxter
found himself in a unique position. As an English teacher at a time of quality literary
television, he seized the opportunity to guide his students and others towards a more

65
“Behind the Mike,” The Oregonian. November 25, 1957. Box 1. Folder 6. Frank C. Baxter Papers,
Collection no. 0263.
66
TV-Radio Life, November 16, 1957. Box 1. Folder 5. Frank C. Baxter Papers, Collection no. 0263.
| 79 |

critical, reflective and discriminating set of viewing habits for the new medium. As an
English teacher in the era of instructional television, he entered the studio himself and
produced quality literary educational broadcasting that he hoped would act in cooperation
with literary television.
But instructional television offered English educators more than just an opportunity to
broadcast authoritative literary instruction which they hoped would work in tandem with literary
adaptations and quality teleplays to help shift the nature of television and its viewers. It also
offered them the opportunity to link the study of literature, traditionally done on the printed page,
with the experience of television by bringing the former into the narrative and visual conventions
of television programming. Again, the turn to T.V. was more than just serendipity. At the exact
moment when professors and teachers of English were trying to use literary adaptations in the
classroom to bridge the divide between the customary experience of T.V. and the "literary
experience" of texts, they were offered the opportunity, via telecourses, to enhance their lessons
of literature and to do so by constructing their own rich multimedia T.V. learning experiences
centered around works of literature. In other words, at just the moment when English educators
hoped to bridge the divide between the literary experience of the page and the routine experience
of the television by way of quality drama programs and literary adaptations, they were also given
the opportunity—an opportunity they never would have had without the instructional television
movement of the 1950s--to translate the study of literature into a multimedia, televisual aesthetic
akin to standard television programming.
Like those in other subjects, English television teachers learned early on that
broadcasting a bare-bones classroom lecture would not sustain students' interests. Almost
immediately English professors and teachers began to adapt the lecture method to the new
| 80 |

medium, working to make the presentation of literature something more akin to what students
generally experienced when sitting down to watch television. English telecourses often made use
of filmclips, pictures of literary figures and fictional characters, interviews, question and answer
sessions and recordings of music and literature. They took special advantage of dramatic
readings from books as well as dramatic re-enactments from literature, sometimes on film, but
often live. “In the humanities, visuals enable us to bring to classes everywhere direct experience
with works of art which are otherwise completely unavailable” wrote Professors Maynard Mack
and Bernard Know of Yale University who combined their efforts with the Stratford Shakespeare
Company in 1957-59 to produce a twelve-part television series on the classics, “In this respect
there is an important difference between the use of educational visuals in the humanities and in
the sciences… [the humanities teacher’s] objects of study are too real -they are pictures to be
looked at, plays to be watched, music to be heard.”
But the creators of English telecourses also took advantage of filmic conventions. English
313: Values in Literature, taught by associate professor Martin S. Day and broadcast over KUHT
at the University of Houston, supplies a ready example. Each telecast opened with this stylish
sequence.

The screen is filled with a host of books, suspended by invisible strings and
slowly moving like mobiles. Lively music is sounding meanwhile. The camera
pushes through the moving volumes towards a stationary book that bears on its
front, "Values in Literature." In the close-up a hand opens the book, disclosing an
end paper of Literary England, then a page "English 313," and next a page reading
| 81 |

"With Dr. Martin S. Day." The music has dropped down and an announcer
introduces English 313 and the lecturer.
67

The content of the "lecture," as here in the fifth episode on the nature of fiction, also took
advantage of a more established and compelling television aesthetic: the breaking up--and in
particular, juxtaposition--of scenes; the use of a variety of camera angles, especially the close-up,
to punctuate narration:

After opening remarks to explain why fiction is the first specific type of literature
to be examined, the instructor steps to the pad and writes upon it the first topic of
the lecture, thereafter adding key words, such as "Aristotle," as needed.
Discussing conflict or struggle as the essence of plot, he introduces a film clip of
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. The clip indicates the arrogant distaste of
young Darcy for provincial girls and the bristling reaction by Elizabeth Bennett.
In explaining the plot conflicts of man against nature, man, society and self, the
lecturer places upon the easel copies of Conrad's Typhoon, Stevenson's
Kidnapped, De foe's Moll Flanders, and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Camera close-ups of each book accompany the discussion of the volume.
68

67
Day, Martin. S. "Teaching Literature by Television," The Reading Teacher, Vol. 11, No. 1, (Oct.,
1957); 29.

68
Ibid.
| 82 |

Telecourses like English 313 gave English professors and teachers the power to,
themselves, design and help construct programming which suggested to those watching--their
students and others--that the study of literature could look like "television" and not just like a
classroom. Granted, any field employing dramatic reenactments (psychology courses, in
particular used reenactments) and/or utilizing the filmic conventions of shot duration and camera
angle and movement to better present the subject matter of their discipline were ultimately
linking the study of that subject matter to the narrative and aesthetic conventions of television.
But for English educators who were interested in establishing a kind of cross fertilization
between the traditionally critical engagement of the printed page and the developing habits of
television viewing, this opportunity had special import.
Both by broadcasting expert televisual literary instruction which English educators
imagined would take its place alongside quality literary television and by making that televisual
instruction look and feel more like conventional television programming, English teachers and
professors hoped to bridge the gap between the experience of literature and television in the mid-
to-late 1950s. Doing so, they hoped, would encourage students and others to approach television
as a kind of literature and in turn to grow up demanding superior programming from television
producers and executives. Thus, what we see in these years is an attempt by English professors
and teachers to couple the television program, in the minds of their students, with superior,
literary storytelling and in doing so endeavor to shape the student's habits and expectations
surrounding the new medium. In the end, it was an effort by humanists to shape the very nature
of the technology itself at a time when its very character--its software, its associated customs,
habits and expectations, its publically agreed upon purpose--was still up for grabs.
| 83 |

Still, regardless of how optimistic scholars and teachers of literature were about the
potential cultural value of television in these years, no matter how open or seemingly radical they
were in considering forms of popular media to be genuine culture, their aim in the mid-to-late-
1950s was still nearly always to bring television as a medium up to the quality of print culture.
Even those who celebrated the innovative literary nature of the new medium shared with the
most determined of mass culture critics the notion that print culture was the standard by which
any true cultural medium would have to be measured. This was a position that would
significantly soften in the 1960s.

VII. The Limits of Educational Television: Towards the 1960s

A confluence of developments in the late 1950s and early 1960 led to a major shift in the
character of educational television away from the lecture-oriented, educator-dominated,
instructional television of the 1950s and towards the public-television style cultural
programming of today. Mounting disillusionment over the development of commercial television
programming throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, led a coalition of reformers at key
funding agencies, educational television institutions, the FCC and congress to re-orient the
purpose of educational television away from formal instruction and towards broader cultural
uplift—to use educational television’s infrastructure to offer superior cultural programming as an
alternative to commercial television emerged elsewhere.
The trouble began with the shifting nature of commercial television programming in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. It was in these years that the center of television production moved
from New York City to Hollywood. At the same time, the focus of prime-time programming
| 84 |

shifted from anthology series utilizing new sets of actors and actresses each week to character-
based series like “I Love Lucy;” while dominant genre in general switched from drama to action
adventure. In 1956 NBC aired five and half prime-time hours of live drama a week. In 1959,
that number was down to two hours. Within the same time-span, the number of hours devoted to
telefilmed westerns rose from three and a half to fifteen. “How different this is from the situation
of a few years ago,” Erik Barnouw, a broadcast historian at Columbia University and chairman
of the Writers Guild of America, told the FCC’s Office of Network Study in 1960, “Already that
period, in retrospect, looks like a golden age.”
69
By the 1957-58 season, many television critics
who were allies of the industry a few years prior, were decrying the apparent shift. Many hoped
that a united front of critical voices could turn things back. “I have never been a critic lover,”
producer David Susskind told TV Guide in 1959,” But the low condition television has been in
the past year, the most potent voice has been the critic... Without the critic, I believe we would
have more mediocrity than we have now.”
70
A number of critics, Jack Gould, John Crosby and
Gilbert Seldes, foremost among them, had similar hopes. In their castigations, they aimed to
council industry on what would be lost by moving forward. “The economies of the situation are
favorable to the spread of the filmed [Hollywood] play,” Seldes warned in 1956, “The only hope
for a reasonably intelligent TV drama lies in the hour-long play done live—and (so far) chiefly in
New York.”
71

69
U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Office of Network Study. Second Interim Report:
Television Network Program Procurement. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965.
Pp. 542.
70
Qtd in Stahl, Bob. “What Good are Television Critics?” TV Guide, January 1959, Pp. 8.
71
Seldes, Gilbert. The Public Arts. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Pp. 183-84.
| 85 |

The guidance on offer from Seldes and other critics was ignored. From 1958 through the
early 1960s, things only got worse for television, as the industry underwent a series of public
relations setbacks. The quiz show scandals of 1958-59, several FCC bribery scandals of 1959
and Senate investigations into television violence in 1961 all led to widespread concern that
television was becoming a medium of sordid subject matter, mindless escapism and engineered
sensationalism. The quiz show scandals, in which contestants participated in rigged trivia
contests, were particularly shocking both to cultural commentators and the public in general.
From 1958 to 1959, several quiz shows, Dotto, Twenty-One, The Challenge and the $64,000
Question were all found to have scripted their competitions by feeding answers to contestants
they thought were charming and telegenic. Charles Van Doren, a contestant on the show Twenty-
One, was one such personality. Van Doren’s fated winning streak on Twenty-One propelled him
to national fame, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in February of 1957. Van Doren was
a professor of English at Columbia University, son of poet and literary critic Mark van Doren
and nephew of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Carl Van Doren. The idea that television’s
production practices could corrupt a member of one of the most distinguished families in
American letters, seemed literally, to demonstrate the effects of the new medium on established
American culture. "The one thing that can be salvaged from this sorry situation is an awakened
sense of public outrage that may yet force reforms in the industry that made it possible," declared
the New York Times, "Whether through governmental regulation, nonprofit competition, internal
reorganization - or perhaps all three, the radio-television industry will have to undergo a
dramatic reform if it is to regain the confidence of the American public."
72
A year later, FCC
Chairman John C. Doefer and Commissioner Richard Mack were forced to resign for accepting

72
“Symptom of a Sickness.” New York Times. Nov 3, 1959. Pp. 30.
| 86 |

gifts from industry groups in return for granting broadcasting licenses. Finally, in 1961, the
Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s investigation on the “Effects on Young People of Violence
and Crime Portrayed on Television” revealed, among other things, that writers were regularly
asked to increase the amount of violence in their scripts.
All of this led FCC Chairman Newton Minow to famously declare television a “vast
wasteland” in 1961. Minow was among a newly influential cadre of liberal reformers who felt
strongly that the federal government had a responsibility, in the age of television, to regulate the
use of broadcast technology for the cultural good of the public. "Why should the national
government stand helplessly by,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. asked in 1960, “while private
individuals, making vast sums of money out of public licenses, employ public facilities to debase
the public taste? Government has not only the power but the obligation to help establish
standards in media, like television and radio, which exist by public sufferance.”
73

By the early 1960s, liberal elites in the Kennedy administration and key members of
congress began imagining a new role for educational television, one which served the public’s
interests more broadly. The White House and Congress were joined by two other key players. In
1959, Jack White, a protégé of Robert Hutchins, became the president of the National
Educational Television and Radio Center (NETRC), which by the late 1950s was becoming the
central organizing institution for educational television. In 1963, the NETCR would become the
National Educational Television Network (NET) and in 1967 all NET stations would become
absorbed into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In the early 1960s, Jack White became
dedicated to making the NETCR the “fourth network,” or more to the point, the “Harper’s

73
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “Notes on a National Cultural Policy,” Daedalus, Vol. 89, No. 2. Spring, 1960.
Pp. 394.
| 87 |

Magazine” of television. Instructional television appealed to students and highbrows, White
wanted educational television stations to produce programming that reached “middlebrows.” In
1963, the Ford Foundation, the premier funder of educational television stations and
programming, changed its tack as well. In that year, it granted NET a $6 million grant on the
condition that “All the Center's resources would be directed at supplying high-quality
informational and cultural program service for noncommercial television.” Jack White
immediately began recruiting producers from commercial television. From 1963-66, lecture
oriented programming and for-credit courses, already waning, began to disappear altogether. In
their place, nearly all educational television stations began broadcasting middlebrow
programming provided by NET: documentaries, public affairs shows, children’s programs, NET
Playhouse. In 1967, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was established to fund NET
and in 1970, its production and distribution infrastructure was incorporated directly into the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as it began operations.
These developments found those humanists interested in using instructional television to
help improve the overall landscape of T.V programming doubly disadvantaged. On the one hand,
like Minow and others, they too felt the opportunity for quality cultural programming rapidly
slipping away. As literary adaptations and live anthology programs were replaced again and
again with action adventure, hopes for an era of literary television became nearly unsustainable.
On the other hand, the conditions for their disillusionment were also the factors pushing Minow
and others to reorient educational television away from their uses. By the early 1960s,
humanists’ capacity to use instructional television to intervene in the meaning and purpose of
television waned at the same time that such an intervention seemed beyond hope.
| 88 |

As we’ll see in the next chapter, humanists remained fundamentally interested in
television, but of course the meaning of the device would change. The expanded electrnic
environment of the 1960s shifted the meaning of all media—film, television, radio, even
magazines. All media became seen, more and more, as part of an instantaneous, potentially
global, nearly-cybernetic information network in which ideas and experiences circulated faster
and faster. In the 1960s, humanists pedagogical interest in television would shift as well. No
longer about getting students to watch good TV, or even to think of television as akin to the
printed page, they instead focused on the role of television in an overall instantaneous electronic
communications environment. Thus, the impulse among humanists to help their students develop
levels of taste and discrimination in their engagement with television in the mid-to-late 1950s,
became, in the 1960s, part of a larger effort to prepare students to critically engage their novel
world of newer media in general. In short: humanists’ theoretical and hands-on engagement with
television in the 1950s was their first significant foray into electronic culture and it set the stage
for their wider efforts to shape the meaning and purpose of electronic media—in the classroom
and elsewhere--in the 1960s. It is here that we will take up the growing efforts of the socio-
technical humanities in chapter 3.

| 89 |

Figure 2.1. Cover of Boy’s Life. September 1968

Chapter 2 || Instructional Media, the Information Explosion and the
Challenge of Electronic Culture in the 1960s

The computer was not the only networked, electronic device thought to be capable of the
type of instantaneous information transmission
necessary to combat the social ills of the post-
WWII knowledge explosion. In the 1960s, the
computer competed for that honor with a host
of other audio-visual electronic media.
Throughout the decade, educational
researchers, audio-visual specialists,
librarians, and members of the electronics
industry, to name just a few, proffered a vision
of the near-future when students would learn
both at home and in the classroom via a multi-
sensory arrangement of media.
“Picture yourself in front of a
television screen that has an electronic
typewriter built in below it,” Boy’s Life envisioned education a generation from 1967, “You put
on a set of headphones, and school begins.”
74
Typical of these mid-1960s futuristic visions of
education, electronic learning was cast as fundamentally interactive, even immersive (Figure 1).

74
Moffet, Samuel. “Computerized School House,” Boys life. September 1968. Boy Scouts of America,
New York. Pp. 24.
| 90 |

Thanks to recent advances in communications technology, the student’s engagement with
knowledge and information now traveled along multiple sensory registers and required their
individual cooperation. Such methods accelerated the rate of learning at a time when the
production of knowledge itself was quickening beyond measure. “Throughout these lessons you
never would have to see a teacher,” the article enticed its readers, “And yet you could be learning
faster than you might in a regular classroom.”
75
Also typical, the author described a world where
children didn’t learn in school so much as they learned how to learn—how to manage
information amongst multiple media-devices. They learned how to deploy media to their
advantage, how to teach themselves in a world transformed by rapidly increasing knowledge and
by a myriad of new information technologies. After all, commentators both inside and outside
education warned, as the production of knowledge continued to accelerate, students would have
to become lifelong information managers.
For just this reason, the home of the future was often envisioned as a necessary
educational counterpart to the classroom. Here, a parallel set of educational equipment, this time
centered on the television, could be set up. In the same year as our Boy’s Life article, the
educational journal Phi Delta Kappan invited several authors to forecast the future of learning.
In “Education in the Cybernetic Age,” S. L. Kong, professor of psychology at University of
Toronto, opened his article with an imaginary anecdote. A girl wakes up one morning curious:
how do birds fly? She goes to a room in her home with a large television built into the wall. Not
the living room where the television is still used for entertainment, but the other room with a

75
Ibid.
| 91 |

television—the “education room,” standard in every home in the “cybernetic age of education.”
76

She pushes a button and asks how birds fly. In Long’s vision, teachers do exist, but they have
become information resource managers; they respond to children’s homegrown curiosities with
appropriate information and directions. They “mediate,” as Long put it, between children and
available information. “The large screen on the wall brightens up and there she sees the familiar
face of Mrs. Brown. ‘Good morning, Lana, did you see some birds recently?’” Ms. Brown faces
Lana on a screen. Next to Lana’s image is a comprehensive record of her past inquiries and
experiences relevant to the topic at hand. Lana answers affirmatively and the lesson continues.
“With Mrs. Brown's picture automatically moved to one corner of the screen, there appears on
the rest of it pictures of birds in motion,” Long explained, “With the aid of a few sets of pictures
selected and transmitted from the Education Center, Mrs. Brown demonstrates effectively some
relevant facts about the flying process.”
77
Finally, Ms. Brown suggests to Lana that she go to
Station 26 at the Community Center to get a real look at live birds.

So where did this vision come from? What developments in the first years of the 1960s
made it seem possible, even necessary? This chapter is devoted to answering these questions.
The next chapter describes how humanists responded to the possibility that, given these
developments, information, knowledge and culture might be making a sizable migration to the
multisensory realm of electronics.

76
Kong, S. L. “Education in the Cybernetic Age: A Model,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Oct.,
1967). Pp. 71.

77
Ibid.
| 92 |

I. The Meaning(s) of Educational Technology

New technologies have the potential to alter established systems of human conduct—
modes of production, work and other practical affairs, but also modes more fundamental to the
human experience, for instance, modes of thought and perception. When a new motive power is
introduced, it alters the economies of scale in relevant production areas and which sources of
energy are sought after. When a new transportation technology is introduced it has the potential
to alter one’s relationship with friends, family and nation and in general with one’s geography;
that is, it has the potential to alter the meaning of one’s place within a city, state or country as
well as one’s perceptions of space, distance and even time. Media in particular, as the conveyors
of information, knowledge and culture—as the conveyors of representations of reality—have the
potential to alter the human experience in fundamental ways.
The ways in which new technologies alter the human experience are ultimately the
product of the agreed upon functions, purposes and associated customs and habits of that new
technology. What’s more, those functions and habits are largely unsettled and undefined in the
first years after a new technology appears on the scene. Thus, when groups battle over the
ultimate functions and purposes of a new technology, they are ultimately, consciously or not,
battling over how that technology will potentially restructure the human experience. In
particular, when groups battle over competing visions for future media landscapes, they are
always, implicitly or explicitly, battling over what kind of relationship humans will have with
information, knowledge and representations and thus over what kind of relationship they will
have with the reality of their world. The portent, therefore, is great, when a new media or set of
media is introduced. A contest emerges not just over who will own it or produce it or sell it or
| 93 |

use it, but by proxy, over how it will affect or influence the public’s engagement with
information, culture and with the rest of the world and how it will affect or influence their sense
of what can and should be done with the record of human thought, how new knowledge is to be
produced and disseminated, and even, what constitutes knowledge.
In some ways, educational media are a special case here. They are the method by which
individuals and societies do more than just take in information. All media do this. Educational
media are also the technological means by which individuals are explicitly instructed on how to
divide, synthesize, systematize and critique information. Educational media—and their engineers
and advocates—have deep designs on how individuals learn and how they think. For this reason,
educational media have a particularly portentous moment when they are new—when their
functions, uses and meanings are initially ill-defined. The “electronic revolution in education,”
in the early-to-mid-1960s, was, for instance, a heady moment in the history of technology. In
these years, numerous groups vied to assign particular purposes, meanings, theoretical
implications, and in general, technological forecasts of grand social and cultural import to the
myriad of new instructional technologies rapidly emerging. Technologies, I’m arguing, when
new, are like ciphers into which invested groups pour their distinctive needs, desires and
expectations. In the 1960s, educational media became such a cipher.
After the mid-1970s, educational or audiovisual technology came to mean largely,
supplemental instructional aids—video, overhead transparencies or PowerPoint presentations
used to augment or enliven lecture material. In the 1960s, I’ll show, “educational technology” or
“audiovisual equipment” meant something potentially closer to advanced man-machine
information systems. No one today would talk of lasers or global satellite communication in the
same breath as “audiovisual technology;” in the 1960s they regularly did. In these years, all three
| 94 |

were thought to be a part of a new advanced, electronic communications environment in which
ideas and information moved faster and faster.
To educational technologists, educational media became, on the one hand, a way to
professionalize their field by linking it to the robust theoretical apparatus of cybernetics and
information theory. On the other hand, it became a way to promote a cybernetic vision of
human-machine information exchange, a vision which, despite the ultimate failure of educational
technology in the 1960s, helped popularize a set of critical ideas about the nature of information,
technology and humankind in these years—namely, that information technologies were
fundamentally similar to human nature. To the electronics industry, educational media became a
way to announce, promote and initially market the total supersession of print media—a way to
signal the eminent coming of a world where push-button, screen-based, communications and
culture brought people and information closer together than ever before. It was a world, as the
electronics industry promoted it, where the eclipse of print and audio-only communication
brought with it a near unmediated interconnectedness between people, on the one hand, and
events, ideas and information, on the other. There are places where these two visions were
complementary, even mutually reinforcing. But together they show the degree to which the
portent of educational technology was up for grabs in these years; that is, the degree to which, as
an emergent set of technologies, they were conceptually un-fixed, and could thus theoretically be
invested with particular values, uses and meanings by these groups. As we’ll see in the next
chapter, it was within this heady, but still open-ended, mix of theoretical and futuristic visions
for educational technology that humanists attempted to insert themselves and their own designs
for its uses and meaning.

| 95 |

II. The Information Explosion

In some sense the term "information explosion" denoted two separate but related
quandaries. For some, the term applied, at least most relevantly, to the sudden accumulation of
data, knowledge and recorded thought generated by the postwar boom in scientific, medical and
technical research. "About 90% of all scientists who ever lived are now at work—and, it seems,
most are publishing their findings," Time Magazine summed up the dilemma in 1965:

In 1750, there were about ten scientific journals in the world; today there are
about 7,000 related to the biomedical sciences alone. Once scientists wrote about
physics, chemistry and biology; today they deal with the likes of biochemistry,
bioengineering, exobiology and biophysics. In 1950, chemists produced 558
articles every two weeks for their publications; in 1965, in the field of chemistry
alone, those learned explorers are turning out—and publishing —6,700 articles
every fortnight.
78

78
"Libraries: How Not to Waste Knowledge," Time. September 3, 1965.
| 96 |

Figure 2.2. Science, New Series, Vol. 136, No. 3515
(May 11, 1962), Pp. 400.

The "information explosion" joined a
number of other critical social phenomenon in
the nineteen-sixties commonly referred to by
alluding to atomic detonation; others included
the "population explosion" and "technological
explosion." Indeed, more than a handful of
commentators compared the unanticipated and
potentially catastrophic nature of the
information crisis to atomic or hydrogen
blasts, a "mushroom cloud of knowledge
which has obliterated all familiar landmarks,"
as one author put it.
79
Even IBM's 1962
advertisement linking the firm's research to
solutions for the information crisis included a sculpture by Harry Bertoia, "The Information
Explosion" made of circuitry wire shooting up and out like a mushroom cloud (Figure 2). For
some, the nature of the crisis was catastrophic. The new avalanche of published material in
scientific and technical fields, some argued, threatened to confound innovation and scientific
advancement by producing both ignorance and informational gridlock. Increased specialization
threatened to fragment science into innumerable isolated fields with little to no communication
between them. Additionally, individual scientist now ran the risk of becoming dangerously
ignorant of all available research in their own area of specialization.

79
Reiten, E. A. “The ‘Knowledge Explosion’ and the Academic Man,” The Journal of General Education,
Vol. 18, No. 2 (July 1966). Pp. 73.
| 97 |

No one who spoke of the information explosion did so without reflecting on the central
role scientific and technical research played in it. But to many, the term denoted something more
widespread, affecting all areas of knowledge. Indeed, the phrase came into wider usage around
mid-decade (Figure 3), and was employed to refer to the overproduction of knowledge,
generally, and to published material, in particular. Often authors characterized the situation by
pointing to the accelerated expansion of the written record in the modern world, specifically the
quickening pace at which knowledge doubled. “There was a time toward the beginning of man’s
history when knowledge took 10,0000 years—perhaps even 100,000 years—to double, and that
at a later period it doubled in 1000 years, and still later in 500 years,” wrote Walter Ong in 1968,
“It has been estimated that today man’s knowledge doubles every 15 years.”
80
Even within the
decade, the growth of published material was dizzying, pundits frequently pointed out. In 1966,
20,542 new books and 7,909 new editions of older books were published in the U.S., almost
twice the number that had come out in 1960. By 1963, the federal government alone was

80
Ong, Walter. “Knowledge in Time,” in Walter Ong, ed., Knowledge and the Future of Man: An
International Symposium. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Pg. 3.

Figure 2.3. Google Ngram Viewer for “information explosion” and
“knowledge explosion” between 1940 and2000, English Corpus (1.5
million books), smoothing = 3.

| 98 |

producing an estimated 25 billion pages of documents a year and had accumulated enough
paperwork to fill 7.5 Pentagons.
81
The increased production of knowledge, data and recorded
thought was tied to a host of social forces, over-specialization and the ascendancy of the research
university among them. But it was also tied to technological forces, in particular, the onslaught
of new communications technologies from the late 19
th
to the mid-20th century. Indeed, the
phenomenon was often accounted for by pointing to the fact that the exponential growth in such
technologies paralleled the accelerated accumulation of “man’s record.”

III. Educational Technology in the 1960s

Above all, higher education is going through its first great technological change in
five centuries--the electronic revolution ... Agriculture, transportation, industry,
and the military have been impelled forward by new technology. Now it is higher
education's turn. (Clark Kerr. The Uses of the University, 1963)
82

For many, the revolution in information technology could not have come any sooner to
the realm of higher education, nor could it have been better suited. As colleges and universities
in Post-WWII America became increasingly viewed as the seat of modern knowledge
production, cutting-edge communication technologies seemed only a natural fit for campuses.
"Today and tomorrow's universities are at the vortex of the technological society," argued Robert
D. Tschirgi, Dean of Planning for the University of California system, "Into them are poured the

81
Bourne, Charles P. Methods of Information Handling. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York: 1963. Pp.
1.
82
Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Pp. 209.
| 99 |

unanswered questions, the untutored populace, the needs, hopes, and aspirations of mankind.
Through the alchemy of education and research, society has come to expect that from the
cornucopia of the universities will pour forth all the good things for a better life. If they are to
achieve any fraction of this grand design, the universities must seek to maximize communication
within themselves [and] among themselves."
83
In some quarters, communication and information
processing became seen as so central to the role universities played in society, that many began
to compare the institutions with computers themselves. Tschirgi was in fact speaking at a two
day symposium, "Computers and Universities," held in 1965 at the University of California,
Irvine, where discussion revolved not just around the role of computers at universities, but often
functioned as a way to think about the ways in which universities were themselves data
processing systems. "Since universities are systems that are intimately concerned with handling
information, and computers are the same, it seems inevitable that there should be some kind of
explosive interaction between them," asserted Ralph Gerald, the Dean of the Graduate Division
at the University of California, Irvine.
84

As the transmission of information and knowledge within and between colleges and
universities became seen as more and more critical, a movement emerged in higher education to
construct inner- and inter-campus information networks. At the center of such efforts was an
organization new to the educational scene, the Interuniversity Communications Council or
EDUCOM whose mission statement opened with the following assertion: "Broadly conceived,

83
U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Education. Computers and the
University: A Workshop Conference Presented by the University of California, Irvine with Cooperation of
the University of Michigan, Newport Beach, November 8-12, 1965. Contract No. OE-5-16-022. See also:
"Computers on Campus," Bulletin of the Interuniversity Communications Council (EDUCOM). January,
1966. Vol. 1. Number 1. Ann Arbor, Michigan: EDUCOM. Pp. 9.
84
Ibid.
| 100 |

the essential role of the university may be viewed as information processing: research, teaching,
learning and in libraries, the storage and retrieval of knowledge." Founded in 1965 with a
$750,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation, EDUCOM began as an association between eight
private and public universities in the United States. By early 1966, their membership had
exploded to include 100 campuses from 25 universities in 17 states. EDUCOM took as their
purview all educational communications, that is, all on-campus information processing activities-
-"computerized programmed instruction, library automation, educational television and radio,
and the use of computers in university administration and in clinical practice."
85
Their purpose
was to report on the status of such technologies and to promote their expansion by way of task
forces set up to investigate critical developmental issues. Under their self-imposed charge were
the tasks of investigating the feasibility of national computerized or microwave networks for the
transmission of educational data and programmed instruction, the formulation of consistent
teaching methods for the broad range of existing electronic teaching and learning systems and
copyright laws as they affected modern practices of storing, retrieving, duplicating and
disseminating information, records and documentation. In the end, the aim of EDUCOM was to
create a coherent structure for the national inter-university networking of electronic resources,
educational practices and information. "In the communication age, the University is ... an ideal
user of advanced technology," Vice President, Hubert Humphrey wrote to EDUCOM in 1966,
"what you can achieve in 'togetherness' --in interuniversity information networks, in programmed
instruction, and educational television ... is truly inspiring."
86

85
"EDUCOM Means Communication," EDUCOM. January, 1966. Vol. 1. Number 1. Inside Cover.
86
"EDUCOM's Conference on Educational Communications," EDUCOM. May, 1966. Vol. 1. Number 5.
Pp. 4.
| 101 |

At the same time, individual members of EDUCOM were busy with inter-campus
networks of their own--networks that would channel and direct information to their students and
faculty so they themselves could process it. "Today's students and faculty are confronted with an
exponentially expanding amount of data that requires processing, synthesis, and understanding,"
the State University of New York's chapter of EDUCOM articulated their vision of networked
information in higher education. In 1966, SUNY endeavored to solve their predicament by
calling on the communications sciences, specifically, by approving plans to build an inter-
campus communication network that included a closed-circuit television system, a time-sharing
computer network (connecting 7 of SUNY's 58 campuses) and an arrangement linking together
the records of several SUNY libraries. To SUNY and others, communications networks were the
only way to update knowledge transmission and production in an era of information overload. A
number of concerns hung in the balance. Learning was at stake. To SUNY, the most effective
way to assist students in processing all the new information was to expand access to it--to put as
much information as possible at the student's fingertips. "We believe that [various electronic
technologies] make feasible the prospect of study terminals located in dormitories, in apartments,
in libraries and in student unions," SUNY reported to EDUCOM, "so that the stored resources of
the institution and its fact-transmitting systems can be available 24 hours a day throughout the
entire university." But the effective and efficient transmission of ideas--up-to-the-minute
research and scholarship--was also at stake: "The bibliographic knowledge, the demonstration
recorded on video tape, the rare manuscript, the intellectual interaction of outstanding professors,
must someday be transmitted rapidly and effectively throughout the whole system."
87
If students

87
"New Ties that Bind SUNY," EDUCOM. April, 1966. Vol. 1. Number 4. Pp. 1.

| 102 |

Figure 2.4. Multimedia instructional laboratory at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Source: Eds. James Brown
and James W. Thorton. New Media in Higher Education.
Association for Higher Education, Washington D.C., 1963. Pp. 115..

and faculty in higher education--the producers and beneficiaries of new knowledge--were to
process all the new data, information and recorded thought, channels of communication at and
between colleges and universities would have to be as efficient as possible. Those channels
(more than one commentator used the metaphor) would ideally buzz with information just like
the objects of which they were extensions--the computer and the human brain.
Students were the intended end-point for much of the information traveling along these
networks. A myriad of educational technologies were newly available to connect students to
these inner- and inter-campus information systems. If the 1950s was the age of educational
television, the 1960s was the era of advanced electronic educational technology, the decade
when the electronics revolution reached campuses and classrooms. From the late 1950s forward,
educational film and television were joined by a host of new, more cutting-edge information
technologies: language laboratories, audio-listening centers, self-instructional "electronic" study
carrels, computer-assisted instruction,
teaching machines, talking typewriters,
multi-media "electronic" classrooms
and remote-access programmed
instruction.
More and more, students were
engaging information of an electronic
variety. The vast majority of everything
they did still required texts, but
increasingly, they were interacting with
information by way of screens,
| 103 |

telewriters and headphones and connecting to it via remote-access. What’s more, the accelerated
pace of innovation and expansion between and across campuses, in addition to the overstated
forecasts of educational technology advocates made it appear to students and educators alike that
a significant portion of educational communication—of teaching and learning--was moving
inextricably towards the transmission and presentation of information via these multimedia
venues.
The use of established modes of educational technology--slides, film, television and
audio—increased in classrooms throughout the 1960s, facilitated by a boom in the construction
of new campus facilities throughout the decade. These were the years when standard projection
equipment and multi-channel audio systems for in-class playback became a common feature of
new lecture halls. Of course these modes were also continuously updated throughout the 1960s.
On the far end of the spectrum, cutting-edge lecture halls, like that shown in Figure 7, were set
up to employ split-screen technology, allowing instructors to juxtapose text, images and
graphics. Lectures themselves could also be transmitted remotely by mid-decade, though only a
few colleges employed the emerging technology. Generally referred to as tele-courses (tele in
this case referring to telephone and not television) a few campuses began in 1965, transmitting
lectures over two-way telephone connections to other colleges and universities or else to their
own satellite campuses. What made these telecourses exciting to educators and administrators
was a new technology called remote-blackboarding, electrowriters that transmitted what an
instructor wrote or illustrated at his or her own location to remote sites. Made by Victor
Electronics, the Victor Electrowriter Remote Blackboard (VERB) consisted of a writing pad and
stylus. The stylus picked up electronic impulses which were transmitted by telephone
connection to the receiver. The receiver consisted of a writing pad and an electronically
| 104 |

Figure 2.5. Computer-Based Laboratory for Automated School
System. Source: This Is CLASS (Computer-Based Laboratory for
Automated School Systems). The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 43, No. 8
(May, 1962). Pp. 349.

controlled stylus; the impressions were instantaneously received and projected onto a screen by a
specially designed overhead projector which was connected to the receiver.
Perhaps the most significant innovation in educational technology in these years was the
introduction of Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI). CAI was a process whereby instructional
material was presented to students via a typewriter or cathode ray tube in a pre-programmed
order. The software for such systems, called programmed instruction, was of two types:
branching and operant conditioning. The first type, developed by psychologist Norman A.
Crowder, constituted a kind of choose-your-own-your-adventure set of lessons. Each lesson
ended with a test whereby incorrect answers would return students to prior points in the program
to review material or else extrapolate on relevant material until a correct answer was achieved.
The second type, developed by famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner, presented a sequence of
| 105 |

Figure 2.6. Different multi-media devoces

“frames,” each frame containing only a small bit of information followed by a clear-cut question
the student was unlikely to get wrong given the information presented (if more than 5% of
questions were answered wrong, a programmed was revised). Each frame built on the small bit
of understanding achieved in the prior frame so that the whole program “shaped” the students
overall understanding of a subject or concept. Programmed instruction had been employed in
other types of media, scrambled textbooks
88
and teaching machines, primarily in the 1950s. But
CAI enjoyed a tremendous vogue in the early to late 1960s, with millions of dollars flowing from
the federal government for research, development and training in the new technology. At first
CAI systems consisted of one or two terminals connected to a nearby mainframe. But by the
early 1960s, systems had been constructed which could control dozens of terminal situated in
one classroom or laboratory. The first such system, developed by the Systems Development
Corporation in 1961, also included monitoring equipment enabling teachers to observe any
students performance from a main console (Figure 8). Within a few years, time sharing
computing made possible the distribution of
CAI terminals across a given campus, like the
systems at SUNY. It also made possible inter-
campus CAI systems. For example, in 1966 the
National Science Foundation funded the
Triangle Computing Center, a complex which
linked together, Duke University, The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and

88
“Scrambled Textbooks” or “Programmed Textbooks” contained quizzes on select material whereby students were
instructed to turn to certain pages depending on whether they provided a correct answer to each question; an
incorrect answer would usually direct the student to a page which re-explained material related to the question,
| 106 |

North Carolina State University. Students at any of the three campuses could dial up to a central
mainframe a choose CAI lessons from several subject areas.

The popularity of CAI was part of a concurrent trend in educational technology in the
1960s towards the kind of self-instructional learning environments on display at Library 21 and
Library/USA—the multimedia study carrel. Perhaps the main advantage hailed by advocates of
programmed instruction, whether in teaching machines or CAI systems, was its capacity for
“individualized instruction,” its flexibility in allowing students to work at their own pace as well
as the capacity of machines, by way of question-and-answer feedback mechanisms, to impart
information suited to individual understanding. Indeed, many self-instructional study carrels,
including those at Library 21 and Library/USA were equipped with teaching machines or CAI
systems. In fact, the sheer variety of self-instructional multiple-media devices put on the market
in these years attests to the scale of the attempted “electronification” of education (Figure 9).
Multimedia study carrels represented an end-point in the evolution of a related
educational technology already in wide use in the late 1950s: language laboratories. Language
laboratories became popular in the late 1950s as a way to combat teacher shortages in foreign
language education. Laboratories typically included a few dozen study carrels each equipped
with a tape player and headphones (Figure 10). They remained popular in the 1960s, though
many were updated to include remote-access taped selections—students no longer needed to
physically obtain tapes before sitting down to study, but instead selected lessons from a push-
button console located in each carrel (Figure 11). By the early 1960s the use of audio-technology
| 107 |

Figures 2.7 and 2.8. Both types of listening laboratories located at Duke
University. (Left). Tape recorder is located in each study carrel. (Right). Tape
recorders are centrally located and broadcast to study carrels. Source:
AudioVisual Instruction. Dept. of Audiovisual Instruction, National Educational
Association, Washington D.C. Dec 1964. Pp. x.

Figure 2.9. Datagram by North Electric. Source: AudioVisual Instruction. Dept. of
Audiovisual Instruction, National Educational Association, Washington D.C. Sept 1965.
Pp. x.

in language laboratories was extended beyond language education to include pre-recorded
lessons and lectures in all areas of study (see figures 2.7 through 2.9). ‘Language laboratories’
became increasingly referred to as ‘listening laboratories.’ In 1957 about 240 language
| 108 |

laboratories existed; in 1963 over 700 language and listening laboratories were in operation.
89

Just as with instructional television, within a few years of its emergence on the educational
scene, the audio-technology used in these laboratories began to reveal opportunities unique to the
medium. More and more, taped lectures were punctuated with recorded source material,
interviews and news reports—they became, increasingly, assemblages of instruction and
recorded media. Time Magazine described such “electronic teaching” this way:

A coed slides into a plastic chair in a soft green three—sided cubicle, consults a
mimeographed list, flips a switch, sees a red light blink, dials 1-2-2, pulls on
earphones. Into the headset flows the voice of her political science professor, then
Adlai Stevenson on the meaning of democracy, finally a discussion of freedom by
New York University's Sidney Hook—and thus ends Lecture 1, Second Semester,
Political Science 113. An electronic approach to teaching at M.I.T.? A far-out
experiment at Goddard? Not at all. This is 15-year-old Oklahoma Christian
College, a theologically conservative, Churches of Christ-run school, which,
though academically obscure, has just opened the nation's first wholly electronic
learning center. Each of Oklahoma Christian's 652 students has his own study
carrel, tied to a computer that connects him in seconds to one of 46 tape playback
machines. The system can transmit as many as 136 programs at once.

89
Brown, James W. and James W. Thornton. New Media in Higher Education. Washington D.C.:
Association for Higher Education and the Division of Audiovisual Instructional Service of the National
Education Association. Pp. 86.
| 109 |

At Oklahoma Christian College, a full two-thirds of freshman and one-third of
sophomore lectures were on tape by 1966. Ohio State University had the most robust
remote-access audio system. Students there could dial for 8,000 separate programs from
75 courses in 13 departments and hear everything from a reading of Chaucer to a lesson
in Chinese. By 1966, student calls into the system had reached a reported 40,000 each
week.
90

90
Gilroy, harry. Electronics and Books: Merger Path. New York Times. Feb 6, 1966. Pp. 14.
| 110 |

Figure 2.10. Diagram of Grand Valley State College’s ETV
system. Source: Ed. Robert A. Weisgerber. Instructional Process
and Media Innovation. Rand Mcnally & Company, Chicago, 1968.
Pp. 398.

Still, multimedia study
carrels represented the fullest
development in this area. In
the early to mid-1960s, they
began popping up around
campuses across the nation.
Some had isolated audiovisual
equipment; others were
networked into a centralized
storage unit for audio, video
and programmed instruction. Some were distributed throughout campuses; others were
contained within a central laboratory or what were increasingly called, Learning
Resources Centers. A full ten percent of colleges and universities surveyed by the
National Association of Education’s Department of Audiovisual Instruction in January of
1967 reported using some form of multimedia, self-instructional study unit. New
campuses especially began investing heavily in the new technology, imaging a future
where remote-access, multimedia instruction was central to the circulation of information
on campuses. Three years after its establishment in 1960, for instance, Grand Valley State
College in Grand Rapids, Michigan decided to organize their new campus around
multimedia carrels. In the words of their Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean
of Faculty, they decided early on to “provide students with individual study booths or
carrels” and that these carrels “would become each student’s personal headquarters on
campus … equipped to display audio and video materials distributed on the campus AV
| 111 |

system.”
91
Having made such a decision early on, they were able to construct a
completely wired-up campus, with a network of underground cables connecting nearly all
facilities (Figure 2.10). Their campus contained 118 carrels, each capable of accessing
120 audio programs and eight closed-circuit television channels, all via coaxial cable. All
auditoriums and lecture halls on campus could access the same material by the same
means. Lectures could be recorded in any auditorium or lecture hall from a central
control unit on campus (number 7 on Figure 2.10), stored centrally and then played back
in any carrel or lecture hall in the future.
Advocates for educational technology often saw multimedia study carrels as the
best way to plug students into the information explosion—the most effective and efficient
way to get students to start processing the ever expanding record of human thought.
Some focused again on the capacity of electronic technology to allow for individual
differences in learning. Instead of keeping up with the rest of their class, slower learners
could take the time to fully comprehend critical concepts. But of more interest to
advocates of educational technology were advanced students, who correspondingly,
could process the expanding body of information and recorded thought at an accelerated
rate. With adjustable speeds, for instance, some argued that students could literally play
information as fast as they could comprehend it. In this case, speeding up the learning
process meant keeping up with the information explosion—a near obsession for
advocates of educational technology in the 1960s. “The Knowledge Explosion is a very
real problem for our new generation of students. And to help them cope with it, we must

91
Potter, George. “Dial-Remote Access.” In Ed. Robert A. Weisgerber. Instructional Process and Media
Innovation. Rand Mcnally & Company, Chicago, 1968. Pp. 390.
| 112 |

speed the learning process,” ran an ad in Time Magazine (April of 1966) for Sylvania
Electronics, “Already, Sylvania is working with educators to project completely
integrated systems of educational communications. Developing more sophisticated
applications. Information "banks" that incorporate libraries on tape, capable of being
comprehended at many times the speed of normal speech.” Others argued that
multimedia learning environments were, by their nature critically interactive. In
promoting the national expansion of electronic educational technology in 1966, the
Subcommittee on Economic Progress summarized the testimony of eight experts in this
way:

The student can control the speed of presentation in accordance with his own
progress. The presentation can be in written form, through pictures, either moving
or still, by voice, or by various combinations of these. Likewise, the student
responses can be made by typewriter keyboard, by pressing buttons, or by simply
pointing a wand at a tube.

Finally, others felt that multimedia self-instruction—and multimedia teaching in general—
allowed students to process information communicated along multiple channels within the
human sensorium. Film, television and audio-sequenced slides all combined sight and sound, but
together with taped lectures, assigned texts and data-interactive teaching machines or CAI,
multimedia study carrels were viewed by many educators, educational technologists, behavioral
scientists and members of the electronics industry as cutting-edge human-machine information
systems.
| 113 |

IV. Educational Technology as Cybernetic Vision: The Social Sciences

As the electronic revolution in education took hold, educational technologists, or rather
audiovisual specialists, as they were more often referred to in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
found themselves in a unique position. The rapid influx of new cutting-edge electronic
educational technology combined with the prevalence of cybernetic theory in these years allowed
practitioners in the field of audiovisual education to accomplish a number of needed goals. Once
again, that critical moment when the purposes, meanings and exact uses of a new genre of
technology are initially unsettled, allowed an invested group to use it for their purposes. On the
one hand, the “electronic revolution in education” allowed audiovisual specialists to cast their
field as a professional enterprise by giving it the robust theoretical underpinning it had,
according to the majority of its practitioners, always lacked. The nature of cybernetic theory, in
particular, allowed audiovisual specialists to cast themselves as builders of complex information
systems. No longer were they mere providers of slides and projectors to teachers in need, they
were system builders, or “audiovisual engineers” as they began to call themselves.
On the other hand, by defining their field, and thus their professional expertise, along
cybernetic lines they began to attain the influence necessary to enter into an ongoing discourse of
the 1960s—a discourse which attempted to redefine “man and machine,” and more specifically,
humankind’s relationship to information and its technologies. Educational technology, and its
specialists played a key role here, one overlooked in the literature on the history of popular
cybernetics. All automated technology in the 1960s became a way to promote a new symbiotic
vision of “man and machine.” But educational technology, in particular, educational technologist
and others averred, situated in a learning environment, demonstrated the degree to which
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humans, machines and the information that passed between them, were essentially cybernetic in
nature.
Complex cybernetic systems began with the work of Norbert Weiner in World War II.
Starting in 1942, Wiener was commissioned by the U.S. government to design and construct an
automatic predicting and targeting mechanism for anti-aircraft gunnery. The system he built took
in data corresponding to a plane's flight path at prior points, extrapolated to the plane's future
position at a predicted point, and then took into account the "error message," or the difference
between its own prediction and the actual position of the plane, to reformulate the next (and
more finely tuned) predicted point. Uncanny in its predictive powers the system was even able to
stand up to pilots' evasive actions. Unfortunately, by the time Weiner had designed a system
capable of accurately predicting with a lead time of 3-4 seconds (the period of time needed for
artillery to reach a target in the air) the war was all but over.
After the war cybernetic theory flourished as practitioners in multiple fields--
anthropology, psychology, information theory, control systems, mass communication,
mechanical engineering, biology, electrical network theory and neuroscience--became
increasingly aware that the concept of feedback was central to the systems they were
investigating. The cross-disciplinary character of cybernetic theory began during the War when
stunning similarities emerged between Wiener's own work and that of Warren McCulloch, a
neurophysiologist at the University of Illinois and one of the world's leading authorities on the
brain. First by correspondence and then in person, the two realized they were both working with
systems governed by the same process: systems where information continuously looped back to
its source in order to reveal whether and to what degree the system was off the mark from its
intended goal and thus what corrections were needed for the system to reach that goal. For
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instance, Wiener learned from McCulloch that his greatest challenge in constructing his anti-
aircraft gunnery system revealed fundamental similarities between humans and machines.
Wiener's gunnery mechanism was initially prone to "violent oscillations" at certain points, a
result of the mechanism getting stuck in an over-correcting routine. According to McCulloch,
this exact mechanism was present in people afflicted with purpose tremor and Parkinson's
disease; the nerves responsible for movement in a given limb continuously dispatched "error
messages" such that the limb relentlessly overcorrected, resulting in uncontrollable oscillation of
the limb.
Immediately after the War the Wiener and McCulloch initiated a series of conferences--
the Macy Conferences--where the science of cybernetics was born. From 1946 to 1953 the
conferences were regularly attended by the likes of John von Neumann the world's most
renowned computer architect of the day, biophysicist Heinz von Foerster, sociologist and pioneer
of mass communication studies, Paul Lazarsfeld, psychologist and founder of social psychology,
Kurt Lewin, and famed anthropologists, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. In short, post-war
cybernetic theory was essentially an attempt to apply the logical calculus and statistical
mechanics of cutting-edge information theory to the organization of social, cultural, mechanical
and biological entities--for instance, the nervous system, servo-mechanisms, Bell Telephone
lines, media influence and the function of ritual. It was an attempt, in other words, to place the
process of signal and message at the heart of all social and living systems while employing
precise mathematical models of "logical circularity" (feedback) to explain the more complex
features of those systems. Thus, for instance, sociologists like Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton and
Talcott Parsons could employ the model of feedback to explain with better precision the circular
impact of social factors and how social homeostasis was achieved and maintained.
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Ultimately the interdisciplinary character of cybernetics did not hold up and in some
ways these heady days of cybernetic theory were a post-war positivist dream fated for
disappointment. But what came out of this multi-field effort and what remains today is the notion
that information processes are at the heart of both humans and machines. Cybernetics was, from
the beginning, conceived of and employed to describe both mechanical and living processes.
This facet in particular was alarming when, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the increased use
of computers and automated machinery began replacing workers. To many, cybernetics was
disturbing because it was based on the principle by which all living organisms were self-
regulating, self-directing and responsive to their external environment—feedback of information.
The authors of the popular literature on cybernetics which emerged in these years never tired of

Figure 2.11 . From Trask, Maurice. The Story of Cybernetics. E.
P. Dutton and Co, New York: 1971. Pp16.

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making this connection explicit—often juxtaposing pictures of babies, animals and machines
(see figure 4). “This self-regulation by feedback, the ‘closed loop’, is found in all cybernetic
processes,” one text instructed, “living, natural, mechanical … studious children [and] living
animals.”
92
The lesson was there: cybernetic machinery did not just accomplish human tasks by
way of a process more suitable to machines (the way that hydraulics substitute for human
muscular activity but in no way imitate how muscles work), it did so via the same internal
processes of humans and all living things.
The popularity of cybernetics in the 1960s, both within and without academia, made the
concept of information interface between humans and machines particularly intriguing. As one
can imagine, educational technology was an arena where this new fascination played itself out.
In fact, the sheer variety of new instructional media in the 1960s was only part of what set the
arena of educational technology in these years apart from its analog in prior periods. Perhaps
more critical was the newly dominant role of communications theory, behavioral science, and
systems engineering in the research, development and theoretical rationale behind educational
technology in these years. In the early 1960s, the professional field of audio-visual instruction,
influenced by thinking in the novel fields of computer science, communications and cybernetics,
experienced a reorientation away from a concern with visual aids in the classroom towards a
more comprehensive theory of human-machine systems. This reorientation made the field
considerably more amenable to the work of behavioral scientists, systems engineers and the
electronics industry, all of whom became intimately involved in the construction of educational
technology in the 1960s. In 1963 the field attempted to formalize this reorientation with the
release of the definitional work, The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education: A

92
Trask, Maurice. The Story of Cybernetics. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, 1971. Pg. 16-17.
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Figure 2.12. Diagram of “AV relationship to the educational-
communicant process.” Source: The Changing Role of the
Audiovisual Process in Education: A Definition and Glossary of
Related Terms. Pp. 25.

Definition and Glossary of Related Terms, sponsored by the Division of Audio-Visual
Instruction of the National Education Association and authored by three of the field’s architects,
James Finn, Donald Bushnell and Donald Ely. Their work can be read on one level as an effort to
put the field, for the first time, on a solid theoretical footing. Imbibing a healthy amount of
cybernetic-inspired communications theory from works such as Claude Simon and Warren
Weaver’s touchtone, Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), the authors, for instance,
cast off the field’s prior focus on things—visual and instructional aids—and asserted a more
sophisticated underpinning to their domain, the process of information transmission; messages
and feedback within “educational-communicant systems” (Figure 11). “Audiovisual
communications” was now:

that branch of educational theory and practice concerned primarily with the
design and use of messages which control the learning process. It undertakes
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…the structuring and systematizing of messages by men and instruments in an
educational environment. These undertakings include the planning, production,
selection, management, and utilization of both components and entire
instructional systems. Its practical goal is the efficient utilization of every method
and medium of communication which can contribute to the development of the
learner's full potential.

The 1963 definition characterized educational technology as a process—a process in which
analysis and implementation and led top complex man-machine systems to deliver instruction.
This new orientation had two important features for our purposes here. First, it treated
humans and machines, at least those capable of responding to input, as mutual communicants in
an educational-communicant system. Both were senders and receivers of messages and thus
“designated communicants.” Communicants were “complementary organisms which operate
within an optimal linkage situation,” that is, the overall design of a learning environment was
meant to make optimal communication linkages, between educators, instructional material,
students and equipment: “Optimal linkage is designed to show the mutual roles of communicants
in the transmission of messages.” Second, this new emphasis on the total process of
communication included a “systems approach” to instructional design. Using the
communications model outlined above, an effort was made to forecast the most effective way to
transmit information to, and thus elicit the proper response from, the learner given the total set of
interrelating elements in the educational-communicant system. “The task of the audiovisual
specialist may be described as assistance in the appropriate design of a presentation which
utilizes the elements of messages, media-instrumentation, men, methods, and environment,” the
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authors instructed, “The appropriate combination of these elements implies a systems approach.”
The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education merely codified a transformation
already taking place in the field. Audiovisual specialists, who ten years prior, had focused on
acquiring visual aids for schools based mostly on their content (e.g. history, math or spelling),
were more and more educated in information systems theory and applying a systems approach
regarding the arrangement of multiple media equipment. Practitioners in the field, for instance,
began to increasingly refer to themselves as “audiovisual engineers.”
Generally speaking, educational technologists were committed to the notion that
instructional technology was the clearest demonstration of the essential cybernetic connection
between humans and machines. Just as the nature of educational technology in the 1960s offered
audiovisual specialists the opportunity to add a theoretical foundation (of cybernetics) to their
hands-on enterprise, it also allowed them the opportunity to thrust their breed of technology into
the center of discussion surrounding the philosophical implications of new “man-machine
systems” in these years. As the intellectual custodians and sometimes creators of this new genre
of technology, they found themselves in a new position of authority to comment on humankind’s
relationship to information and technology, a relationship which, though always in flux, was
rapidly changing in these years.
We are so used to characterizing the 1960s as a period of social and cultural disruption
that we sometimes forget the massive techno-scientific output of the decade. Such advancements
had their own modes of disruption--unemployment, the rise of a technical elite and, most
relevant here, a new discourse on the relationship between humans and machines. The decade
witnessed two parallel and accelerating trends: the humanization of technology and the
technologization of humans. On the one hand, widespread computerization, artificial
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intelligence, talk of cyborgs and cybernetic systems and theory all signified machines' new and
significant incursions into the sacred territories of organic life and mind. On the other hand, a
host of bio-technological innovations--prostatic fingers and limbs, plastic heart valves and
arteries, bionics, the rapid rise of biochemical ‘mood correctors,’ and most of all, the possibility
of genetic coding--all signaled humankind’s latest and most profound foray into a world of
technologized life.
Educational technology featured prominently in this shift. In some ways, obscure
research in artificial intelligence—for instance, getting mobile machines to seek out electric
outlets or programs to erect structures with building blocks—wasn’t as compelling to the popular
imagination as “intelligent artificial teachers,” machines which “talked,” or communicated
learning materials to humans based on their real-time input.
93
The latter were not only designed
to directly affect, and in some cases, mirror, how humans think, but humans actually “plugged
into” them. For this reason, to many, educational technology, and computer aided instruction in
particular, became the most compelling example of the growing similarities and interdependence
between humans and machines. In fact, one finds that the popular press in the United States
seized on the image of students “plugging into” machines as the best way to showcase the radical
nature of the “cybernetic era.” “There are 1,000 students, each plugged into the mother
computer. They are studying eight different lessons. Each of the students is having a ‘dialogue’
with the computer through two sets of electronic keys” the New York Herald-Tribune reported in
typical fashion 1964. Educational technologists, in particular, never tired of promoting just this
vision of their technology. Students wired up to electronic equipment, taking in information at

93
“UConn Project Seeks Artificial Teaching Device,” The Hartford Courant (Sep 10, 1970): 68.

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greater speeds and efficacy than ever before (or so they believed) signaled, they hoped, that
educational technology was the central machinery in the new era of “man-machine information
systems.”

V. Educational Technology as Futurological Trope: The Electronics Industry

The new social scientific and systems engineering approach to audiovisual instruction
made the field of educational technology incredibly amenable to the method and manner of the
electronics industry who, in the mid-1960s, moved full force into the world of education. From
the early to late 1960s, with few exceptions, every major electronics manufacturer in the United
States began to invest in the research, development and production of educational technologies.
Xerox, R.C.A., Raytheon, Sylvania, Victor, General Electric, I.B.M., Honeywell, Remington
Rand, Burroughs, Digital Equipment, Westinghouse and Philco-Ford—essentially, the nation’s
entire electronics industry moved en mass into the schoolroom.
In one sense, they did it for the money. Education was a booming industry. Direct
expenditures for formal education in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges increased
from $18 billion a year in 1955 to $40 billion in 1966. By 1975, that number was an expected to
increase another 50% to $60 billion. Increased enrollments were only part of the reason. Total
enrollment in U.S. educational institutions did rise from 36 million in 1954 to 53 million in 1964
and was expected to reach 63 million by 1975. But at the same time, annual expenditures per
pupil in public elementary and secondary schools increased from $321 per pupil in 1954-55 to
$478 in 1964-65, and were expected to increase to $660 by 1974-75 while the annual cost per
student in institutions of higher learning rose from $881 in 1954-55 to $1,220 in 1964-65, and
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was expected to climb to $1,537 in 1974-75. In 1966, experts estimated that the educational
technology market in the United States was somewhere around $500 million a year, while
predicting that it would rise markedly in the next decade to $5 or $10 billion. Indeed, the federal
government alone was shelling out 1 billion a year by 1966 towards educational innovation, with
200 million of that going directly to hardware development.
Once inside the classroom, industry took the position that they were there to save
education. The tone of industry leaders when addressing educators, often indicated that they felt
they had been called on by the government and by detractors of modern schooling to apply the
prowess of their technical know-how and “systems thinking” to the large-scale problems of the
nation’s educational system. “It is characteristic of our economy to meet new challenges with
more effective technology,” John Stark, deputy director of the Joint Economic Committee,
framed it historically, “When our historical development required breakthroughs in
transportation and communications, to name two important sectors, it was technical innovation
that made them possible. It is not surprising to discover mounting enthusiasm among educators
for the possibilities of applying our rapidly developing communications technology to
education.”
94
Deficiencies in the nation’s educational system—whole uneducated sectors of
society, poor national test scores, the inability of educators to keep up with the information
explosion, even the inability to successfully transmit traditional values to the next generation at a
time of social upheaval —were often blamed on the technological backwardness of education.
Some even compared education to a third world country, whose folk culture has successfully
resisted modernization. "The aircraft industry would go out of business in 2 years if it changed as
slowly as education" one industry leader stated before the Joint Economic Committee.

94
Educational Technology: a Communications Problem, 196
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To their credit, industry leaders did often attempt to allay educator’s fears by stressing the
need for cooperation and collaboration. “The goal, of course, is to build a working relationship
between schools and industry so that together we can plan, carry out, and evaluate efforts aimed
at improving education,” assured Edward Katzenbach, vice president of Raytheon’s Education
Division.
95
But they did so with some arrogance. After only a few years working in the area of
education, industry leaders again and again felt comfortable telling lifelong educators that the
progress of education in America now depended on their getting along with engineers and
businessmen.

Industry is strongly committed to utilize its broad technological knowledge; its
administrative, engineering, and systems analysis talent; its research and
development and manufacturing resources; and its energy in helping to improve
education. If these resources are to be skillfully applied … a close working
relationship between industry and the academic community must be developed.
The continuing and accelerated progress of education in America may well, in
fact, depend upon this relationship.
96

What recourses did industry have? More than just educational technology. For with
educational technology came “systems analysis.” Systems analysis was, according to another
exec in Raytheon’s Education Division, “the application of scientific methods and tools to the
prediction and comparison of the values, effectiveness, and costs of a set of alternative courses of

95
Katzenbach, Edward L. “Industry Can Serve,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan., 1967). Pp.
191.
96
Ibid. pp. 193-94.
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action involving man-machine systems.”
97
In other words, it was a way to forecast and thus
properly design and implement the assembly of a multitude of resources geared towards a broad
objective, in this case and educational objective. But in the end, the electronic industry’s brand of
systems analysis, as they themselves articulated it to educators, essentially called for industrial
solutions, specifically the design of “new and exciting” combinations and re-combinations of
various educational media components. When the electronics industry talked of “systems
analysis” in education, more often than not, they meant figuring out which media components
should be used in what order or what configuration to effectively convey a subject or concept.
When for instance, should CAI as opposed to multimedia instruction be employed in an overall
system? In fact, members of industry often expressed their expectation that educators would one
day become something like information councilors, primarily training students to properly
employ, and discriminate between, various sources of ubiquitous informational media.
“Educational technology may require profound changes in the teacher’s role,” assured
Katzenbach, “from that of classroom instruction to that of including the much broader duties of
‘orchestrating’ an array of new teaching tools.”
98
Whether with apprehension or optimism, many
educators had similar expectations. In a world where information was everywhere—in print, on
your home television, on computers, at the other end of your telephone line, in the air, and who
knows where else in the future—students may need, more than anything else, to know how to
manage information sources. “I rather think the term 'classroom teacher' will soon be a
misnomer, if it is not already so,” argued Lois Edinger, president of the National Education
Association in in trying to reassure educators that educational technology was not meant to

97
Meals, Donald W. “Heuristic Models for Systems Planning,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5
(Jan., 1967). Pp. 202.
98
“Industry can serve,” 191.
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displace teachers so much as alter their overall function, “for the teacher will no longer be
confined to a classroom ... No longer will we think of the classroom in its traditional box shape.
Indeed, we may soon call the teacher a manager of learning resources in an instructional
resources center.”
99

Thus, there were any number of professed reasons why the electronics industry moved
full force into education in these years. On the one hand, increased funding for educational
research and development made it quite lucrative. On the other hand, many, including those in
the electronics industry, believed they had both the equipment and the analytical, engineering
and organizational tools necessary to solve education’s mounting problems. But beyond and
behind official reports, industry advertisements and published discourse on the matter was a
subtext which can be read to reveal another of the electronic industry’s aims in promoting the
necessity of educational technology. Materially, the electronics industry hoped to use educational
technology to force a near total shift towards the electronic transmission and display of
communications and information more generally. Rhetorically, they hoped to use their
promotion of educational technology to initially market the idea that print media would rapidly
and inevitably be superseded by electronic, specifically screen-based, media, because the former
had a low fidelity to realty. The degree to which media mediates, the electronics industry
implicitly argued in their publicity of instructional technology, was the mark of its efficiency and
effectiveness. Media which mediates least, media that is able to bring reality or near-reality from
afar to its user, something print simply could not do, would and should necessarily displace

99
Keppel, Francis. “The Business Interest in Education,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan.,
1967). Pp. 189.
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Figure 2.13. Boy’s Life, “The Telephone of Tomorrow.”
November, 1962. Pp. 2.

previous representational technologies. It was, for the electronic industry, a simple story of
technological supersession.
Of course, members of the electronics industry were not the only ones in these years who
promoted such a vision of total media supersession. The 1960s was, after all, an age of
futurological tropes, visual cues and narrative themes which signal to audiences that they’re
looking at or reading about the future. Automatic sliding doors, flying cars and talking computers
appeared everywhere in movies, television and advertisements in these years. Granted, each of
these devices already existed in the American imagination, but in the 1960s they became nearly
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Figure 2.14.Bell Labs, “Talking of Tomorrow,” 1962.
ubiquitous in depicting the future. Another such trope was the screen, or more specifically,
screen based communications and information retrieval. In the 1960s this trope began to appear
everywhere. These were the years when characters on the Jetsons, Star Trek, Voyage to the
Bottom of the Sea, to name just a few, were immersed in a high-tech audio-visual
communications environment whose most superior, and therefore ubiquitous, expression was the
screen.
Industry obviously had a hand in pushing this trope into the popular imagination.
Futurological tropes became a hallmark of industry advertising and promotion in the 1960s. It
was in this decade that the electronics industry began to spend considerable energy selling
imaginative and speculative visions of a technological future—promotional material which
contained no existing product, but instead, an conceptual vision of how electronic technology, in
particular, would vastly improve life in the near future. The heady days of the 1960s inspired a
rapid upsurge in the promotion of what might be called, industrial-electronic futurism by
electronics firms. Bell Labs was a forerunner here. In 1962, for instance, they ran a series of ads
in Boys Life on “The Telephone of Tomorrow.” Future Telephones included, predictably, car
phones. But most often they incorporated
a screen: a picture phone for business use
and, as always in industrial futurism of the
1960s, one for educational use. In this
particular ad, a television/printer allows a
child in traction to be “instructed at home
from a central education center.” Bell
Labs also released to theaters in 1962
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“Talking of Tomorrow,” a short animated film directed by Jetsons writer, Chuck Couch. In this
film, Bell Labs computer Cybil (which also makes an appearance in the Boy’s Life ad above)
predicts the future world of 2000. Once again, all communication and informational activities
take place on screens: education, shopping, business and entertainment.
Perhaps, most famously, in 1967 Ford-Philco released a short film, “1999 AD” for
Philco’s 75
th
anniversary. Philco was an electronics firm which, though forgotten today, made
radios, televisions and refrigerators for the first half of the twentieth century (Ford bought Philco
in 1961). In the 1960s they moved into the realm of computers, and for a short time were a key
player in advanced electronics, building components for NASA and NORAD in these years.
“1999 AD” is typical of industrial-electronic futurism in these years in that every scene—every
single activity depicted—involves human engagement with audio-visual information on a screen
(figure 2.15). The husband’s office, perhaps most obviously, involves multiple screens for
simultaneous video conferencing and information retrieval as well as paying bills. Even cooking
in the future is facilitated by accessing recipes from a monitor. After obtaining her recipe, the
wife is not done—there is more of the world to engage from her console. She switches gears:
shopping on the main screen while monitoring her children play via a closed circuit system on a
secondary screen. Even a child playing chess in his spare time and entertaining with friends,
must somehow, almost by necessity, involve interaction with a screen. Finally, as always in
industrial-electronic futurism in these years, a child’s education takes place via a multitude of
audio-visual equipment, essentially, a selection of differently sized screens—one large enough to
almost bring the moon landing directly into his study room.
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Figure 2.15.Ford-Philco, "Year 1999 A.D.," 1967.
Thus, in some ways, the electronics industry was simply playing into and helping to
advance more popular notions concerning the ultimate fate of print and the unstoppable
ascendency of a screen-based, audio-visual culture. But, as we’ll see, the electronics industry
was in a place to not just to promote such a
vision of a new media regime, but they
were in a place to try to install it—and
educational technology, I’m arguing, was
the realm where they first sought to do
both.
Industry moved into education
because they regarded the campus and
classroom as key arenas in which to work
out the development and implementation of
cutting-edge information transmission
systems. In particular, the electronics
industry believed that education was the
first arena where information transmission
would move, on a large scale, beyond the
bound book and towards electronic
systems. This particular vision was, in fact,
behind a sudden spate of large-scale
mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures between the nation’s leading electronics firms and
publishing houses specializing in educational material in the middle 1960s. In 1964, IBM
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acquired Science Research Associates, a company specializing in programmed instructional
materials while R.C.A. made public negotiations to purchase Prentice Hall, a large publisher of
textbooks. Talks between R.C.A. and Prentice Hall fell through in April of 1965, but meanwhile
a number of other firms were negotiating similar arrangements. In the summer of 1965, Xerox
purchased American Educational Publications and in 1966, Litton Industries acquired the
American Book Company, a publisher of elementary, high school and college textbooks and
educational records. In that same year, Raytheon Inc. purchased D.C. Heath, another textbook
concern and in March, R.C.A. ended up acquiring Random House, the largest of these
electronics and publishing arrangements. Joint research ventures between electronics and
publishing interests were also popular. In the fall of 1965, General Electric and Time Inc. formed
a joint company, the General Learning Company, to produce educational materials, systems and
services. The next year, Sylvania Electronics and the Reader’s Digest Association announced a
joint group to investigate the potential of electronic systems in education. Alongside these more
conspicuous, large-scale transactions, other partnerships were being formed. By 1968, this “rash
of mergers of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ companies” included over one hundred new
partnerships.
100

At the center of these deals, at least implicitly, was a kind of core formula, a formula that,
according to Alan Stein, partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., even investment houses were
counting on: in the future, at least in education, publishers would be responsible for producing
content and the electronics industry would be responsible for producing the equipment which
transmitted that content. Even Bennet Cerf, president of Random House could get behind such

100
Sharpes, Donald K. “Computers in Education.” The Clearing House. Vol. 43, No. 3, Nov., 1968. Pp.
135. Behrens, Carl. “Publishing Goes Electronic.” Science News, Vol. 92, No. 2, Jul., 1967. Pp. 44.
| 132 |

synergy. “Publishing and electronics are natural partners,” he argued at the time of his and
R.C.A’s merger, “With the revolution in education that is expected in the next ten years, R.C.A.
has the equipment that will be used and we have the books.”
101
On the surface, at least, everyone
appeared to be in agreement. George Haller, president of General Electric, characterized
publishers as “the people who can collect and present learning materials,” while arguing that
systems engineers can “do a better job of transmitting the material.”
102
Both groups had reason to
be happy about these ventures. The electronics industry needed educational content—well
written, edited content—for their instructional systems. Members of the publishing industry who
specialized in educational material—the most profitable field of publishing—perhaps convinced
that educational material was destined to be transmitted electronically, felt they needed a partner
in the electronics industry to stay competitive.
Others were not so sure. In May of 1966, the American Book Publishing Council held a
panel discussion with members of the electronics industry to ask them point blank why they were
“interested in the book business.” Some feared that educational publishing was only the
beginning, that the electronics industry would move inextricably into all areas of traditional text
production. Representatives of General Electric and IBM did little to allay such fears at the
Council meeting. When asked by the audience of publishers what kind of hardware would
transmit the contents of printed material in the future, both representatives talked of a futuristic
world where the codex would be nearly irrelevant. D.V. Newton of IBM talked about artificial
intelligence programs that would soon determine a student’s learning deficiencies before
teaching them, simply by conversing with the student, something a book could never do; George

101
Gilroy, Harry. “Electronics and Books: Merger Path,” New York Times, Feb 6, 1966. Pp. F1.
102
Gilroy, Harry. “Newest Bookman Program the Future,” The New York Times. May 27, 1966. Pp. 40.
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Haller talked about a point in time when a device could be used to pass information directly from
one brain to another.
| 134 |

Figure 2.16. RCA home-facsimile system. Source: Behrens, Carl.
“Publishing Goes Electronic,” Science News, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Jul. 8,
1967). Pp. 44.
The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education: A

Such fears were not unwarranted. On the one hand, the electronics industry undoubtedly
had the expansion of educational communications systems in mind when they acquired these
publishing houses. They had, for instance, designs on the American home. When Alfred C.
Edwards, president of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, was approached by a “leading electronics
executive,” he was told that the firm wanted to “take information out of a book, put it on audio-
visual tapes and then … bring the information into homes and schools.” Edwards, who turned
down their offer, reportedly
asked the executive,
“Doesn’t a book do that
already?” At the time of its
merger with Random
House, R.C.A. was in the
process of developing a
machine that transmitted
printed material—text and
images—by way of
television sets (Figure 12).
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Figure 2.17. RCA electronic typesetting.
Source: Behrens, Carl. “Publishing Goes
Electronic,” Science News, Vol. 92, No. 2
(Jul. 8, 1967). Pp. 44.

In yet another example that the television, as a networked electronic device, was initially offered
as a viable alternative to the computer for managing the information explosion, six prototypes
existed in 1966 and each could successfully transmit a paperback sized page of material in 10
seconds. Customers would ultimately choose between 14 options “scheduled” each day. They
would turn a switch to one of 14 points and the corresponding material would be transmitted
over the FCC controlled airwaves to their printer.
Among the material listed by James Hillier, vice
president of R.C.A Laboratories, for possible
transmission was news briefs, sports scores, stock
market reports, TV program schedules, syndicated
columns, news magazines and presidential addresses.
Also included was printed material to accompany
educational television programs. In the middle-
1960s, Sarnoff envisioned this device, or something
like it, at the heart of future information transmission.
“A true communications revolution,” was coming, he
said in 1966, “[where] the telephone, record and tape
player, radio, TV, and film projector [will be] merged
into one unit that will also publish magazines, and
newspapers in your home."
On the other hand, some members of the
electronics industry clearly felt that the realm of education was only a first step, that one day
soon, a good portion of content traditionally destined for print would be communicated
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electronically. George Haller, president of General Electric, rather arrogantly declared to the
audience at the American Book Publishing Council meeting that the function of their profession
would soon be narrowed to fit technological trends: “We are not interested in the book business,
we are interested mainly in the information business. I predict that you people will be chiefly
information publishers in the future.”
103
R.C.A. clearly envisioned a future where a good deal of
published material would end up in electronic systems. Their newly formed “Graphic Systems”
division, the division which absorbed Random House, was primarily responsible for designing
electronic systems capable of converting printed material into information which could be
displayed by a computer onto a cathode ray tube screen (Figure 13). In short, the “Graphic
Systems” division was among the first in the nation to develop a method of turning computer
memory of a text (inputted in the form of paper or magnetic tape) into a CRT display of that text
on a computer screen. One could, for the first time, create a paper tape of a text—any text—by
punching out spaces on the tape corresponding to given letters, numbers and punctuation; each
punched space would tell the computer to render on a CRT screen, a specific graphic
representation, stored in its memory, of a letter, number or punctuation mark. R.C.A. marketed
this process to printers as the Videocomp phototypesetter, but they had larger futuristic designs
on this breakthrough technology. The central project of the “Graphic Systems” division was the
development of “electronic libraries in which all types of printed information could be stored
electronically and retrieved immediately.” In short, RCA and other electronic firms, imagined
that one day soon, whether with the computer at the center or not, the myriad of new electronic

103
Gilroy, Harry. “Newest Bookman Program the Future,” The New York Times. May 27, 1966. Pp. 40.

| 137 |

networks and devices would be configured in such a way as to transmit all information more
effectively. The arena of education was clearly just a start.

VI. Educational Technology and Crisis: The Humanities

Together these two visions of educational technology in the 1960s show the degree to
which the specific import of these new systems was up for grabs in these years and thus the
degree to which invested groups could endeavor to assign to them particular values and
meanings. Into this mix, humanists, and in particular, socio-technical humanists arrived. The
redefinition of humankind’s relationship to technology and information by educational
technologists and social scientists in general, a redefinition which sought to solve the information
explosion by simply increasing the efficiency of message and signal between humans and
machines was threatening to humanists on its own account. To the custodians of print culture, the
use of educational technology by the electronics industry to aggressively promote and install a
post-print world was menacing on yet another front. Many humanists commentating on the
situation, from Lewis Mumford to Joseph Wood Krutch, took both of these threats to be at the
heart of the humanities crisis. Other humanists—what I’m calling socio-technical humanists—
from Neil Postman to countless unnamed electronic adopters, instead sought, as we’ll see, to use
educational technology to respond to the information explosion in uniquely humanistic ways, by
wedding the new technologies to both traditional and reformist humanistic aims. In doing so they
sought to defend and update the humanities enterprise. Educational technology, they argued,
allowed humanists to speak directly to students’ real world experiences—to “what it means to be
| 138 |

human in today’s world”—to guide the critical uses of new media generally and thus ultimately
to make the humanities more publically engaged and socially relevant.

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Chapter 3 || Instructional Media and the Socio-Technical Humanities

It goes without saying that many humanists resisted the incursion of electronic
technology into the realm of education. Instructional media, especially its 1960s variant, born of
cybernetic and behaviorist thinking and instituted by engineers and industry executives,
represented a double incursion—the wholesale application of social scientific and mechanical
engineering principles to the process of learning. Many argued that it “dehumanized” or
“alienated” students. Others argued that electronic devices only fed factual material to students
and thus bolstered the growing emphasis on practical-oriented, career-focused instruction in
American education. Lewis Mumford, historian and longtime critic of the authoritarian impulse
in modern technological thinking, argued that the expanding use of educational technology
provided the greatest evidence of a general shift towards the automation of knowledge, and
ultimately, the automation of the human organism. “Shall we extend the processes of automation
into every department of our lives,” he asked the audience of the 19
th
National Conference on
Higher Education in 1964, “Unless we tackle this question swiftly, we shall soon find that the
last word in automation is Automatic Man.”
104
To Mumford and many other educators at the
time, the introduction of educational technology signaled the latest incursion of cybernetic
automation into human affairs; education was now joining the realms of manufacturing, finance
and the wide-ranging field of data management. Mumford bristled under this further
encroachment:

104
Mumford, Lewis. “The Automation of Knowledge.” The New Technology and Human Values. Ed.
John G Burke. Belmont, Calif., Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1966. Pp. 86-87.
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As the facilities of our educational institutions expand with their nuclear reactors,
their cybernetic IBM machines, their computers, their television sets and tape
recorders and learning machines, their machine-marked yes or no examination
papers--the human contents necessarily shrink, for the very presence of the human
personality disturbs this complex mechanism which operates increasingly as a
single unit and can be managed efficiently only by remote control under
centralized direction.
105

If the mechanization and systemization of learning and thinking was an issue with the
coming of automated information storage and transmission in education, so too was the status of
print. As the standard guardians of print culture, discord emerged among humanists about how
to view the possible migration of culture into electronic formats. On one end of the spectrum
were those like Joseph Wood Krutch who refused to leave the Gutenberg era quietly. “The
printed page is the most important means of communication ever invented and any student who
does not learn how to take full advantage of it has failed to learn the most important thing
schooling can teach,” Krutch declared in 1969, “Teaching machines and ‘audio-visual aids’ have
their place, but they are impediments to continuing education if they diminish the student's
ability to give proper attention to the printed word.”
106
On the other end was a different kind of
humanities scholar, perhaps best represented by Marshall McLuhan, who championed the rise of
electronic media and decried certain inherent attributes and associated behaviors of print:

105
Ibid. Pp. 88.
106
Krutch, Joseph Wood. “A Humanist's Approach,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 51, No. 7, (Mar., 1970).
Pp. 278.

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We haven't really cottoned on to the fact that our children work furiously,
processing data in an electrically structured information world; and when these
children enter a c1assroom elementary school, they encounter a situation that is
very bewildering to them. The youngster today stepping out of his nursery or TV
environment, goes to school and enters a world where the information is scarce
but is ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects,
schedules. He is utterly bewildered because he comes out of this intricate and
complex integral world of electric information and goes into this nineteenth-
century world of classified information that still characterizes the educational
establishment. The educational establishment is a nineteenth-century world of
classified data much like any factory set up with its inventories and assembly
lines. The young today are baffled because of this extraordinary gap between
these two worlds.
107

In-between these two ends of the spectrum lay an assortment of reactions by humanists
who felt that multimedia instruction, in one way or another, could or should, be made in to fit
into the print dominated realm of humanities education. For many humanists, doing so
constituted a unique way to accomplish several goals central to their field—some long-
established and others, part of curriculum reform in the humanities of the 1960s. First, there were
those who believed new media to be particularly well suited for humanities instruction, because
the content of that instruction was often narrative, experiential, affective, or aesthetic and

107
McLuhan, Marshall. "Address at Vision 65," The American Scholar, XXXV (Spring 1966). Pp. 201.
| 142 |

sensory-oriented in nature. Thus, multimedia instruction could, and according to some should, be
used to highlight those affective aspects of humanities material traditionally transmitted via text
only. Often these educators experimented with a kind of “total experience” in humanities
instruction, what I am calling an “immersive humanities,” and hoped that such instruction could
revitalize the humanities in a time of perceived decline.
Second, there were humanities educators who felt that the use of new media was an ideal
way to speak directly to students’ contemporary world, an educational responsibility which
humanists had recently been charged with ignoring altogether. As the pressure of the 1960s
mounted, more and more, humanities scholars and educators were called on to address “what it
means to be human in today’s world.” As a result, the humanities enterprise came to incorporate
new media in these years for the same reason that it came to incorporate new material (popular
culture, contemporary issues and the culture and ideas of traditionally underrepresented
groups)—namely, in an effort to become more publically engaged and more socially relevant.
On one level, this simply meant using multimedia instruction in an effort to better relate to the
unique experiences and proficiencies of the “television-“ or “electronic-generation.” Doing so
was thought to appeal to students’ receptivity towards new media, to tap into their advanced
aural and visual sensibilities developed in world outside the classroom and as a result potentially
rejuvenate humanities content by making it more gripping and up-to-date.
Other humanists had broader ambitions in using educational technologies to expand their
social relevancy. Their use of electronic media was, I’ll argue, part of a widespread, newly felt,
sense of techno-social responsibility in the humanities in these years. With educational
technologies specifically, humanists felt a responsibility to respond to the information explosion
in a way that ran counter to the reactions of the social science, electronics and engineering
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communities. First, these humanists argued that they had the unique responsibility to expand
their notions of “media literacy” commensurate with the new “electronic environment” emerging
in these years—to incorporate new media into the realm of communications for which they felt a
responsibility to impart critical interpretive skills. Second, they found uses for educational
technologies which fit squarely into the humanistic tradition—using them to invoke the full
sensorium in getting students to critically engage and interrogate reality. Both efforts were
essential if humanists, in an era of information overload and accelerated change, were to fulfill
their traditional task of instilling in their students the capacity to order their experience of the
world meaningfully. In all these ways the humanists I’m describing—what I call socio-technical
humanists—were able to turn so much rhetoric from the electronics industry and behavioral
sciences on its head and appropriate electronic media for their own purposes.
But what did humanists have in mind when employing these terms? What did “new
media literacy” mean in the context of the decade? Since the 1960s the terms "electronic media"
or "new media" have been used to single out specific technologies appropriate to the period in
which they’re used. Today “new media” largely denotes the internet. In the early-to-mid 1990s, a
time when much cultural commentary was focused around the “death of the book” and the
National Endowment for the Arts widely circulated report, Reading At Risk: A Survey of
Literary Reading in America, decried the “decline of literary reading,” “new media” largely
signified the video game and the Walkman—those technologies proliferating private and
distracted experiences. In the 1960s "electronic culture," "electronic environment," "electronic
media" or "new media" had a complex of meanings. Materially, the terms denoted television and
the computer, largely. But a host of other technologies came to mind for people using these
terms: the widespread use of audio-tapes; the new availability of video tapes; classrooms wired
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with sound, slide projectors, TVs and overhead transparencies; facsimiles and telewriters; any
communication via satellite; and even lasers and light shows. Conceptually, the terms "electronic
culture," “electronic environment,” "electronic media," or "new media" in the 1960s invoked a
sense of the new speed, omnipresence and networked nature of audio and/or visual media and
information as well as the new ability to organize, store and retrieve information via computers
and information retrieval systems.

I. The Crisis of Engagement in the Humanities

Today the humanities are still assumed to make man more human, but they locate
the threat that they must counter not in the animal world but elsewhere, in the
world of machines. The humanities are commonly set off against science and its
mechanistic offshoot, technology. The inhuman other is no longer a population of
brutes to which man s lower, nonintellectual nature threatened always to hold him
in bondage, but a population of nonliving things that he has made.
108

The humanities have always defined themselves in opposition to something. This is not to
say that no one has ever held a positive definition of the humanities. Indeed, many--perhaps too
many-- have always existed. Rather, that alongside, behind or beneath whatever positive
definition exists, the humanities have also always been identified in their essence as
contradistinctive to some other set of activities and interests. In the renaissance it was barbarism
or the lack of civilization; after the scientific revolution, it was always science; and from the late

108
Deadalus, 1969.
| 145 |

19th century forward it was also mass culture. After World War II, while science and mass
culture remained items of contradistinction, another item began to dominate: the technical.
The vast techno-scientific output of the late 1950s and 1960s appeared threatening to the
humanities on several fronts. First, funding and interest in the humanities on the whole seemed to
be at stake as the United States geared up for the space race, spending thousands of times more
money each year on science and engineering research. Second, humanists feared a loss of
national leadership as they became increasingly cut off from a progressively hermetic scientific
and technical culture. As a result, in the early 1960s there began to appear a collection of books
and articles proposing that the humanities were in the grip of its most formidable crisis ever.
Humanists, to be sure, were nearly always in a state of anxiety regarding their status, especially
since the turn of the century. In the mid-to-late 1950s, they were, as we’ve seen, embroiled in a
crisis concerning the Two Cultures—a crisis which saw them trying to keep up with science and
technology by helping to guide the nature of television and by taking to the airwaves themselves.
But the 1960s was a period which marked the beginning of a fervent "crisis" literature emanating
from the humanities, a literature which continues till this day. What’s more, it was in these years
that the “Two Cultures crisis” of the mid-to-late 1950s transformed into a “crisis of engagement”
of the 1960s—a crisis concerning the widespread accusation that "in a society in turmoil," as the
Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences put it, "the humanities seem far removed
from the concerns of their time."
109
The threat that science and technology posed for the
relevancy of the humanities combined with the accusation that humanists were generally socially
disengaged found scholars everywhere clamoring for humanistic council on science and

109
"What is Wrong with the Humanities Today?," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. Vol. 23, No. 1 (Oct., 1969), Pp. 3.
| 146 |

technology. And thus, humanists interested in updating the mission of the humanities, found in
technology, and in my case educational technology, a direct means of becoming more socially
engaged.
The crisis began with unparalleled increases in the amount of funding for the sciences
due to post-WWII national defense and the Cold War space race, as well as downturns in
humanities funding, Both signaled to many the declining importance of the humanities in a
technology-gripped America. As a kind of quantitative marker many pointed to the funding
within the National Science Foundation which had been established as early as 1950 in order to
promote “the progress of science… advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to
secure the national defense.”
110
It began in that year with $225,000 in monies, but immediately
increased to a full 3.5 million the next year. In 1954 a cap on annual appropriations was lifted
and by the early 1960s it was spending near a half a billion dollars annually.
111
By comparison
the humanities were receiving somewhere near one percent of this figure.
In the estimation of Francis Keppel, United States Commissioner of Education in 1963,
the asymmetries in funding signaled that the humanities were beginning to play an ambiguous
role in American society. They were still recognized as the spring from which flowed a
civilization’s great art, philosophy and literature, Keppel assured. But, rather ironically, they
were at the very same time “kept on short rations financially.”
112
“There does not seem to be

110
See online at: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode42/usc_sup_01_42_10_16.html
111
Keeney, Barnaby C. “The Humanities in American Society,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society. (112; 1. Feb., 1968). Pp 4.
112
Keppel, Francis. “Strengthening Support for the Humanistic Disciplines and the Public Arts,” The
Journal of Higher Education. ( 35; 1 Jan., 1964).
| 147 |

enough money available to do a satisfactory job of transmitting our cultural heritage to the rising
generations,” Keppel went on, “an expression of concern for science and engineering, on the
other hand, is on everyone’s lips.” The upshot according to these prognosticators was not just a
waning of resources for the humanist but an increased call to future generations for “more
engineers and more scientists.”
113
These authors seized incoming numbers to show that, while
the percentage of humanities majors fell off markedly, the student body of higher education had
already swelled with future professionals, technicians and engineers. Relatedly, many feared a
shift by those within the humanities and social sciences towards subjects and methods better
suited to seize some of the research funds emerging from the new profusion of science and
technology grants. “Federal dollars for the social studies have been directed to those that can
claim to be scientific” one author for the Journal of Higher Education wrote, “Thus while in
general historians can obtain no aid from the National Science Foundation, some federal monies
have supported studies in the history of science; and while students of political philosophy
receive no support, those who follow a quantifying approach can qualify.”
114
Many of these
authors argued that without more federal aid to the education would become purely vocational—
churning out more and more technicians—and the only concerns of future citizens would be ones
of efficiency and order.

113
Cornog , William H. “Teaching Humanities in the Space Age,” The School Review ( 72; 3 Autumn,
1964) The Arts in American Education.
114
Snell, John L. “Advancing the Humanities: To Make Our Present More Secure and Our Future Worth
Striving for,” The Journal of Higher Education. (36; 1 Jan., 1965). See also: Schroeter, James. “An
Enemy within,” College English. (25; 8 May, 1964); Sacksteder, William. “Cyclotrons for the
Humanities: What Humanists and Artists Need,” The Journal of Higher Education. (39; 8 Nov., 1968).
| 148 |

The deplorable state of funding for the humanities in America and the resulting literature
of panic on the subject roused the federal government into action in the mid-1960s. In 1963 the
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Council of Graduate Schools in America,
and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa joined together to establish the National Commission
on the Humanities whose expressed purpose was to consider the state of the humanities in
America. A year later the commission released its full report, which converged on two main
points: "that expansion and improvement of the activities in the humanities are in the national
interest and consequently deserve support by the federal government ... [and] that federal funds
for this purpose should be administered by a new independent agency to be known as the
National Humanities Foundation."
115
In making the first point, the report drew on a number of
ideas in wide currency among humanists at the time--namely, that the humanities were just as
vital and influential as the sciences in regards to the survival and success of America in a cold
war context. They argued, for instance, that the humanities enabled America to be a cultural
leader on the world stage: a well-funded humanities demonstrated to other nations that
Americans were more than mere materialists
116
; humanistic studies produced citizens (and
potential diplomats) who understood the complexities of intercultural exchange.
117
But it was the
second point of the report which quickly became an item for legislation. In August of that year,

115
Report of the Commission on the Humanities. New York, NY: American Council of Learned
Societies, 1964. Pp. V.

| 149 |

Congressman William Moorhead of Pennsylvania proposed legislation to implement the
commission's full recommendations. But though the commission's report deliberated on the
humanities only, members of congress observed the arts to be suffering an identical state of peril.
Thus both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities
were established under the same act: The National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities Act
of 1965. The text of the act itself mimicked much of the language expressed on the floor of
congress, during debates over its ratification, to the effect that the arts and humanities were not
only similarly menaced by increasing technology but also served similar purposes in relation to
it:
An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone
… Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster
and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities,
designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their
technology and not its unthinking servants.
118

If the vastly disproportionate amount of funding for science and technology over the
humanities appeared troubling—even hazardous—to academics and others, so too did the
increasing lack of communication between the worlds of the humanist, scientist and technologist.
More specifically, what commentators informing the “crisis in the humanities” in the 1960s
railed against was the increasing lack of influence the humanities were perceived to have on a
newly dominant and hermetic scientific and technical culture. An explicit dread was registered

118
http://www.nea.gov/about/Legislation/Legislation.html
| 150 |

by many academics and educationalists alike that as society’s craving for science and technology
pulled far ahead of any interest in the humanities, the central questions and concerns of the
humanist would cease, perilously, to inform the tendencies and objectives of modern society’s
greatest twin forces. The humanist was needed more than ever, many warned, to give science and
technology the moral bearing it by definition could not provide for itself. A typical
characterization of the humanities as offset from the sciences ran: “The values of humanistic
pursuits lie in what they do to give the individual a deeper, broader, and richer understanding of
himself and his relations to other men [as well as] his time and place.”
119
Technology and the
sciences, these authors scorned, were purely means directed; that is, they were merely concerned
with the most efficient and effective process to achieve a given end. By contradistinction, the
humanities inherently aimed to question and inform those aspects of life which were ends in
themselves—“moral principles and life’s ideals.”
120
One author schematized the respective
concerns of science, technology and the humanities this way: The first asked what there was to
be known about the world, the second, what use could be made of this knowledge, and the last,
what use ought to be made of this knowledge.
121
“The humanist, thanks to his understanding of
history, sees the political, economic, and the social crisis of his generation in the perspective of
the past,” Paul A. Varg, Dean of the College of Letters and Science at Michigan State University
wrote in the Journal of Higher Education, “Humanists are not problem-solvers.”
122
The interests

119
Varg, Paul A. “The Proposed Foundation for the Humanities: Recapturing the Spirit of Humanism,”
The Journal of Higher Education. (36; 5 May, 1965).
120
Hoor, Marten. “Why the Humanities?: Their Contributions to the Spiritual and Intellectual Life,” The
Journal of Higher Education. (34; 8 Nov., 1963).
121
Ibid.
122
Varg, Paul A. Ibid.
| 151 |

of the humanist, Varg goes on, are first, as a citizen invested in a better world, and as a “scholar
and artist” invested in how to create and cope with that world. Where the humanist assesses
motivations, goals and value systems in the real world, the scientist constructs an artificial realm
divorced from that world: “[The] scientific method limits and narrows the problem at hand so as
to fit it into a design that permits controlled testing and quantification.” The sciences, these
authors warned, in what they hoped was a timely fashion, cannot be removed from the moral,
political, historical and social investigations of the humanities.

II. Techno-Social Responsibility in the Humanities

In 1967 and 1968 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences held a set of conferences
on “The Future of the Humanities.” Attended by forty-five distinguished humanists, the
conferences were the answer to a set of concerns that unexpectedly dominated a two-day
symposium, "Science and Culture" four years prior--namely, the relevancy of the humanities.
“The prevailing mood” at the 1967 and 1968 conferences, James Ackerman summarized in
Deadalus, “was one of self-criticism based on the conviction that ... the humanities were not
living up to their potential as vehicles for the understanding of man's achievement and
promise."
123
In conference papers and in structured group discussions, participants agonized over
the current state of the humanities. Since the mid-1960s, widespread social disruption outside the
academy, exemplified most by urban unrest, the Vietnam War, assassinations of major public
figures and an extensive student rebellion, had forced its way into the classroom. As a result, the

123
Ackerman, James. "Introduction to the Issue, 'The Future of the Humanities," Daedalus (The Future of
the Humanities), Vol. 98, No. 3, (Summer, 1969). Pp. 606.
| 152 |

principal aims of the humanities--to introduce students to the central traditions of Western
culture--had begun to appear to students and scholars alike as particularly constrained and out of
touch with the present world. To many, there appeared as never before, a yawning chasm--a near
total disconnect--between the traditional subject matter of the humanities and the rest of life. So
too did there appear a disconnect between the traditional medium bearing that subject matter and
the rest of life—between the worlds of print and electronic media.
Early on at the conference, Walter Ong, professor of English at St. Louis, outlined the
charges against the humanities which together amounted to the overall indictment that the
humanities failed to connect to the "rest of actuality."

Too many teachers fail to convey any sense of the real world in which
their own responses and students' responses to the material of their subject take
form…The teacher not infrequently insulates his class and his subject from his
own and his students' actual life, never daring to regard the realm of television
and electronic guitars and newspaper headlines and politics and ghetto housing
with the intent gaze he directs to the wit of Ben Jonson or Marvell or Rembrandt's
light and shadow or Bach's fugal counterpointing.

Technology was, in fact, a central topic of concern at the 1967 and 1968 conferences, a
critical element, participants averred, in assessing the future relevance of the humanities.
Embracing computational and information technologies was not just important because it
allowed humanists to find uniquely humanistic uses for them, participants argued, but it also
allowed them to relate to 1960s youth. “Perhaps the real question before us is whether we can
| 153 |

communicate with these students [“the technological youth”],” offered Robert Coles in a
discussion period following papers, “I hope our discussion does not deteriorate into an anti-
technological diatribe…as Stephen Graubard said, this is one option we do not have;
furthermore, nothing would suck us so fast into irrelevance.” In many respects, the incorporation
of electronic media into the humanities enterprise in these years paralleled the analogous
incorporation of contemporary issues, popular culture and non-western culture and ideas into the
curriculum. Both updated humanists’ connection to their students’ world.

Teaching the “Electronic Generation”

The use of electronic media in particular proved a critical way for humanists to commit to
their student’s interests, real-world experiences and media sensibilities—to commit to their
student’s world outside the classroom, a world no longer dominated by print. Using media
appeared to be profitable in many respects. Teaching the “electronic generation” via electronic
media was a better way to reach them— it took advantage of students’ eager receptivity to, for
instance, the screen and to the immersive character of audio via headphones. As a result, using
media also brought the narrative and experiential quality of humanities content to life,
“rejuvenating” humanities instruction, in the process. And finally, using media in the classroom
took advantage of student’s developed visual sensibility and gave humanities educators the
opportunity to help guide its critical uses.
“[Students] enjoy history class for a day,” Edwin Fenton, professor of history at
Carnegie-Mellon wrote about the use of transparencies, “They also learn that a picture … can be
used to generate a hypothesis as a starting point for historical investigation, a useful piece of
| 154 |

Figures 3.1 and 3.2. Jackson, Martin. “Education: The
Future Role of Films in History,” The History Teacher, Vol.
3, No. 3 (Mar., 1970). Pp. 12, 19.
knowledge for a society in which Life
and Look outsell all the historical
journals combined many times over.”
124

The ultimate medium in these respects
was film, and the late 1960s saw a great
expansion in its uses for humanities
content. In 1967, the American Historical
Society’s Committee on University and
College Teaching initiated the Feature
Film Project which commissioned twelve
historians to edit historically-oriented
theatrical films into half-hour segments
for use in college classrooms. The very
next year, Chelsea House publishers who
had recently acquired a massive
collection of newsreel footage, hired
history professors from the City College
of New York, directed by Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., to produce narrated half-
hour segments for their “History Machine” series. Both projects aimed to make history more
sensually and emotionally compelling to be sure. “What historian would not sell their soul for

124
Fenton, Edwin. “Using Audio-visual Materials to Teach History,” The History Teacher, Nov., 1968.
Pp. 44.
| 155 |

footage of Julies Caesar addressing the Roman Senate,” asked Martin A. Jackson, lecturer at
Herbert H. Lehman College and one of the historians working on the AHA’s Feature Film
Project.
125
But both projects were also explicitly conceived of as a way to break down the
“generation gap,” to relate more concretely to their students’ electronic sensibilities. “This is the
electronic generation visually,” Jackson asserted, “children are weaned on television sets, they
deal with the world in visual terms and are often strangers in the land of the printed page.”
126
In
advocating the use of films in history instruction, Jackson employed an argument familiar among
educators in the 1960s. He pointed to a generational distinction in order to illustrate the
difference between classroom film use in the 1950s and 60s. After all, educational and
instructional films had been around for years. The 1950s was full of children sitting in darkened
rooms watching half-hour segments on plant growth and personal hygiene. What had changed
was not just the overall media environment –more forms of interconnected media-- but the
students themselves. Students of the 1950s were a “television generation,” but they were not
born into a world with television. Students of the 1960s were an “electronic generation,” not just
a generation growing up in a world of the computer, interconnected information and multimedia
environments but they were born into a world dominated by the television screen. A great deal
was made of this latter point. Students of the 1960s were, according to John Culkin, famed media
scholar at Fordham University, “the only people who are the native citizens of the new electronic
environment.”
127
“Generations of students have been familiar with the audiovisual lesson,”

125
Jackson, Martin. “The Future Role of Films in History,” The History Teacher, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Mar.,
1970). Pp. 10.
126
Ibid. Pp. 11.
127
Culkin qtd in Glueck, Grace. “Multimedia: Massaging Senses for the Message,” New York Times. Sep
16, 1967. Pp. 35;37.
| 156 |

Jackson admitted. The difference was that “Students born in the 1950's bring to the classroom a
highly developed visual sense.” “What better way, then, to instruct the children of the television
age?” he concluded.
128
In fact, both projects did what they could to make the presentation of
their newly acquired films similar to the experience of television. They avoided the “foreboding
appearance of ordinary movie equipment” and instead, took advantage of new cartridge-loaded,
8mm, rear-projection film technology developed in 1965 by Kodak (used by the feature Film
Project) and Fairchild (used by Chelsea House) (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). These new rear-projectors
looked and functioned like standard television sets. “They invite use by the student,” Jackson
concluded.

A “Total Experience” in the Humanities

Another way to engage students of the electronic generation was immerse them in their
own media. In 1961, Robert Pooley, chair of the Department of Integrated Liberal Arts at the
University of Wisconsin, imagined for the audience at the National Council of English Teachers,
the potential benefits of advanced audio-visual methods for literary instruction. In a futuristic
flight of fancy which drew out the latent implications of advancing classroom technology,
Pooley showed contempt for selected impending aspects while endorsing others. His talk, a
guided tour of a “model school system” in the year 1975, contained many of the obvious
dystopian criticisms of automation run amok: nearly all teachers had been replaced by
computers; all students were watched by a central control unit which levied out punishment by
flashing a student’s number on a classroom screen, alerting them to go to detention. But not all

128
Ibid. Jackson, Martin. Pp. 11.
| 157 |

electronic systems in Pooley’s prophecy were detrimental to the educational process, and in
particular, English instruction. Pooley was especially intrigued by the prospect of immersive
multimedia literary teaching. The centerpiece of his futuristic fantasy was an advanced
audiovisual English classroom where students enjoyed a “profoundly moving experience” of
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”
129

Now the first screen dims and one at the center comes to life. Tom motions us to
put on the earphones, which we find attached to the back of the seat in front of us.
They are large and comfortable; immediately our ears are greeted by some soft
background music which we re-cognize, after a moment, as one of the English
suites by Ralph Vaughan- Williams. A moment later the music fades and an
excellent, clear voice announces, "'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold"… As the
poem begins we see on the screen a gentlemen dressed in the costume of an
Englishman of the 1860's sitting at a writing table in a room with French doors
partly open; through them we can see the water and the moon over it. In the room,
sitting in a comfortable chair is the gentleman's wife. She looks up when he rises
to glance out the window. When he speaks the words, "Come to the window,
sweet is the night air," she joins him. And thus through the poem, in natural and
homely movements, we observe the thought of the poem to take shape, as it were,
in the mind of the speaker. Not only by his voice, not only by his words, but also

129
Pooley, Robert C. “Automatons or English Teachers?” The English Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3. Pp. 169.
| 158 |

by his face, his gestures, his bodily movements, we sense the conflict in his mind,
the mingling of doubt and faith, and the quiet despair of his feelings.
130

Pooley’s fantasy exhibits a number of features common among humanists in the 1960s
who made a case for the use of multi-media instruction in their field. On the one hand, Pooley
makes clear that literature is fundamentally experiential and therefore well suited to multimedia
instruction. On the other hand, he indicates that such methods took advantage of students’
developed sensibility for their electronic world outside the classroom to impart such uniquely
experiential material. Pooley mentioned several times how “rapt” and “absorbed” his
hypothetical students were with the experience. Pooley’s potential classroom system had
borrowed just enough of these students’ electronic world outside school to captivate their born-
electronic sensibilities. As electronic natives, text and action on a glowing screen coupled with
music and dramatic readings all fading in and out at perfectly controlled key junctures—the
overall electronic environment—was irresistible to them. “Nor is the spell abruptly broken,”
Pooley went on, “The screen slowly fades, and soft music for more than two minutes permits of
meditation and emotional adjustment to the message of the poem. Then the music changes pace
to a matter-of-fact, lively air, the screen lights again, and we see a distinguished professor of
English literature from a Midwest university.”
131
These students were used to being mentally and
emotionally cued by the patterns and rhythms of media—the transition from opening credits to a
main feature, the emotional changeover in a film score, the predictable disruption of
commercials—so why not import that guiding mechanism into the classroom?

130
Ibid. pp. 170.
131
Ibid. Pp. 171.
| 159 |

By the mid-to late 1960s, humanities educators were in fact experimenting with these
types of total-audio-visual systems—testing and then talking about the potentially profitable
relationship between electronic and humanistic experiences in the classroom. In 1965, Richard
A. Stowe, an English teacher in Skokie, Illinois described this system used for instruction in
language and poetry:

The students file into a large, light, attractive room and take seats at tiered rows of
tables. Before each student is a set of four buttons, marked A, B, C, and D. Lively
music begins to come from overhead speakers through-out the room. Projectors
begin to whir quietly in a small darkened room behind a plastic screen at the front
of the auditorium. As the auditorium lights dim, a brilliant image illuminates the
screen. "Language" reads the title. The image then dissolves into the single word:
"Listen!" The music fades out, and a baby's voice is heard calling "Da-da, da-da."
A baby's picture appears on the screen at the same moment. Then the voices of
children at play fill the room as their photograph replaces that of the baby. Next
come the pictures of a married couple, a school class, a radio announcer, and a
child reading from a book, all matched with the appropriate sounds of
language.
132

Mixing media; intermingling multiple senses alongside ideas; appealing to a complex of
cognitive and affective registers created a “total experience,” a phrase regularly employed by

132
Stowe, Richard A. and Andrew J. Maggio. “Language and Poetry in Sight and Sound,” The English
Journal, Vol. 54, No. 5. Pp. 410.
| 160 |

humanities educators advocating educational media in these years. As Pooley and Stowe pointed
out, such an experience could be incredibly effective in bringing out the combined cerebral and
sensible nature of language and literature—itself a total experience. “Literature, and poetry in
particular… affects the senses as well as the intellect” argued Martin Birnbaum, professor of
English at Oregon College, “the initial experience is, in fact, sensual… it is a total
experience.”
133
Numerous English teachers and professors in these years attempted to translate
literature into multisensory experiences. Many did so in an ad-hoc kind of way. The pages of
Media and Methods, a new journal whose overall focus was the classroom use and analysis of
new media, predominately in the humanities, were full of English educators trying to figure out
the relationship between the experience of literature and new media in the classroom. Others
directed experimental projects funded by the U.S. Office of Education. Birnbaum, with funding
from the USOE, experimented with the multimedia rendering of poetry in the classroom.
Birnbaum did not employ the kind of immersive, centrally-coordinated, audio-visual system like
Stowe’s or like the one in Pooley’s educational fantasy. He, like most humanist using media in
these years, employed a more modest process, utilizing transparencies, films, audio recording
and slides at different points during class. But the argument was the same: an experience with
literature that involved “as many senses as possible” would result in “greater understanding” and
“greater enjoyment.” There was a sense that appealing to multiple senses would both engage
students on an affective level critical to the experience of literature and update that literary
experience by transplanting elements of their increased audiovisual environment in the outside
world into the classroom.

133
Birnbaum, Martin J. The Use of Media in the Teaching of Poetry. Final Report. CORD Project in the
Teaching of Poetry 1967-1969. Oregon ColIege of Education, Monmouth, 1969.

| 161 |

Figure 3.3. Source: Gilmartin, Frederick G. “AV Media and the Art
Room,” Art Education, Vol. 23, No. 3. Pp. 30.

Art history was another
subject whose educators found
themselves disposed to
experimenting with multiple
media systems. At Freedom
High School, Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, for example,
teachers constructed a single,
centrally controlled console
which employed four screens
capable of displaying super 8
motion pictures, 16mm sound movies, filmstrips, color slides, and audio via records or tape
recordings (Figure 3.3):

At the touch of a button, one of the "eyes" glows with vivid color as a 16mm
motion picture shows an art history class the life of the ancient Greeks and their
use of pottery. Still another touch, and a second "eye" flashes on to demonstrate,
through a 35mm filmstrip, how pottery is made. This is followed by 35mm slides
of Greek amphoras from various collections, to illustrate the evolution of the
shape and how it was refined to attain maximum beauty and utility. Finally, a
super 8 movie of a ceramics class in the Bethlehem Area School District
| 162 |

fashioning its own pottery, and more slides of contemporary pieces, unite the
entire presentation.
134

Teachers experimented with combining various media to affect specific moods: native-American
music while showing slides of George Catlin’s work on the west; sounds of industrial machinery
during a presentation on modern steel sculpture. Experimental multimedia systems in art history
and art education abounded in these years. At Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, art
educators created slide presentations synchronized with music, sound effects and lecture material
for individual study. Their aim, as with English educators, was to move “beyond the cognitive
domain into the affective area.” Perhaps the most sophisticated was at Troy State College in
Alabama, where Robert C. Paxson established an “Automated Esthetics Laboratory” with several
facilities, including a central audio-visual classroom and a self-instructional center with testing
devices.

The Information Explosion

For humanists, the knowledge explosion signified a unique kind of challenge; it
amounted to modernity's latest obstruction to man's coherent and meaningful experience of the
world, the latest and perhaps most powerful force for fragmentation. For members of the
electronics industry, behavioral scientists, academic administrators and educational technology
engineers, educational media became one way out of the information crisis. As is often the case
in the history of technology, here again, the potentially injurious social effects wrought by a new

134
Gilmartin, Frederick G. “AV Media and the Art Room,” Art Education, Vol. 23, No. 3. Pp. 29.
| 163 |

set of technologies were thought to be mitigated or even fully alleviated by the existence of other
technical systems. The postwar boom in scientific and technological research which made the
electronic revolution possible--that is, the development of means for the electronic transmission,
storage, organization, retrieval and processing of information—was also responsible for
generating the tremendous upsurge of information which now had to be transmitted to and
organized for humankind. For those advocating a technical solution, the way out was to develop
and implement more effective and efficient forms of largely non-print communication systems.
For humanists who embraced educational media, the new technology did not constitute a way to
simply transmit information faster. From their end of things, doing so only made matters worse.
Instead, humanists found their own uses for new media, uses which fit squarely into the
humanistic tradition and which were commensurate with their own concerns about the
information explosion. In new media humanists found the means to expand their traditional ideas
of literacy and to impart to their students a critical mastery of their new electronic environment.
They too found the means to invoke the full sensorium in getting their students to critically
engage and interrogate reality. Both efforts were essential if humanists, in an era of information
overload and accelerated change, were to fulfill their traditional task of instilling in their students
the capacity to order their experience of the world meaningfully. In these ways humanists were
able to turn so much rhetoric from the electronics industry and behavioral sciences on its head
and appropriate electronic media for their own purposes.
| 164 |

Figure 3.4. Google Ngram Viewer for “end of print” and “death of print” between 1950
and1980, English Corpus (1.5 million books), smoothing = 3.

At the most fundamental level, humanists’ engagement with new media in the 1960s was
a response to a new electronic environment in which the nature of information, communication
and experience themselves were changing. If humanists reacting to television in the 1950s were
interested in fitting the new medium into a world of print, humanists concerned with electronic
media in the 1960s were reacting to the possibility that new, more effective and efficient forms
of non-printed communication could soon or eventually take their place at the apex of education
and culture. Many were convinced that the “electronic revolution” would significantly impact if
not supersede print technology. And that feeling had escalated over a few short years (see Figure
1). While educators in the 1950s, humanists and others alike, constantly referred to television as
“the most important invention since print,” or …since Gutenberg,” in the mid-to late 1960s, they
regularly spoke of leaving the Gutenberg era behind altogether. In the 1950s, humanists
endeavored to bring television programming up to the quality of print. In the 1960s, they were
more apt to question the very status of print, for good or for ill. Take for instance, Edmund
Farrell’s 1967 report to the National Council of Teachers of English, English, Education and the
Electronic Revolution. The report is striking in its differences from the NCTE’s earlier
| 165 |

publication on the field’s relationship to new media, Neil Postman’s 1961 Television and the
Teaching of English (which we saw in chapter two). Farrell, professor of English Education at
the University of California, Berkeley, like Postman, also averred a strong commitment to
television education within his field: “A teacher of English who accepts responsibility for
helping students develop taste appropriate to the age in which they will live should spend
considerable time in the classroom discussing television programs.”
135
But Farrell, espousing a
sentiment in much wider circulation by the mid-1960s, also repeatedly questioned the fate of
print altogether. “This is not to argue that teachers of English should purge their classrooms of
books,” he maintained while still speaking about television, “Though electronic devices may
eventually eliminate most books as physical objects.”
136
Toward the beginning of his report,
Farrell even chastised contemporary Education and English teaching for failing to prepare
students for the outside world and offered this forecast: “What future place books will have,
either in education or leisure time activities, cannot confidently be predicted. Certainly they will
not dominate education as they presently do.”
137

Thus in one sense, humanists’ analytical and hands-on engagement with new media in the
1960s was a way to take up the reigns of the new technology at a time when it looked as though
information, knowledge, culture and education might be making a sizable migration to new
media formats. After all, humanists were there in the 15th century when culture made an
analogous migration from the scarce written page to mechanically repeatable text and they
wanted to be involved in its potential migration from text to the screen. The historical analogy

135

135
Farrell, Edmund. English Education and the Electronic Revolution. Campaign, Illinois: National
Council of Teachers of English, 1967. Pp. 53.
136
Ibid.
137
Ibid. Pp. 8.
| 166 |

was not lost on humanities educators. Scholars familiar with the history of communication
seemed to make the connection most clearly. In 1968 Walter Ong, Renaissance scholar and
media theorists, asserted what many then and even now are reluctant to admit: "Opposition
between technology and the humanities is more imaginary than real."
138
“The humanities,” he
went on to argue, “seize on technological interventions for their own specific purposes.”
Offering evidence from his own period of study, Ong compared humanists’ use of electronic
media and computers in the 1960s to their analogous techno-cultural intervention in the late 15th
century: “The printing press, a technological device, was developed largely under Renaissance
humanist auspices.” Not only were humanists intervening in the transition from print to
electronic culture just as they had in the shift from writing to print, but, according to Livio
Stecchini, professor of ancient history, the contemporary intervention was as essential as its
earlier counterpart. “It will take a heroic effort by those who have competence in the field of
thought to prevent the gadgeteers and the spiritually illiterate from obtaining the monopoly of the
new devices,” he avowed.
139
Discussing the need to counter the efforts and interests of
behavioral psychologists and the producers of electronic hardware, he went on: “Here too an
historical parallel is possible. In the first period of printing, a number of great humanists, among
the most famous were Reuchlin, Beatus Rhenanus, and Lefèvre d'Étaples, became printers or
employees of printers; in the sixteenth century several first rate scholars and thinkers chose the
career of printer, often at great personal sacrifice.”

138
Ong, Walter. “Introduction: Knowledge in Time.” Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International
Symposium. Ed. Walter Ong. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Pp. 13.
139
Stecchini, Livio. “Prospects in Retrospect: On Educational Technology.” Programs, Teachers and
Machines. Eds. Alfred de Grazia and David A. Sohn. New York: Bantam Books, 1962. Pp. 27.
| 167 |

Many averred just such a purpose to finding humanistic uses for educational technologies
in the 1960s, uses which went beyond those on offer by this era’s “gadgeteers.” In other words,
finding uses for educational media specific to humanities instruction amounted to more than
cautiously incorporating the principles of humanistic education into the machinery of new media.
Doing so also struck a number of observers as a needed corrective, a strategic inversion really, of
educational technology’s more standard justifications. “The community of educational
psychologists, the Skinnerian behaviorists, who prepare linear and branching programs, who
intimidate with formulas and occult numerical rituals, who scorn unmeasurable affect, to whom
the word ‘humanism’ is anathema” Arthur Daigon, Associate Professor of English Education at
the University of Connecticut summarized the dilemma, “their influence is becoming more and
more evident in the prepared materials teachers are asked to use.”
140
But, Daigon argued, a
humanistic experience of classroom materials was possible within these new systems, despite the
fact that they were devised and promoted by those who “scorn unmeasurable effect.” Diagon
likened the situation to a kind of intellectual subterfuge:

The behaviorist has his sequenced branching or linear programs giving stimulus,
response, and reinforcement; the technologist has his computers retrieving
information and giving immediate but selective feedback; … and the educator-
humanist, gloating quietly in the background, has his concern for involvement

140
Daigon, Arthur. “Pictures, Punchcards, and Poetry,” The English Journal, Vol. 58, No. 7 (Oct., 1969).
Pp. 1033-34.
| 168 |

with poetry, for literature as affective experience supported and carried out by his
erstwhile enemies.
141

Other humanists envisioned a more amicable relationship with the producers of
educational hardware, talking instead of working with them to insert humanistic uses of
educational technology into the mainstream. Participants at the Academy of Arts and Sciences
1967 conference on the Future of the Humanities quarreled over such a possibility, as Charles
Muscatine, professor of English at Berkeley, related:

We turned again to the question of our curriculum and spent a good deal of time
talking about the curriculum in relationship to modern circuitry. Our opinions
differed significantly on this subject… Eric Martin, Bill Arrowsmith, and myself
[thought] that we ought to get aboard these machines and see how well they can
be made to work. The technologists producing them are still in a mood to take
direction as to how they can be used.

The trick, as everyone observed was in finding uses that were truly within the humanistic
tradition: “The option will not last forever,” Muscatine continued, “and… if we do not
tell them, they are going to fumble to non-solutions of their own from which we will
suffer in the long run.” The question was one visited by humanists everywhere in these
years. Participants at a 1965 conference, Automation, Education and Human Values
aimed at understanding “the humanistic implications for education of … technological

141
Ibid. Pp. 1037.
| 169 |

change,” for instance, constantly turned to this theme, often underscoring the difference
between genuine humanistic uses for educational technology and what some considered
non-humanistic uses of modern electronics in humanities computing.
142
While speaking
about educational technology and the unique demands of humanities instruction,
Maxwell Goldberg, professor of humanities and Associate Director for Humanities at the
Center for Continuing Liberal Education at Pennsylvania State University, offered this
warning:
The computer, as well as other instrumentalities of programmed learning,
may be expected, sooner or later, to invade the last sanctuary of
humanistic and liberal education. It may be expected to insinuate itself
into the domain of the dialogue—‘The Great Conversation…It already has
penetrated into the cubicles of humanistic scholarship and research.

“Media Literacy” in the Humanities

Alongside the feeling that educational technology proved a vital way for humanists to
connect to their students was the sense that they had the distinct responsibility to prepare those
students to critically engage their native world of newer media, just as they had with television in
the 1950s. Thus the impulse among humanists in the 1950s to help their students develop levels
of taste and discrimination in their engagement with newer media continued into the 1960s with
the focus of that impulse expanding from television to all things electronic. Some did still focus
on television, but of course the meaning of the device had changed from a decade prior. Within

142
Automation, Education and Human Values
| 170 |

the new electronic environment the meaning of individual media changed—film, television, even
magazines were, from one perspective, now part of a communications world which also included
time-sharing computers, microwave-linked nation-wide teleconferencing and picture-phones.
Television, for instance, was no longer just a screen in a classroom or a living room. Televisions
were broadcasting transmissions via satellite; via city and state wide closed-circuit networks; via
cross-nation microwave teleconferencing links. In some ways, television was now part of an
instantaneous, potentially global, nearly-cybernetic information network in which ideas and
experiences circulated faster and faster. “As satellite networks develop … man will no longer
need to travel physically to change his environment,” Farrell argued in summing up his section
on television, “his stimuli will change by the world's coming to him.” “What implications for the
teaching of English [pocket-size televisions developed by Motorola] shall have no one can
augur.”
143
It was no longer just about getting students to watch good TV, or even to think of
television as akin to the printed page. It was about the role of television in an overall
instantaneous electronic communications environment. Thus, even when humanities educators
focused on television in the late 1960s, often there was now an expectation that developing
students’ critical apparatus for TV would help them navigate their total communications
environment. “It has long been a recognized obligation within the school to help children
become literate in print. Now, it is just as important to help them become literate about other
media. Literacy is a print concept; a similar process exists for the visual media too,” argued Ned
Hoopes, associate professor of English at Pace College in New York City, “As students become

143
Farrell, Edmund. English Education and the Electronic Revolution. Campaign, Illinois: National
Council of Teachers of English, 1967. Pp. 57.
| 171 |

more observant and articulate, they not only will demand more of the TV medium and of
themselves, but will react more intelligently to other media.”
144

Thus in the 1960s, getting students to engage new media critically was about more than
just imparting taste and discrimination for modes of communication beyond the codex. It was
about getting students to critically engage the world—to interrogate reality—in a new way. The
knowledge explosion signified a different kind of challenge for humanists than it did for other
groups. For members of the electronics industry, behavioral scientists, academic administrators
and educational technology engineers, speeding up the tempo of information transmission via
educational media became a way out of the information crisis. But for humanists, the knowledge
explosion amounted to modernity's latest obstruction to man's coherent and meaningful
experience of the world, the latest and perhaps most powerful force for fragmentation. As a
result, both within and without the humanities, teachers and scholars of the interpretive sciences
were thought to have inherited a distinct set of responsibilities in the new electronic era. The
accelerated rate of new information along with its increasingly automated organization, storage,
retrieval and transmission prompted many, even those in industry, to highlight that traditional
task of humanities teaching which seeks to instill in students and society the impulse to handle
information critically, to turn data into meaningful knowledge.
145

This new charge among humanists can perhaps best be seen in the transformation of Neil
Postman’s thinking throughout the decade. As we saw in chapter two, Neil Postman, associate
professor of English Education at New York University, opened his 1961 Television and the

144
Hoopes, Ned E. “Critics out of Vidiots,” The Teachers Guide to Media and Methods. Vol. 4. Num. 2.
Oct 1967.
Philadelphia: Media and Methods Institute, Inc.
145
See for instance, Education, Automation and Human Values. (1966)
| 172 |

Teaching of English by encapsulating widespread sentiment among literary scholars in the late
1950s: “For millions of youngsters ... television is the most persistent and magnetic source of
information and a primary source of literary experience. To the extent that their responses to
television are informed, discriminating, and creative, we may be assured that our language and
literature, as well as the lives of our students, will be enriched by contact with television.”
146
By
1969, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Postman had all but given up on the idea that
television could be the source of quality literary experience. He was no longer concerned
principally with television or with bringing the quality of its content up to the standards of print
so much as he was concerned with all "electronic media" and the increasing irrelevance of the
codex altogether: “What you have is a totally new environment requiring a whole new repertoire
of survival strategies ... When you plug something into a wall, someone gets plugged into you.
Which means you need a new pattern of defense, perception, understanding, evaluation. You
need a new kind of education.”
147
Postman had something in mind. He first spelled out his new
vision for education in a 1970 article, “Curriculum Change and Technology,” a support paper for
the report "To Improve Learning; a Report to the President and the Congress of the united states
by the Commission on Instructional Technology." The curriculum described would eventually be
incorporated into the Media Ecology Program established by Postman at New York University a
year later.
In the report, Postman encapsulated for his Washington audience the wide circulating
sentiment as he saw it. Man’s meaningful experience of the world was dangerously confounded
by both the knowledge explosion and by rapid change generally, the latter increasingly referred

146
Postman, Neil. Television and the Teaching of English. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961.
Pp. v.
147
Postman, Neil. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Delacorte Press, 1969. Pp. 7.
| 173 |

to as “future shock.” Humanists, in such an era had to ramp up their traditional endeavor to aid
the individual in organizing their experience of the world meaningfully. But Postman was part of
a cadre of humanities educators who felt that imparting critical media skills, both by teaching
media and by using it in the classroom, was a primary way to produce students psychically
capable of navigating a world of excessive information and accelerated change. “Imagine a clock
face with 60 minutes on it,” Postman wrote, explaining the connection between the amount of
information and the rate of change in society:

Let the clock stand for the time men have had access to writing systems. The
clock would thus represent something like 3,000 years, and each minute on the
clock, fifty years. On this scale, there was no significant communication or
technological changes until about nine minutes ego. At that time, the printing
press came into use in Western culture. About three minutes ago, the telegraph,
photograph, and locomotive arrived. Two minutes ago: the telephone, rotary
press, motion pictures, automobile, airplane, and radio. One minute ago, the
talking picture. Television has appeared in the last ten seconds, the computer in
the last five, and communication satellites in the last second. The laser beam
appeared only a fraction of a second ago.
148

Thus, the human situation was fundamentally different from all prior periods of change:
“CHANGE CHANGED,” he quipped. In such a situation, the mere transmission of information,

148
Postman, Neil. "Curriculum Change and Technology." Academy for Educational Development, Inc.,
Washington, D.C. 1970. Pg. 2-3.
| 174 |

that time-honored goal of much education, according to Postman, was not only irrelevant, it was
damaging. What mattered now was not taking in more information, but a mastery of the
mediums along which that information traveled. It was one thing when the codex was the only,
or even the primary, mode of information transmission. In the Gutenberg era, reading skills were,
by definition, a mastery of informational media. And since only one medium (the codex)
mattered in that earlier era, imparting critical skills about mediums as objects of investigation
didn’t really matter either. But in the electronic era, in an environment where more and more
informational mediums thrived, mastering the very concept of media was crucial “The way to be
liberated from the constraining effects of any medium is to develop a perceptive on it—how it
works and what it does. Being illiterate in the process of any medium (language) leaves one at
the mercy of those who control it.”
149
Thus, Postman advocated putting “multi-media literacy,”
by which he meant both the ability to use and the ability to critique the social effects of various
media, at the center of secondary and post-secondary education.
Though Postman’s position in the late 1960s was a drastic reconsideration of his earlier
thinking about media, he was not alone in advocating that the mastery of media take center stage
in humanities education. This argument, for instance, appeared in numerous articles in a new
journal, Media and Methods. Frank McLaughlin, professor of English at Rutgers University and
editor of the journal, put it perhaps more succinctly. Students had to work harder than any other
in history to make sense of their environment, he averred. Educational reform which advocated
the faster transmission and assimilation of information only added to the din of communications
chaos: “The generation growing up in this information-polluted environment should at least be
entitled to ear plugs and a map. This never quiet marketplace wasn’t created by the youngster,

149
Postman, Neil. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Delacorte Press, 1969. Pp. 166.
| 175 |

unfortunately, and helping him sanely inhabit it is the task of the educator.”
150
The English
educator, in particular, McLaughlin averred, could help by teaching texts not as revered cultural
objects, but as examples in a wider curriculum which sought to explicate the social effects of
media—“Not by annual pilgrimages to the shrines of Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, but
through interdisciplinary exploration of environments and media.”
151
Perhaps most important, by
doing so, McLaughlin argued, “the Humanities would be the heart of school programs, not the
apologetic, makeshift intruder now struggling against the linear, utilitarian, and scientific
influences that predominate.”
In these ways, “media-” and “multimedia-literacy” ran afoul of established textual
practices in the humanities classroom—namely, close reading. Once again, humanists were faced
with a decision. On the one hand, they could remain bound to traditional practices, in this case,
teaching the close reading of print-based texts, which many averred, fell further and further
outside the “zone of proximal development” for the born-electronic generation. On the other
hand, they could admit that large-scale social forces were changing the way people engaged
culture and information, get on board, and remain vital by helping to instill critical interpretative
skills for these new modes of media engagement. The decision was one humanists were
constantly coming to face mid-century: how to help guide the new cultural and informational
practices of the electronic age and at the same time remain true to the traditional and, many
would argue, perennially important aim of humanities instruction—to teach the slow,
contemplative and reflective engagement of cultural objects. Thus, multimedia literacy was, in

150
McLaughlin, Frank. “New Circuits or Short Circuits?,” Media and Methods, v4 n3, Nov 1967. Pp. 19.

151
Ibid.
| 176 |

part, an attempt to negotiate between the practices of close reading and the demands of the new
electronic world, between the established mode of textual engagement in humanities education
and a world of sensory and information overload. And in this way, the information explosion,
and humanists’ felt responsibility to respond to it and its attendant technologies in uniquely
humanistic ways, helped move them away from the instructional praxis of close reading in the
1960s.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, there was, for instance, a sizable vogue among humanities
educators for putting media into the hands of their students. Many English educators fashioned
assignments which asked students to use various media to interpret traditional literature. In some
cases, the assignment was to translate a novel or poem into a single new media format, like film.
In other cases, students constructed more inclusive multimedia presentations. “It is essential for
students to become active, intelligent and discriminating consumers of both print and nonprint
media” argued James Bell, an English teacher who in 1968 started requiring his students to
construct multi-media presentations of novels in lieu of standard book reports.
152
In fact,
according to Bell, television and newer media had become such an integral part of a student’s
communication environment that their overall creativity hinged on its mastery: doing so “could
become the very beginning step toward an education of his whole imaginative life.” Bell dubbed
his method the Multi-Media Response Process, and in it, he specifically prohibited students from
using any print material in their responses to texts. Bell, hoped, it seemed, that this process
would force students to think about non-printed, new media as a semi-direct, translatable analog
able to stand on its own terms with a literary text. Other educators required students to create

152
Bell, James. “A Nonprint Response To Print,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National
Council of Teachers of English (62nd, Minneapolis, November 23-25, 1972).
| 177 |

projects that integrated literary texts with new media. For instance, English students at Belmont
High school in Belmont Massachusetts, took poems and integrated them into slideshows which
synchronized various media elements including the text of the poem itself, music, sound effects
audio interviews and original photography.
153

English educators were not the only ones who asked their students to translate the core
texts of their field into multi-sensory media experiences. In 1971 the history department at the
University of Delaware began offering a new course, History Through Media, with such a
requirement. The course was part the department’s new Media Center established in 1969. In that
year, the American Historical Association in concert with Indiana University's History
Department and Social Studies Development Center established the History Education Project
(HEP). The project oversaw thirteen programs nationwide each of which sought “the
improvement of history education and the training of teachers of history, grades kindergarten
through PH.D.,” though the primary emphasis throughout 1970-72 was on pre-collegiate
teaching. Many of these programs incorporated multimedia elements into their curriculum
reform and at the University of Delaware, in particular, the HEP team, comprised of two
members of the history department, William E. Pulliam and Joedd Price, established the Media
Center which produced and coordinated a collection of photographic slides, specifically for use
in history department lectures.
154
As professors in the department began using more slides and

153
Morrissey, Muriel E. “To Illustrate a Mood, Creatively,” Leaflet; v68 n1 Feb 1969.
154
Classifying and cataloging collections of audio-visual materials became a daunting task for many
schools, colleges and universities. As humanities departments at Delaware and other educational
institutions put systems in place to organize their collections, Robert Diamond, director of Instructional
Resources at the State University New York, College of Fredonia, worked with professors in art history,
English and history to formulate and build a nationally scalable search and retrieval system for slides in
arts and humanities instruction. See, Diamond, Robert M. The Development of a Retrieval System for
35mm Slides Utilized in Arts and Humanities Instruction: Final Report. State Univeristy of New York,
Fredonia, 1969.
| 178 |

film, James C. Curtis constructed his own course whereby students were required to do archival
work and then present their findings in a multimedia presentation. “Some educators … claim that
such projects are mere indulgences, pandering to the youthful exuberance for sound and light,”
Clark defended his course in The History Teacher, “Yet such exuberance exists. Today's student
is television's offspring. His fascination with media, if properly channeled, can produce solid
results that are educationally sound.”
155
What’s more, Clark argued, doing so required more than
getting instructors to use media to convey the traditional information once confined to lecture
notes or textbooks. It required moving students out of the passive role vis-à-vis media and giving
them the opportunity to “master the medium” itself.

The Aesthetic Education Movement

Perhaps the most united and widespread effort among humanities educators in the 1960s
to use new media to advance traditional humanistic goals can be found in the aesthetic education
movement. Humanities educators like Postman, McLaughlin and others, attended to student’s
increasing need to make sense of their environment by focusing on critical media skills. Others
focused on the sensory chaos of the era. Although aesthetic education meant different things to
different groups, at its core was a belief that an “education of the senses” was now essential in
getting students to make sense of the world around them. Sensory order, according to these
teachers and scholars, was now a critical skill necessary for a meaningful experience of the world
and educational media became an essential part of imparting that skill.

155
Curtis, James C. and Stanley Schwartz. “Learning History through the Use of Media: An Experimental
Approach,” The History Teacher, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Aug., 1973). Pp. 536.
| 179 |

The movement is sometimes identified as originating with the inauguration of the Journal
of Aesthetic Education in 1966 as well as special issues in Studies in Art Education and Art
Education devoted to “aesthetic education” in 1966 and 1967, respectively. But of course, such
publications more often mark a point of general acknowledgement for a set of ideas, or in this
case, curriculum reform, and not a point of origin. In fact, the impetus towards aesthetic
education began a few years before these publications. In 1962 the U.S. Office of Education
established the Arts and Humanities Program whose task was to implement a nationwide
program of educational research and development at the intersection of these two fields. Between
October of 1964 and November of 1966, the Arts and Humanities program sponsored seventeen
conferences, seminars, and workshops on art education alone.
What emerged out of these conferences, and in particular the Seminar in Art Education
for Research and Curriculum Development held at The Pennsylvania State University and the
Whitney Museum of American Art Conference, was a concrete plan among participants to carry
out curriculum reform projects for arts and humanities programs in schools across the country.
Thus, the movement was really comprised of a loose-knit community of scholars and educators
who instituted various projects in “aesthetic education” or sometimes, "allied arts," "integrated
arts," "interdisciplinary arts," or "arts in general education" in the 1960s and 70s. Among the
largest these projects was the Aesthetic Education Program conducted jointly by the University
of Ohio and the Central Midwestern Regional Educational Lab, the Allied Arts Project at the
State Teachers College, Kirksville, Missouri and the Aesthetic Education Project at the
University of Illinois, directed by Harry Broudy. Others outside the community of scholars
participating in the Arts and Humanities conferences established similar large-scale projects,
including the Rockefeller funded Arts in General Education Program and the Culture,
| 180 |

Understanding and Enrichment Program (CUE) established by the University of the State of
New York, State Education Department.
Intellectually, the aesthetic education movement can be characterized as a widespread
concern that emerged among scholars and educators in the early-to-mid-1960s with the role of
arts education in the nation’s schools, colleges and universities, and more generally, with the
function of aesthetic experience and perceptual sensitivity in society at large. It was, in the
broadest sense, a response to the increased focus on and funding for science and engineering
related fields in the schools, colleges and universities of post-Sputnik America. Like the
establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities in 1965, the movement
was born out of a widespread sentiment that the emphasis on numeracy, systematic reasoning
and professional expertise had to be balanced with the development of feeling, values and
affective dimensions of living in education. "The need for aesthetic awareness is greater in our
own time than ever before,” wrote Sam Reese, from the distance of the late 1970s, “Modern,
technological society has created conditions which cause the sources for meaning and value in
personal life to be meager and insufficient. The common conviction of the aesthetic education
advocates is that the development of aesthetic sensitivity and the enrichment of subjective life
that results will help fill some of the void created by the technomeritocracy.”
156
As we’ve seen,
in the 1960s, many both within and without the arts and humanities saw these two fields as
bound together in an exclusive challenge: to maintain and demonstrate their merit by evidencing
the unique importance of culture and values in a nation gripped by science and technology. One
strategy among educators in the 1960s was to try to bolster the connections between the arts and

156
Reese, Sam. An Implementation of the Cemrel Aesthetic education Program by Elementary Classroom
Teachers: A Qualitative Observation. PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
1981. Pp. 2.
| 181 |

humanities in school and college curricula. The aesthetic education movement was one such
effort. “It is important to recognize the intimate relationships among the arts and humanities,”
argued Manuel Barkan, the first director of the Aesthetic Education Program at the University of
Ohio, “Both are concerned with the meaning and quality of experience in life.”
157
Aesthetic
education programs were, after all, concerned with art appreciation and art history and not art
practice. Most programs made a point, especially when applying for funding, of articulating a
vision for aesthetic education whose purpose was not to develop art skills, or even to establish a
model for taste and judgment, but rather to educate the aesthetic and affective sensibilities for
effective and meaningful living. Thus, aesthetic education programs targeted humanities courses
just as much as it did art courses. Humanities courses, in particular, Richard Kuhns, Professor of
philosophy at Columbia University wrote in the second issue of The Journal of Aesthetic
Education, provided the best opportunity for creating in students “the awareness of the unity
which exists among philosophy, history and the arts.”
158

The aesthetic education movement of the 1960s wasn’t the first time that an “education of
the senses” was offered up as a cure for the human psyche in an era of rapid technological
change. Social disruption is often sublimated into concerns over sensory chaos. In the late 19
th

century, the sensorial mayhem of urban living, the increased speed of industrial work and the
widespread use of new technologies of representation like photography, film, the telegraph and
telephone led countless observers to bemoan the overstimulation of the senses. Such conditions
were thought to be responsible for perceptual fatigue leading to increased complaints of eye and

157
Barkan, Manuel. Aesthetic Education Progam at the Ohio State University: Report on the Planning
Phase. Unpublished Central Midwestern Regional Educational Laboratory, August 1967. Pp. 5.
158
Kuhns, Richard. “Humanities as a Subject,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn,
1966). Pp. 7.
| 182 |

ear strains and of general bodily over-sensitivity and pain. It was also thought to be at the center
of various new nervous disorders, like neurasthenia.
Similar concerns emerged in the 1960s. Although part of the problem in the transistorized
world of the sixties, at least according to humanities educators, was that “sensory overload” had
itself become a cultural vogue for youth. “A new method of communication is developing in our
society—the technique of multimedia,” wrote Grace Glueck in the New York Times in 1967, “Its
jarring combinations of stimuli—sounds, lights, colors, smells and moving images—aim at
reaching audiences by a supersaturated attack on all the senses.”
159
The trend found its most
extreme form in youth and counter culture. In the mid to late 1960s an number of discotheques in
New York and Los Angeles opened up offering a “total environment” of music, pulsating lights,
flashing slide images, projected films and at New York’s Electric Circus, a color mist. But the
notion of conveying messages by bombarding the senses with multiple audio and visual signals,
of communicating via a “total experience,” had wider traction. In 1964, John Brockman, a
graduate of Columbia’s School of Business Administration, started Brockman Associates, a firm
which organized artists and filmmakers to create multimedia presentations for industry. At least
one client, the Scott Paper Company, indulged Brockman’s services, in which regional salesmen
in nine cities received “the company’s message by simultaneous projections, rock ‘n’ roll music
and strobe lights.”
160
Said a representative for the company, “We couldn’t seem to get through to
our salesmen. They’re young—in their 20’s—and they want to be with it. Since this is the kind
of thing going on now, we decided to [do it].” Another firm specializing in “total kinetic
environments,” Sensefex, created similar presentations for Yardley of London, Inc., and E. I.

159
Gluek, Grace. “Multimedia: Massaging Senses for the Message,” New York Times, Sep 16, 1967. Pp.
35.
160
Ibid.
| 183 |

duPont dr N,mours & Co. in the late 1960s. “We approach each project with ‘How many senses
can we involve?’” said one of Sensefex’s co-founders. As we’ve seen, appealing to multiple
senses was often seen as a way to slip a message past cognitive functions and directly into
affective domains. Thus even Reverend Dr. Harvey Cox, a Harvard theologian, offered his
keynote address to the 1967 Conference on Church and Society using three movie projectors, a
radio, a television set, two tape recorders and color slides. 6654

| 184 |

Figure 3.5 (top-left). The Dioplyecran. Figure 3.6 (top-right). The Labyrinth. Figure 3.7 (bottom). Circle-Vision
360.

| 185 |

Expo 67’ held in Montreal was in some ways the pinnacle of the intermedia vogue of the
late 1960s. More than any World Fairs before it, the pavilions at Expo 67 were audio-visual
wonderlands, total optical and aural experiences. Janine Marchessault, professor of film studies
at York University has argued that Expo 67 was “a pivotal precursor to the multiplication and
interconnectedness of screens that characterize twenty-first century digital architectures.” Media
scholar Gerald O’Grady has argued that Expo 67 was the most important media experiment of
the 20
th
century. In fact, a full sixty-five percent of the pavilions at Expo 67 presented moving
images, some with dazzling complexity. “The grander and theme pavilions featured multi-
million dollar shows which explored the latest optical technology,” Judith Shatnoff described
Expo 67 for Film Quarterly readers, “multiple-dimension films, multiscreen, multi-image, multi-
media light and sound experiences.”
161
Films came on one screen, Shatnoff described, two, five,
nine wide screens, in a circle (Figure 7), 112 cubed screen moving on a wall (Figure 5), a film
“labyrinth” (Figure 6), a 70mm film frame broken into countless screen shapes, screen-mirror
complexes that projected images to infinity, a screen made of running water and a dome screen.
These new audio-visual environments were given names by their promoters: Circle Vision,
Polyvision, Kinoautomat, Diapolyecran and Kaleidoscope.
Entrepreneurs and counter-cultural figures trying to temporarily alter individuals’ sensory
experience with new media environments were working under the assumption, widespread in the
1960s, that the new electronic order of things was transforming the human sensorium generally.
Some focused on the increased orality of the new era, others on the importance of visuality.
Marshall McLuhan, who Brockman and all other intermedia artists and advocates constantly
cited (some called Expo 67 “McLuhan’s fair”), popularized the connection between electronic

161
Shatnoff, Judith. “Expo 67: A Multiple Vision,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967). Pp. 2.
| 186 |

media and sensory equilibrium. McLuhan proffered the idea that different media appeal to the
senses with distinct sense ratios together with the notion that the senses were interdependent in
such a way that when a dominant media appealed nearly exclusively to one sense it set all in a
state of disequilibrium. “The electronic media together add up to an externalization of our
sensorium,” he argued in a 1960 report commissioned by the National Association of
Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), “No change in technology can touch us save by altering the
existing ratio among our senses. The nature of sensation being itself comprised of a ratio among
our various senses, any increase or decrease of intensity in any sense area immediately affect our
awareness of the other senses.”
162
It wasn’t just that one media might, for instance, emphasize
the visual register and thus create an evnironment where our other senses atrophied. It was this,
but it was more. The senses were organized, McLuhan offered, such that intensifying one
increased and/or decreased all the others to new levels, like readjusting all the dials on a five
channel equilizer. For instance, McLuhan predicted that the introduction of television would see
Americans eating more spicy food. Thus, McLuhan maintained, perhaps most popularly in his
famous axiom, “The medium is the message,” that media scholars and media makers should not
be concerned with media content so much as how it changed the ratio of our everyday sensory
experience. “We may be forced, in the interests of human equilibrium,” he told the NAEB, “to
suppress various media as radio or movies for long periods of time, or until the social organism
is in a state to sustain such violent lopsided stimulus.”
163

162
McLuhan, Marshall. Report on Project in Understanding New Media. New York: National
Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1960. n. pag.
163
Ibid.

| 187 |

In 1960 McLuhan didn’t feel that we had come to a point where such action was
necessary, but he did feel that electronic media had shifted a crucial sensorial balance, returning
society to a more tribal-like aural-oral culture. McLuhan was just one of a number of new media
scholars in the 1960s who argued that the electronic age was a return to an oral culture and
juxtaposed it to the predominantly visual world of the print era. “The changes in today’s
sensorium as a whole have been too complex for our present powers of description,” wrote
Walter Ong in 1967, “but … the new age into which we have entered has stepped up the oral and
aural.”
164
Modern communications did not slight the visual by any means, Ong and others
argued, but they gave more emphasis to the oral-aural than did print. Television, which media
scholars took to be the most transformative medium of the era, was just as, if not more, aural
than visual. Images emanating from a television screen lacked real detail (as opposed to
photographs or film); the audio did not. For instance, while silent film was at one time an
option, Ong argued, silent T.V. could never be an “engaging prospect.” Thus, while oral culture
was aural in nature, and print culture was primarily visual, the post-print era was both.
While some focused on the increased role of the oral-aural in a world of electronic
communications, others focused on the importance of the visual. “Visual literacy” became a
topic of widespread concern among educators and scholars in the mid-to-late-1960s.
165
But here,
the focus was less on a new balance or even an imbalance in the sensorium, so much as the
integrative function of vision in an increasingly un-integrated world. “The heightening of
sensibilities involved in learning to be ‘visually literate,’" argued Martin Dworkin, at the first

164
Ong, Walter. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1967. Pp. 88.
165
See for instance, Benning, Virgina. An Annotated Bibliography Concerning Visual Literacy.
Unpublished Report, 1973.
| 188 |

Conference on Visual Literacy in Rochester, New York in 1969, “should be in the direction of
the integration of the self.”
166
One of the leading spokesmen for such a concept, Gyorgy Kepes,
often cited by “visual literacy” and “aesthetic education” advocates, promoted a systematic
philosophy of vision which went largely unrecognized until the mid-1960s. At the heart of
Kepes’s philosophy of humankind lie a conviction that vision was both the key to being a fully
integrated human and to properly ordering the chaos of so much recent scientific knowledge,
technological innovation and urban reorganization. In Kepes estimation, the human experience
had become dangerously compartmentalized—people responded to leisure and entertainment
with feeling, science and technology with reason and to art with perceptual sensitivity. Since
visual forms communicated on a sensory, emotional and intellectual register, only they could
restore the unity of humankind’s experience. “Our task is to face the present with the courage of
an open eye, an open heart, and an open mind. We cannot renounce the new scientific efforts and
technological achievements of the twentieth century because they were bought by human
distress,” Kepes wrote in the introduction to The Education of Vision (1965), “Our central
faculty in performing this task, as we have suggested, is visual sensibility. Thus a key task in our
time is the education of vision—the developing of our neglected, atrophic sensibilities.”
167
Kepes
had advocated his philosophy of vision for many decades, but in the mid-1960s, such a
philosophy was ripe for embrace. From 1965-72 Kepes conceived and edited a widely circulated
seven volume series titled Vision + Value. The series brought together an impressive
interdisciplinary group of scholars including physicists, urbanists, musicologists, architects,
mathematicians, cyberneticists, philosophers, aestheticians, curators, graphic designers,

166
Dworkin, Martin. “Toward an Image Curriculum: Some Questions and Cautions,” Journal of Aesthetic
Education, Vol. 4, No. 2, (Apr., 1970). Pp. 132
167
Kepes, Gyorgy. Ed. The Education of Vision. New York: G. Braziller, 1965.
| 189 |

psychologists, composers, educators and anthropologists. The series acted as a platform from
which Kepes and those who shared aspects of his ideas could work out systematic view of the
role of vision in the life of man. But perhaps more revealing, in 1967 the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology funded Kepes’ Center for Advanced Visual Studies, a community of scholars,
technologists and artists dedicated to, among other things, promoting the integrative function of
vision in the modern world. “Vision is a fundamental factor in human insight,” Kepes wrote in
his proposal to MIT, also published in Daedalus, “It is our most important resource for shaping
our physical, spatial environment and grasping the new aspect of nature revealed by modern
science.”
168

The importance of vision, and the senses in general, for unifying individuals’ increasingly
fragmented experience of the world was an idea whose time had come. Particularly among
humanists. "We need to sharpen all our perceptions, to see, hear, and even to taste, touch, and
smell many material and immaterial environments with greater accuracy," argued Bruce Dearing,
professor of English and Humanities and President of the State University of New York,
Binghamton, while speaking about the role of the humanities in the age of automation.
169
The
aesthetic education movement was part of this new humanistic focus on the senses.

In higher education, the movement lacked expansive federally funded projects and
instead took the form of new offerings in courses and programs of study in “aesthetic education”

168
Kepes, Gyorgy. “The Visual Arts and Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration,” Daedalus, Vol. 94, No.
1, Science and Culture (Winter, 1965). Pp. 120.
169
Dearing, Bruce. "Education for Humanistic Living in an Age of Automation," Automation, Education
and Human Values. Ed. Maxwell H. Goldberg. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966. Pg. 101.
| 190 |

or “aesthetic studies” by numerous colleges and universities.
170
But a significant portion of the
aesthetic education endeavor, and one relevant to our interests here, involved university level
humanities educators becoming active in K-12 arts and humanities instructional curriculum
reform. The aesthetic education movement, and its commitment to new media, in fact, proved a
vital way for humanists to become more socially engaged by contributing to expansive K-12
educational reform, reform centered on the visual literacy and sensorial dexterity of the youngest
citizens of the electronic generation. All the largest projects—the Allied Arts Project, the
Aesthetic Education Project, the CUE project and the Aesthetic Education Program —were run
by university based humanities scholars, the later by the one of the nation’s leading philosophers
of aesthetic education. “A problem exists for the scholar in the humanities,” wrote Richard
Colwell in his report on the Aesthetic Education Project at the University of Illinois, “how is he
to provide a better education in the arts for every school child within the existing framework …
[such that it] develops aesthetically aware citizens?” According to Stanley Madeja, director of
The Aesthetic Education Program at The Ohio State University General, the movement emerged
from “an agreement among humanists that children were being shortchanged … children were
missing the chance to learn how to experience, judge and value, the aesthetic in their lives.”
Aesthetic education, in both K-12 and higher education, ultimately constituted a
humanistic attempt to get students to order their experience of an increasingly media-rich and
technologized world by developing their sensual capacities. “During the past several decades
technology and technics have contributed to a media and knowledge explosion,” wrote Kenneth
Tidwell, the director of the Aesthetic Education Program in 31 schools in Alabama, Florida, and

170
Reese, Sam. “An Implementation of the CEMREL Aesthetic Education Program by Elementary
Classroom Teachers: A Qualitative Observation,” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, 1981). Pp. 2.
| 191 |

Georgia, “Bizarre images, sounds, and actions generated at incomprehensible speeds compete for
our attention and often prevent sound judgment.”
171
As one can imagine, with a philosophy
focused on developing sensual competency and dexterity, the instructional units in aesthetic
education curricula were structured around media—television programs, slides, photographs,
films and audio recordings. But the use of media was about more than just offering a sensorial
antidote to the purely verbal or written description of art objects; a visual rendering of a painting,
or an audio version of a poem. It was about getting students to engage the world around them
with a heightened perceptual sensitivity.
Take for example, the Culture, Understanding and Enrichment (CUE) project instituted in
the arts and humanities programs in 13 high schools in New York from 1963 to 1966. In their
1966 report, the directors of the program argued, the true aim of “training in visual perception”
was not to impart the skills necessary for the enjoyment or the production of art. Rather, it was
for “the education of the emotions for intelligent living in a complex, ever changing
environment.”
172
“In relatively static societies such as those which existed in the Middle Ages,”
the authors went on, “the individual could be taught what to think and do, and how to interpret
the environment, or reality, entirely by examples from the past.”
173
But in a world where “the
only constant is the assurance of continuing, rapidly accelerated change” it was no longer enough
to tell students this is how you should make sense of your world, or even, this is how we have
traditionally made sense of our world. One had to provide students with the skills, in this case,
visual skills, necessary to make order and meaning themselves. Only then could they continue to

171
Field Trial of Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development and CEMREL. Final Report.
172
Allen, James et al. The Cue Report: 1966. New York State Education Department, Albany. Report
Number NDEA-VIIS-324. Pp. 4.
173
Ibid. Pp. 4-5.
| 192 |

make sense of their world as their environment radically shifted every 10 years, then every 5
years, then, perhaps, every year.
The way to do this, the creators of the CUE program, argued was through the use of
media. On the one hand, media was “education through vision” at a time when increasing change
manifested itself visually—the rapidly changing urban setting, increasing mobility and of course,
the media environment itself, which was “becoming increasingly visually oriented.” On the other
hand, the nature of new media promoted a different kind of engagement with information. Books
were ideal devices for the indexical, linear transmission of facts. The screen, however, or "new
media" generally, was best suited for getting students to critically engage reality--to interrogate
actual occurrences in the world. The visual register (especially in combination with audio) was
more appropriate for getting students to perceive inter-relationships and to search for meaning
amongst a myriad of stimuli. The latter was seen to be absolutely essential in a world of
accelerated change. "The school is still book and fact oriented,” the authors of the CUE report
argued, “Such education continues to promote the single line progression of thought which is not
adequate to fully interpret the complex environment of today's world."
174
On the other hand,
media promoted “the education of the eye” which itself encouraged “the visual study of [one’s]
environment.” In short, “visual communication …provides for the simultaneity of stimuli which
occurs in real life situations.”
175
Engagement with media on the visual or in multiple registers
helped students order their increasingly visual world by teaching them to take the “myriad of
stimuli in [their] environment and [putting the student] in the habit of perceiving relationships
and searching for meanings.”

174
Ibid. Pp. 6.
175
Ibid. Pp. 5.
| 193 |

Aesthetic education was thought to educate the emotions in an analogous fashion—by
revealing critical interrelationships. More specifically, aesthetic education was thought to teach
students to integrate their affective and cognitive domains in responding to objects and events in
their environment. Such integrated responses came from a “third domain.” Aesthetic education
practitioners often referred to this kind of response as “enlightened cherishing,” a term coined by
Harry Broady, director of the Aesthetic Education project at the University of Illinois and meant
to be shorthand for a judgment of both intellect and affectation.
176
An aesthetic experience,
advocates argued, is one in which all aspects of an object or event is comprehended as a total;
medium, structure and content come together to form meaning. One experiences the “integral
interrelationships between” these potentially diverse elements where the medium is sensual, the
content is intellectual and the structure is potentially both.
177
Like Kepes, aesthetic education
advocates believed that this kind of unifying experience played a critical role in a world
increasingly fragmented by an explosion of knowledge and media and by rapid change generally.
“Aesthetic experience depends upon an individual's ability to discriminate those qualities of
media, structure, and content from which meanings are created,” argued Kenneth Tidwell,
“Society needs not only the production and distribution of knowledge but also the active search
for cultivation of sensitive and competent judgments.”
178

176
See Broudy, Harry S. “The Role of Humanities in the Curriculum,” Journal of Aesthetic Education,
Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn, 1966.; Smith, Ralph A. “Editorial: On the Third Domain. Film Study as Aesthetic
Education,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 3, No. 3, July, 1969; Colwell, Richard. An Approach to
Aesthetic Education, Vol. 1. Final
Report. University of Illinois, Urbana. College of Education, 1970.
177
Ibid. Colwell, Richard. Pp. 33.
178
Tidwell, Renneth W. et al. Field Trial of Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill
| 194 |

Thus the aesthetic education movement was born out of the deep social engagement of
humanities educators. It was an effort to educate the sensual and affective aspects of life at a time
when numeracy and other practical skills were, according to some, overemphasized in the
curriculum; it was an effort to bolster the appeal and relevancy of the arts and humanities by
bringing them into closer curricular unity; it was an effort to get students to critically engage
their information- and media-overloaded environments. In the end, it was an effort to re-orient
the use of educational media for more humanistic purposes. “If one values humanism as an
element in the educational process, an element not only to be maintained at its present level, but
to be augmented, how is this to be accomplished within the ongoing movement toward increased
systematization and technology?” Stanley Madeja, second director of the Aesthetic Education
program at the University of Ohio, asked on the pages of Instructional Technology, “One answer
is inherent in the nature of the aesthetic experience as defined for the Aesthetic Education
Program…[that program] offers a unique opportunity to evolve an instructional resource which
is humanistic in its substantive base.”
Unfortunately, it was the movement’s commitment to educational media that ultimately
hindered its development. Aesthetic education advocates shared the view, common in the mid-to-
late 1960s, that the text would soon cease to dominate the classroom. In 1986, Stanley Madeja,
the, offered this reflection:

Development and CEMREL Aesthetic Education Program: Final Report. Southeastern Education
Laboratory., Atlanta, Ga, October, 1972. Pp. 49.
| 195 |

It was anticipated that in ten years, i.e., by the 1970s, the curriculum would be
less dependent on textbooks and be made up of flexible units of study which had a
variety of non-text materials to assist teaching and learning. This prediction
proved drastically wrong…the textbook remained the predominant mode of
instruction. Economics played a major role in the decision to continue instruction
from texts as schools were faced with reductions in the amount of monies
available for instruction. Thus the Aesthetic Education Program introduced its
units into the schools at a time when most schools were purchasing fewer rather
than more multimedia materials.
179

In fact, despite the pervasive rhetoric of educational technology enthusiasts and the
electronics industry in the mid-to-late 1960s and despite the widespread interest or apprehension
among educators—humanists included—education did not move beyond the text in any
significant way. Like instructional film in the 20s, radio in the 30s and television in the 50s, the
educational technology movement of the 1960s failed to sustain itself—the electronic revolution
in education never took hold. The technologies never disappeared and educators continued to use
audiovisual materials to supplement instruction to be sure, but large scale experimentation
dwindled rapidly in the early 1970s and with it, the vision of a largely electronic, multi-media,
post-print educational world. Industry and enthusiasts were flummoxed. The classroom of the
1970s remained essentially the classroom of the 1960s, which itself was essentially the
classroom of the 1950s and earlier. The age of educational media on offer in Boy’s Life, and in

179
Madeja, Stanley S. “Reflections on the Aesthetic Education Program,” Journal of Aesthetic Education,
Vol. 20, No. 4, 20th Anniversary Issue (Winter, 1986). Pp. 90.
| 196 |

Library 21, that vision of education dominated by electronic multi-sensory equipment promoted
and promised by industry and enthusiasts simply never arrived.
A number of theories have been put forward which attempt to explain the recurring
failure of technological innovation in education; why instructional technologies fail to
revolutionize education or why they never gain more than a limited acceptance. In fact,
educational technology advocates, especially in the late 1980s as the microcomputer entered the
classroom, have spent a good amount of time wringing their hands over the question of failure—
a necessary exercise, they feel, if they are to envision a process which better secures widespread
acceptance of a contemporary educational technology. Prevailing explanations always come
down to teacher resistance, sometimes thought to be the result of poor teacher training, other
times, the loss of classroom or curriculum control, but almost always, the lack of communication
between teachers, on the one hand, and policy makers and hardware producers, on the other.
Most scholars turn to Larry Cuban’s analysis in Teachers and Machines in which he posits a
four-step cycle that repeats itself with the promise of each new educational technological
revolution—a cycle comprising “exhilaration," followed by "scientific-credibility,"
“disappointment," and finally "teacher-bashing." According to Cubin, disappointment sets in
when, after some experimentation, educators realize both, that a new technology is not nearly as
magical as boosters claimed and that their questions and concerns regarding that technology will
not be addressed. This lack of communication continues after the fact as those invested in the
new technology nearly always label teachers as luddites:

Thus what boosters of electronic technology frequently label as teacher
stubbornness in embracing innovations can be viewed from the perspective of
| 197 |

power: Whose questions count? Teachers ask very different questions of new
classroom technologies … [questions] anchored in the classroom, an arena largely
foreign to nonteachers. Policy makers who adopt innovative technologies and ship
them into classrooms ask very different questions about productivity, equity, and
cost …and teachers whose questions have been unsolicited, much less
unanswered, close their doors and use what fits their students.

A 1971 Ford Foundation study charged, in part, with discovering why instructional technologies
had not been adopted as predicted in the mid-1960s, cited miscommunication as a primary
impediment. In the report, teachers were charged with the inability to communicate the goals of
education as well as holding misconceptions about reforms; “hardware people” were charged
with assigning teachers a secondary role, or no role at all, in the planning and implementation of
new technologies and in general with producing those technologies while having “little concern
for the psychology of the classroom teacher.”
Even within the overzealous climate of the mid-1960s, teacher resistance was always an
issue. While some educators cautiously experimented with, and others enthusiastically adopted,
new classroom technologies, many failed to see the allure. By the end of the decade, it was
becoming frustratingly clear to advocates that the myriad of new instructional technologies on
offer in the early to mid-decade were not going to reach adoption levels necessary for any
wholesale transformation in education. They would, in other words, like educational film, radio
and television before them, remain minor supplements in the curriculum. And once again,
teachers were blamed. “With few exceptions, instructional technology has failed to live up to its
expectations,” William VanWyck, director of instructional resources at Delhi State University
| 198 |

Figure 3.8. Phonoviewer by The General
Learning Company.
New York, wrote in 1975, “Although some can legitimately claim that lack of financial
resources…have hampered efforts to innovate, the largest single factor affecting adoption is
teacher resistance.”
180

When the American classroom failed to “go electronic,” industry—that group who had
taken upon themselves to imagine and create the “push-button” future of education—began to
lose interest. Take for instance the General Learning
Company, that joint educational venture formed by
Time Inc. and General Electric in 1965. In the mid-
1960s the company appeared to be perfectly
positioned, out on the forefront somewhere between
electronic technology and education. In 1966 Francis
Keppel even stepped down as U.S. Commissioner of
Education to become its chairman. A year before it
formed, in fact, James Linen, the president of Time
predicted that the venture would gross a half a billion
within its first four years. In reality, the venture
recorded heavy losses in those first four years, only going into the black in 1970 after shifting its
focus away from electronic technology and toward “instructional packages,” mixing print and
visual materials with lab equipment. “Remember ‘the marriage of hardware and software’? Well,
the honeymoon is over. Technology's warm, hazy glow has faded,” Efrem Sigel, editor of the
Knowledge Industry Report, wrote of the mid-1960s electronics and publishing house mergers.

180
VanWyck, F. William. “Reducing Teacher Resistance to Innovation—An Updated Perspective,” in
Phillip J. Sleeman and D. M. Rockwell Eds. Instructional Media and Technology: A Professional’s
Resource. Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1975. Pp. 291.

| 199 |

Part of the problem, according to Francis Keppel, was that the overzealous techno-enthusiasm of
the mid-1960s allowed parties to move forward with nothing more than a hazy sense of what
advanced electronic education would look like. Industry moved forward too quickly and without
a sense of what was needed or feasible. “Neither the products nor the market was ready,” Keppel
summarized, “Neither of them.” The General Learning Company found this out after rapidly
producing the Phonoviewer (Figure 3.8X) for the educational market, only to struggle for
anything beyond modest sales.
Again, none of this is to say that educational technology up and ended in the early 1970s,
just that a revolution in advanced electronic technology never superseded the text in education or
culture the way many promised, prophesized or feared. Humanists themselves continued to use
audiovisual material to supplement instruction, but their rhetoric about its use changed as the
prospect of an impending post-print world subsided.

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Chapter 4 || Electronic Networks, the Socio-Technical humanities and the
Invention of Literary Data

Recent histories of digital humanities have consistently passed over their most formative
years: early humanities computing of the early-to-late-1960s. Forever forward-looking,
contemporary digital humanists have, in fact, spent little time looking back over their history.
They have spent even less time examining the first years of robust intellectual and institutional
activity of the 1960s. Of those few who have glanced back, nearly all begin in the 1980s with the
advent of the microcomputer—that is, with the introduction of the computer into the home,
office or department of the scholar.
181
The 1960s has proved decidedly uninteresting to those
digital humanists who wish to probe their field’s legacy. Within the relatively small literature
devoted to this earlier period a consensus has already emerged. Before the 1970s, scholars have
concluded, batch processing computer technology was so limited that humanists found few uses
for it; those interested in employing computing power to examine language and literature in the
early-to-late-1960s, could generate concordances and conduct large-scale stylistic studies of
canonical texts. “At this time much attention was paid to the limitations of the technology. Data
[was] input laboriously by hand either on punched cards, with each card holding up to eighty
characters or one line of text (uppercase letters only), or on paper tape,” Susan Hockey writes in
the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities, “All computing was carried out as batch

181
For instance, of the eight essays in Blackwell’s A Companion to Digital Humanities devoted to the
field’s “History,” only one begins before the 1980s. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Schreibman,
Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds). (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
| 201 |

processing, where the user could not see the results at all until printout appeared when the job
had run.”
182

It’s not difficult to imagine from where this consensus emerged. Even Joseph Raben, the
first editor of Computers and Humanities (1966-) has characterized the 1960s as a period in
which humanists struggled to move beyond mere concordance making.
183
What’s more, early
computing humanists themselves as well as their funders constantly decried the lack of
imagination in moving beyond word indexing (concordances) and word counting (stylistic
studies) in these years. On the pages of journals and at numerous conferences, scholars both
within and without the humanities warned that the incipient research genre might be stagnant or
else stillborn. The challenge of moving forward was already a theme widely addressed in the first
issue of Computers and Humanities in September of 1966. “Concordances of the poets are
rolling off the presses, huge collation jobs are resulting in variorum editions of incredible
complexity, bibliographies and indexes of abstracts are becoming available in satisfactory
numbers, though perhaps not fast enough to keep up with the information explosion,” Lious
Milic summarized the situation in the opening article, “The Next Step,” “These will be good
things and scholars look forward to them, but satisfaction with such limited objectives denotes a
real shortage of imagination among us. We are still not thinking of the computer as anything but
a myriad of clerks or assistants in one convenient console.”
184
In the same issue, Irwin C. Lieb,
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas and member of the Selections Committee for

182
Hockey, Susan. "The History of Humanities Computing." A Companion to Digital Humanities.
Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds). (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004),
5.
183
Raben, Joseph. “Humanities Computing: 25 Years Later,” Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 25,
No. 6, (Dec., 1991).
184
Milic, Lious. “The Next Step,” Humanities and Computing, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Sept., 1966): 3.
| 202 |

the American Council of Learned Society’s Fellowships in Computer-Oriented Research,
announced that proposals for concordances or stylistic studies—that is, proposals that do not
seek out “new or further uses of the computer”—need not apply.
185
Lieb imagined that
humanities computing was on the threshold of a “second stage,” and it was his intention that the
Council help fund this second stage. In the first stage, as Lieb characterized it, humanists looked
at the types of tasks traditionally associated with computational power—counting, sorting,
storing and retrieving—and asked how those tasks might be applied to the sorts of things that
humanists typically do. In the second stage, Lieb made clear, humanists will want to consider
what it is that they need done and then ask (literally, ask engineers) how computational power
can be adapted or shaped to attain those goals—that is, to explore the new boundaries of
computational power beyond sorting, indexing and classifying. Lieb was perfectly willing to
admit that he had no idea what this second stage, or projects within it, would actually look like.
But he wanted the Council to fund its exploration: “At the start of what may be a second stage,
we are trying to set aside the image of the file (as well as some of the calculator images) and
trying to imagine computers on different models, we are not sure what--the puzzle, the trip,
module constructions.”
186

Nevertheless, a cursory story of early humanities computing which only focuses on the
limited nature of early projects or on the frustrations of early adopters leaves untold the ways in
which those projects allowed scholars to think through, or rethink, the nature of the text in the
electronic era and thus, ultimately, the ways in which their hands-on engagement with electronic

185
Lieb, Irwin, c. “The ACLS Program for Computer Studies in the Humanities: Notes on Computers and
the Humanities,” Humanities and Computing, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Sept., 1966): 9.
186
Ibid. It should be mentioned that of the twelve projects funded by the ACLS in 1966, nine of them,
strictly speaking, employed computers to count or sort textual elements. See: “ACLS Fellowships,”
Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Jan., 1967): 71-72.
| 203 |

textuality in these years allowed them to participate in technical efforts of social import beyond
their scholarship: efforts to curb the information explosion via the establishment of electronic
educational networks and improved bibliographic control. Put another way, this standard,
abbreviated story of 1960s humanities computing ignores the broader intellectual and socio-
technical circumstances—the new nature of electronic information and textuality and the social
implications of the information explosion—to which, I argue, early humanities computing
projects had direct bearing. Indeed, part of my aim in this chapter is to first, locate the history of
early humanities computing within the larger story of humanists’ attempt to come to terms with
those features of electronic culture which, in total, challenged the nature of the printed page and
the enterprise of the humanities and second, to show the degree to which those efforts, as with
educational television and technology, ultimately translated to a more socially engaged
humanities.
The electronic media upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s had wide raging implications for
the humanities, forcing its practitioners to come to terms with the challenging features of its
various technologies—television (literature as television); electronic educational multimedia
(literature as multisensory and immersive); and computers (literature as data). In other words,
just as educational television and multimedia electronic educational technologies allowed and/or
compelled humanists to think through the relationship between print, on the one hand, and mass,
immersive, affective and non-linear modes of communication in humanities instruction, on the
other, so their engagement with computer-oriented research and bibliographic efforts in the
humanities required them to think through the nature of machine-readable, networked textuality
and its relationship to the bound, printed page. What’s more, such efforts gave those involved a
needed answer to the “crisis of engagement” in the humanities in these years—allowing them to
| 204 |

get involved in projects of critical social import. Once again, technology, and new media
specifically, proved a critical and direct way for scholars to update the aims and functions of the
humanities in an era of expanded social responsibility. Indeed, as I argue in this chapter, given
the socio-technical context in which it took place, “mere” concordance making had much greater
import than cursory histories of early humanities computing have given it. Computerized
concordance making—the messy business of translating the countless complicated textual
features of the great works onto punch card or magnetic tape—compelled those involved to
interrogate the limited nature of print culture and to think of the computer as a “new media”
machine as much as it was a machine to process data. This in turn led quickly and directly to
their interest and self-professed expertise in electronic networked textuality.

I. The Computer as an Informational Device

The information explosion involved, for all groups, a rethinking, at least unconsciously,
of the printed page as the definitive setting for information storage and transmission. From the
beginning, technical solutions to the information explosion involved moving beyond the bound
book--the codex--and towards the electronic organization and networked transmission and
display of information. It was within this overall context of responses to the information
explosion, and their technical re-organization of information and knowledge in the mid-to-late
1960s that early humanities computing efforts and interest in concordance making, computerized
stylistic analysis and ultimately electronic textuality must be seen.
| 205 |

J. C. R. Licklider, psycho-acoustics analyst and computer scientists, put it perhaps most
tactfully in his 1965 work, Libraries of the Future, itself one of the more legendary responses to
the information explosion:

Books are not very good display devices. In fulfilling the storage function, they
are only fair. With respect to retrievability they are poor. And when it comes to
organizing the body of knowledge, or even to indexing and abstracting it, books
by themselves make no active contribution at all ...the trouble stems from what we
may call the 'passiveness' of the printed page. When information is stored in
books, there is no practical way to transfer the information from store to user
without physically moving the book or the reader or both. Moreover, there is no
way to determine prescribed functions of descriptively specified informational
arguments within books without asking the reader to carry out all the necessary
operations himself.
187

But computer scientists and information specialists were not the only ones who felt recent
advances in information management indicated either the potential or the necessity to move
beyond the bound printed page. Somewhere between the necessity of dealing with the
information explosion, new cybernetic-based communications theories on information and recent
advances in information management, people in key sectors of society and culture, including
education, began to think that books and even the printed page were no longer capable of
organizing and transmitting the information of the world sufficiently. Many turned to new media

187
Licklider, J. C. R..Libraries of the Future. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press 1965. Pp. 4-5.
| 206 |

and machines. "Given the rapid piling up of information in most fields, books are becoming less
and less useful as sources of information," the editors of a widely read volume on new media and
education argued in 1966, "We assume that the next two decades will see the rapid development
of techniques for encoding, storing and searching information, and that research libraries may
shortly be linked to one another by means of media that allow not only for information search
but also for the reproduction of desired materials for individual use."
188
People in a position to
imagine the future of information management—government officials, scientists, librarians,
industry and educators--began, in these years, to imagine a world where data and documents
could be retrieved on computers or closed-circuit television, where the data and documents held
by individuals or institutions would be linked together by networks and where people would
learn by engaging a wealth of electronic media.
189

The information explosion elicited a range of responses from individuals and institutions.
The most elaborate called for the automated and centralized storage and transmission of the
nation’s entire scientific and technical literature. In the post-Sputnik era, the prospect of
informational gridlock in the sciences became a national security issue. In congress, the concept
of a national information network for scientific research was an idea whose time had come. In
1960, then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and other members of the Senate Reorganization and
Internal Organization Subcommittee, in an effort to avoid unnecessary and costly duplication of
scientific research and to provide quick access to all scientific research data, called for a national
"Science Information Network." In the House of Representatives, the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on

188
Rossi, Peter H. and Bruce J. Biddle. The New Media and Education. Chicago: Adline Publishing
Company, 1966. Pp. 39.
189
Using Google Ngram viewer, one finds that the use of the word "network" went up 25% from 1960 to
1970 while the use of the phrase "information network" increased by over 450%.
| 207 |

a National Research Data Processing Center and Information Retrieval Center called, in 1963,
for a similar arrangement, the Science Data Processing Center.
190
The White House responded as
well. In 1962, President Kennedy and his science advisor, Dr. Jerome Wiesner established a
panel comprised of the president's Science Advisory Committee to investigate the information
management and communication practices of the nation's scientific community. In 1963 they
issued their report, "Science, Government, and Information," originally titled "Science,
Government and the Information Crisis." The authors of the report characterized the dilemma
this way: Scientific progress depended on a kind of unity of effort which increased specialization
now threatened to fragment by breaking science up into innumerable isolated fields. Only
improved communication between these fields, the authors felt, could guarantee that innovative
connections between diverse research would continue. The authors of the report had two sets of
recommendations, First, they openly chastised scientists and engineers for their lack of interest in
effective communication: "the technical community must recognize that the handling of
technical information is a worthy and integral part of science."
191
In other moments, they offered
more direct reprimands: "Write more clearly," "Write better abstracts and titles," and "Spend
more time writing thoughtful review articles!" Second, they urged the creation of information
centers staffed by both scientists and information specialists. Scientists at the center would
perform double duty, spending half their time carrying out research and staying in close contact
with their field and the other half poring over documents and reports from their field,
summarizing and indexing their contents.

190
Committee on Scientific and Technical Communication. Scientific and Technical Communication: A
Pressing National Problem and Recommendations for Its Solution. Washington D.C.: National Academy
of Sciences, 1969. Pp. 242.
191
President's Science Advisory Committee. Science, Government and Information: The Responsibilities
of the Technical Community and the Government in the Transfer of Information. Washington, D.C. 1963.
| 208 |

The material result of these centers would be the centralization and wider dissemination,
via remote-access, of critical scientific and technical information. The New York Times
characterized, with optimism, the nature of scientific research when such centers finally brought
the vast new hordes of data under control and at last leveraged it toward greater human
achievement:

The young researcher in Texas had picked up a clue, in the behavior of an obscure
virus, suggesting a link with cancer. He needed desperately to know, whether
anyone had experimented with this virus. His university librarian punched out a
series of signals on a small console. They travelled to a distant electronic archive
and, within seconds, the console printed out a list of 23 reports on the subject,
with brief descriptions of each. The researcher quickly spotted one dealing
directly with his problem--work done several years earlier at a Central European,
university.
192

Neither this system, nor the science networks and centers called for by congress were
built at this time. Fears that centralized governmental management of scientific communication
would constrain innovation further always halted any concrete plans for such systems.
Detractors of such plans consistently argued that it was up to the scientific community itself and
to the professional organizations and societies within individual fields, in particular, to improve
the organization of and access to information on current research. This is precisely what
happened.

192
Sullivan, Walter. "Science," New York Times, June 7, 1964. Pg. E11.
| 209 |

The information explosion offered two separate but related technical problems. The first,
was how to organize all the new information, the second, was how to make it all accessible, that
is, how to display or transmit it more effectively and efficiently. In the early 1960s—not so
coincidentally--a number of new systems offering solutions to both sets of problems became
feasible. For the first problem, reference retrieval systems were built, for the second, document
retrieval systems. Both were part of a new genre of machinery called information retrieval
systems. As the information explosion became more widespread the electronics and data
processing industry sensed a shift in national needs. In the 1950s, the industry's focus had been
almost exclusively on developing computing power; that is, getting machines to calculate,
analyze, and in general, manipulate numeric data. In the 1960s, "information retrieval" or "IR"
promised, according to some, to become "what electronic data processing was to the 1950s."
193

Data processing machines manipulated numeric information fed to and distributed from it via
punch cards or magnetic tape. Information retrieval systems were instead built to index and
organize information—for instance key words--on documents or to actually store and make
accessible microfilm of documents.
In the early to mid-1960s, the first type of systems--reference retrieval systems--were
employed by a number of professional fields. The earliest such systems were developed in the
fields of chemistry and medical science. In 1963 the American Chemical Society began
producing its monthly index, Chemical Titles, from computer memory.
194
The next year the

193
"Microcard File System Displayed," Los Angeles Times, Jul 16, 1961. D1.
194
In 1966 the American Chemical Society added the Chemical Information and Data System (CIDS), a
database of the expanding catalog of chemical compounds which could be accessed remotely. Users could
submit queries via a remote teletype writer and call up information on a given compound, its molecular
and structural formula, compound descriptors, bibliographic references and a new registry number for the
compound assigned by ACS.
| 210 |

National Library of Medicine established MEDLARS, the Medical Literature Analysis and
Retrieval System. By 1966 several dozen such systems were operating in the United States. In
these years reference retrieval systems were limited to human indexing. Literature analysis
would review articles or abstracts and decide how they should be indexed, that is, what key
words should be associated with the contents of the article. All relevant information associated
with the article, including those key words, would be input into computer memory. A monthly
index for the field could then be produced by processing a global string containing all keywords
relevant to the field. Finally, unique keyword searches could be processed for researchers by
special request. Other systems went slightly further by committing to computer memory the full
text of a given body of documents. In 1964 the University of Pittsburg, for instance, stored on
magnetic tape the entire text of Pennsylvania law, the health statutes of 11 states, and selected
statues from the Federal Code. The entire corpus could be keyword searched by researchers.
While these indexing and retrieval systems helped manage the avalanche of new research
and publications, remote full-text access was always seen as the ultimate goal in bringing the
increasing corpus of information under control. From the beginning, the National Library of
Medicine began developing a graphic-image storage and retrieval system to permit full-text
access of its documents. "NLM visualizes a network which will efficiently acquire and provide
rapid dissemination of published literature, unpublished material, bibliographies and indexes,"
imagined Dr. Martin Cummings, the director of the National Library of Medicine, "Optical or
electronic linkages between libraries will make it possible for anyone to enjoy and be
enriched."
195
The National Library of Medicine in Bethesda. Maryland was not alone. In the
early to mid-1960s, many public libraries, research university libraries and even the library of

195
“RX for MDs: Citation by Automation,” EDUCOM. September 1966,. Vol. 1. Number 6.
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congress drew up plans to automate their cataloging, search and retrieval systems and
investigated ways to connect either the record of their holdings or microfilmed renderings of
their holdings themselves to other institutions--multimedia learning centers at colleges and
universities, laboratories and, of course, other libraries.

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Figure 4.1 (Left). Documents stored on continuous microfilm with machine-readable bibliographic data for each
document above it. Source: Bourne, Charles P. Methods of Information Handling. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New
York: 1963. Pp. 202.
Figure 4.2 (top-right). Aperture card containing microfilm of 8 document pages. Machine-readable bibliographic data
located on the left of the card. Source: Bourne. Ibid. Pp. 198.
Figure 4.3 (bottom-right). One cell for the IBM Walnut System containing microfilm of 450 pages. Source: IBM
Manual and Principles of Operation for 1360 Photo-digital Storage System.

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Hopes that library holdings could be electronically shared among multiple libraries and
institutions was based on another set of technologies under development in the early to mid-
1960s—document retrieval systems. By the mid-1960s, these systems had been employed by a
number of private firms and government agencies to centralize and manage internal
documentation. Some systems used microfilm rolls, others used microcards. In both instances,
film-images of document pages were reduced by as much as 60 times their original size and each
page-image was placed next to machine readable indexing data relating to its contents (Figures 4,
5 and 6). The Command Retrieval Information System, developed by Information for Industry in
1962 could fit 500,000 document pages on one 400 foot real of microfilm. IBM's Walnut system
used microcards arranged in cells (Figure 6). Each cell contained 50 strips of film, each with 99
document images. Each Walnut system came equipped with 200 cells (one memory store) and
thus could hold 990,000 document page images. Each Walnut system was built to handle up to
100 memory stores for a theoretical total of 99 million document pages. In all systems, a user
could keyword search for documents or document pages indexed. With many systems, document
pages were merely projected onto a screen for the user to read. But with a few, such as IBM's
Walnut, the document image could be sent electronically to a television. It was this last
development that had librarians investigating ways to transmit the content of books and journals
to multiple locations.
In some ways the field of library science was hardest hit by the information explosion.
"Casual users of libraries are hardly aware of it, but library professionals and their more
conscientious clients know about it all too well. They call it the 'information explosion,' Time
Magazine summarized the dilemma mid-decade, "the technical disciplines—chiefly the
sciences—have turned loose such a Niagara of information that even the wealthiest of corporate,
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collegiate or community libraries simply do not know what to do with it, let alone how to make it
available to researchers."
196
The only answer to "suffocation by paper" was, of course,
automation. In the early to mid-1960s, every major professional library organization, including
the American Library Association and the Council on Library Resources, which was funded by
the Ford Foundation to address issues of library expansion, was invested in imagining the future
of libraries. On the one hand, they funded numerous studies and held countless conferences
exploring the technical solutions to the impending bibliometric crisis outlined. On the other
hand, these same organizations created elaborate exhibits which presented to the public futuristic
visions of "push-button" libraries and learning, replete with automated information systems and
multimedia instruction. In the first half of the decade, the United States hosted two World’s
Fairs, the first in Seattle (1962), and the second in New York City (1964). Both contained large
exhibits which offered just this vision to the public. Library 21 was the American Library
Association's contribution to the Seattle World's Fair of 1962, the Century 21 Exposition. The
project was funded by the Council of Library Resources and was intended to demonstrate "the
importance of making fuller use of recorded knowledge and information." But what the 1.8
million visitors to the exhibit experienced when they entered was a bright, colorful, ultramodern
environment of education and culture, an almost Jetsons-like vision of future information
management, transmission and display. As visitors entered the exhibit they first made their way
into the Automated Library Service Center. Here, they were greeted by a UNIVAC mainframe
equipped to help visitors perform "research." Visitors could fill out a form about themselves and
indicate a subject they were interested in. The UNIVAC would return an annotated bibliography
based on their area of interest, their age, sex, education and reading level. Eighty-four thousand

196
"Libraries: How Not to Waste Knowledge," Time. September 3, 1965.
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Figure 4.4. Self-instructional study carrels located in
the Library of the Future Exhibition. Source: New
York World's Fair 1964-1965: Official Souvenir
Book. Time-Life, New York: 1965.

such "personalized bibliographies" were produced for fair goers. Visitors could also "converse"
with the great minds of Western Civilization by receiving printouts of quotes from the Great
Books of the Western World relevant to their specified area of interest.
In the next room visitors encountered the Learning Resources Center with study alcoves
or "quest spaces" for independent learning. Each alcove contained a dual track tape recorder, a
closed-circuit television, a slide projector and a teaching machine. The dual track recorder made
it possible for visitors to listen to a lesson in French, respond, and then replay both the French
instructor and then their own voice. The teaching machines contained lessons for first year
algebra, computer math, and bridge. Surrounding these alcoves additional closed-circuit
televisions broadcast lectures on physics and a televised version of Hamlet.
Two years later, the American Library Association was again present at the World's Fair,
this time hosted by New York City. Library/USA, as the exhibit was called in New York, was
largely similar to its counterpart in Seattle.
One room contained a large mainframe
where visitors could "research" topics,
another room acted as a futuristic
multimedia learning environment. But
given recent advances in technology and the
large sponsorship of American Telephone
and Telegraph, there was a larger focus in
1964 on networked communication. This
year the mainframe was connected by
telephone lines to other machines across the
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country, specifically to other Univac 1004s. People at these other destinations could request
information from the mainframe in New York, just as though they were at the World's Fair.
197
In
the next room, visitors could dial up the call number for a book and hear a summary and review
by a professional librarian.

II. The Computer as a Media Device

For the electronics industry, library science, social scientists and engineers, and even for
those in the general public paying attention, solutions to the information explosion involved
freeing information from the printed page. Humanists interested in the relationship between
computing and textuality in these years had similar concerns. Just as with educational television
in the 1950s and the electronic revolution in education in the 1960s, humanists responded to the
efforts of the electronics industry and social scientists to re-think and re-engineer the nature of
information transmission and knowledge production with analogous endeavors of their own.
That is, just as the electronics industry and others hoped to use databanks and computers to free
information from the strictures of the printed page, so too early computing humanists hoped that
the potential translation of literature to the radically new electronic medium of machine-readable
paper or magnetic tape, could free certain aspects of literary study, or even the literary
experience, from the confines of print culture. The computer, or more precisely, machine-
readable textuality was a potent force in what might be called a lifting of the veil of print culture
for many humanists in the 1960s.

197
This feature was no doubt a nice corollary to ATT's new picturephone which also debuted at the 1964
World's Fair. With the picturephone too, visitors in select cities could communicate with those attending
the World's fair in New York.
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Around every dominant media there materializes an informational ecosystem in which
that media’s method of delivery structures, among other things, the ways we communicate, the
ways we think about what constitutes information and knowledge, with whom it should be
shared, the rights of its creators and ultimately the ways we set up and maintain the social and
cultural institutions in which that media become indelibly embedded. In some ways, this
informational ecosystem is so all encompassing, so totalizing, that very few see it at all. Marshall
McLuhan, capitalizing on an old proverb, characterized this lack of social awareness with typical
pith, comparing a media ecosystem to water in a fishbowl: “One thing about which fish know
exactly nothing is water since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to
perceive the element they live in.”
198
It isn’t until the potential disruption of that ecosystem—a
new way or ways of delivering content comparable on scale with the older dominant medium—
that it becomes clear to many that they once lived under an older media regime. When a new
mode of delivering content equivalent on scale to an older dominant mode becomes feasible, and
when that new mode of delivery has implications for re-thinking, for example, who should have
access to information and new knowledge, or whether information is better engaged in a linear or
associative fashion, there is a unique opportunity to realize that established answers to such
questions have been suitably constructed to fit the nature of the older medium. Put another way,
each and every time there is a radical displacement of an established, dominant media, or even
the potential for its displacement, a kind of veil is lifted; scholars (and non-scholars alike)
become suddenly very aware that information, knowledge, culture, and in some sense reality

198
McLuhan, Marshall. War and Peace in the Global Village; An Inventory of Some of the Current
Spastic Situations That Could be Eliminated by More Feedforward, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968),
175.
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itself, had been, under the regime of that prior dominant media, shaped and constrained by its
nature, by the very structure with which it imparts information and knowledge.
In the 1950s and 1960s, mass communication in general, and the television in particular,
constituted just this kind of potential radical displacement. It is no more a coincidence that “the
Gutenberg era” became an object of widespread, critical analysis in first two decades after the
introduction of the television any more than the “history of the book” became an established sub-
field during our contemporary age of digitization. The fact is, compared to the years before
WWII, scholars of the 1950s and 1960s became gripped by the social, cultural and historical
study of the book and of print culture. The coming of the “electronic age,” it seemed, brought
with it the need to study the “Gutenberg era.” Print, both as a culture and as a technology became
a much more frequent object of scholarly analysis and popular commentary in the years of
“electronic media.” From 1960 to 1970, for instance, the use of both terms, “print culture” and
“print technology,” in published books quadrupled.
Casey Man Kong Lum, writing about the emergence of technology-oriented media
studies in the 1960s, attributes the lifting of the veil of print culture for scholars not just to the
rise of visual media, but more particularly, to the noticeable changes it brought to their students’
worldview—a new awareness that their students understanding of the world changed just as their
dominant media did. “The rapid succession of advancements in and diffusion of media
technology and telecommunications, from the transistor and videotape recorder (VTR) to the
satellite… began to challenge the dominance of literacy and print,” he argues, “because of the
rise of graphic communications in the larger social and media environments, predominantly
print-based educators such as [Neil] Postman and his contemporaries began to see subtle and yet
profound changes in their classrooms, or, better, in how their students learn or otherwise come to
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understand the world.”
199
Elizabeth Eisenstein, perhaps the most prominent historian of print
culture, also attributes the origin of her interest in the subject to this shift in the 1960s. It was
then that she began to encounter pronouncements to the effect that “the age of Gutenberg [was]
at an end.” Watching scholars react with both lament and support to the contemporary shift from
print to electronic communication stimulated her curiosity “about the specific historical
consequences of the fifteenth-century communications shift…from script to print.”
200

But visual electronic media in general, and the television as the most potent force in mass
communication, in particular, were not the only technologies of representation to allow and/or
compel scholars of interest in these years to consider the relationship between the contemporary
and Gutenberg eras. For some, the computer had a similar effect. People forget that the computer
was more than a machine for processing data. It was also, it must be acknowledged, the recipient
and producer of a significant new strain of media— machine-readable cards or tape—a media
surely as transformative as film, television and multimedia instruction. Humanists’ engagement
with this new media of punch-cards and magnetic tape is usually told as a history of humanists’
engagement with the computer generally, that is, as a history of their engagement with

199
Lum, Casey Man Kong. “Notes Towards an Intellectual History of Media Ecology,” in Casey Man
Kong Lum Ed. Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication: The media Ecology Tradition.
(Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc., 2006), 17.
200
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), xiv-xv.

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computational analysis in humanistic research. I want to tell the story instead as humanists’
engagement with yet another new electronic media, one that, like television and electronic
multimedia instructional technology, challenged the nature of print technology and thus the
nature of the humanities enterprise. In short, I want to tell the story of early humanities
computing, not as a history of computational technology, but as a media history.

III. Early Humanities Computing: From Concordances to Electronic Textuality

The history of automated literary data processing by way of digital computers begins
with Father Roberto Busa, professor of philosophy at the Istituto Filosofico Aloisianum. In 1948
Father Busa began giving talks about the possibility of constructing an automated index to the
corpus of Thomas Aquinas’ writings in machine readable format. The following year Busa was
in discussion with Thomas Watson Sr., the founder and president of IBM, who provided Busa
with access to a card punching machine, a tabulator, a card sorter and a collator as well as
technical council from IBM engineers. By 1951, Busa had produced his first automated word
indexes, to four of Aquinas’ hymns for the Feast of Corpus Christ. These indexes included an
alphabetical list of words along with their frequency of use and a concordance with verse line
context for each word in the hymns. Each sentence of the hymns was laboriously punched into
machine readable cards which were then fed through the tabulator and/or sorter and collator to
produce a count of certain key words, their position in the overall hymn and their context (the
first few words before and after the word in question).
From 1951 to 1956, Father Busa indexed nearly two million words of Aquinas’ texts by
this method and in 1957 established the Center for Automated Literary Analysis with the help of
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Paul Tasman of IBM. There they began the automated indexing of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the
initial stages of a project that would eventually become the 50-volume Index Thomisticus, a
comprehensive concordance of Aquinas’ works. Nineteen fifty-seven also saw the first
automated concordances for humanities-oriented texts in the United States. In that year, Guy
Montgomery’s automated index to John Dryden’s works were produced by the University of
California, Berkeley; Stephen Parrish and James Painter began work on the Cornell
Concordances, a series of indexes for Mathew Arnold, Yeats and Emily Dickenson; and
Reverend John Ellison, of the Church of Epiphany, Winchester Mass., produced the first
automated concordance of the King James bible.
Concordances were not the only end-result of humanities-oriented, computer-aided
textual analysis in these years. In the early to mid-1960s, as more and more humanists began to
embrace computational power as a means to achieve traditional ends within their respective
fields, a new genre of data processing began to emerge, sometimes referred to as “literary data
processing.” Perhaps the most famous of these studies in these years was done by Frederick
Mosteller and David L. Wallace who, in 1963, used statistical methods to determine the
authorship of the twelve disputed Federalist Papers. Like similar studies conducted in these
years, Mosteller and Wallace first tried to use used word and sentence length to determine
authorship, only to find such metrics nearly equivalent in the known works of Hamilton and
Madison. They turned instead to word choice, or rather, the frequency and distribution of certain
words: filler words, like “and,” “of,” and “the,” but also more specific items, like “while” (used
by Hamilton) and “whilst” (used by Madison). They then examined the occurrence of each word
in successive blocks of 1000 words to show that significant statistical patterns were present.
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The early to mid-1960s found humanists exploring the parameters of what computational
power could do for their field. Computer-aided statistical analysis of vocabulary opened a
number of doors for humanists and they began searching for imaginative uses of such methods.
At NYU’s Institute for Computer Research in the Humanities, for instance, professor Anna
Balakian of the French and Comparative Literature departments endeavored to construct several
literary data studies that might better establish the date of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. The exact
date when Rimbaud composed the poems in his Illuminations was unknown, or more precisely,
whether he composed them before or after his Une Saison en Enfer. Because Rimbaud was
heavily influenced by particular authors at select points in his writing career –Baudelaire’s prose
during the period of Une Saison en Enfer , Germain Nouveau after 1873 and Verlaine
throughout—Balakian proposed comparing the vocabulary of the Illuminations with these other
authors to help clarify the chronology of Rimbaud’s work. Though early computing humanists
were habitually engaged in kinds of efforts—concordance making and the quantitative analysis
of texts—translating texts into machine-readable formats quickly shifted their interests towards
the computer as media maker. By the mid-1960s, the nature of concordance making had spurned
a new interest in the nature of networked textuality. When humanists ruminated publically and
privately about the methods by which one gets a computer to analyze, Jonathon Swift, for
example, they were obviously concerned with the relationship between the features of a
traditionally printed text and a new process of computational analysis. At the most general level,
for instance, they were interested in how one even gets a computer to answer textual questions of
traditional humanistic merit. That is, they were interested in how the process of computational
analysis could be applied to traditional questions of interest in the humanities. This was, it should
be said, their central concern. What can large-scale pattern recognition tell us about literary
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style? What is the relationship, as far as computational analysis is concerned, between literature
and data, words and numbers? Where is the “quantitative-qualitative barrier” in computer
analysis—that is, are counting and sorting words ends in themselves or can their processes be
used, for example, to get at an author’s “attitudes, values beliefs and opinions”?
201
In short,
which aspects of meaningful humanistic textual inquiry can be rigorously formalized and fed
into a computer? All these questions were consistently front and center at early humanities
computing conferences and in the emerging field’s journals and newsletters.
Nevertheless, I want to argue that while
early computing humanists were clearly
focused on the relationship between texts and a
newly salient analytical process, they were
equally, if less explicitly, concerned with the
relationship of printed texts to a new physical
medium—the machine-readable and potentially
networked text. This text was mechanically
storable and retrievable and it was
algorithmically searchable. But perhaps most
importantly, as a text, it was no longer given
shape, nor constrained, by the structure of the printed page—the very thing which made it
retrievable and searchable. When one analyzes a text with a computer, one frees its textual
elements from the order of the printed page and from the structure of the bound book. But one

201
Conference on the Use of Computers in Humanistic Research : December 4, 1964 : Sponsored by
Rutgers, The State University, and the International Business Machines Corporation. (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers, The State University, 1964), 15 and 11.
| 224 |

also loses the shape, form and meaning that that order and structure imposed on the text. These
concerns did register among the first generation of computing humanists. Turning canonical text
after canonical text into a litany of concordances was not just a practical exercise for the
expansion and potential re-orientation of humanistic analysis in these years. It was this. But it
was also a way to think through the nature of the text itself.
Computerized concordance making required scholars to create a whole other “text”—in
fact, it required them to create several. Take for instance the first automated concordance of the
King James Bible produced by Reverend John Ellison, of the Church of Epiphany, Winchester
Mass., in 1957. Ellison related the tedious process of concordance-making both to Life Magazine
and in his talk at the Conference on the Use of Computers in Humanistic Research at Rutgers
University in December of 1964.
202
Instead of focusing on the ad-hoc, cutting-edge,
programming or the computer processing power involved in creating concordances, Elision in
describing the process, focused on the many mediating steps required, whereby the contents of
one physical media was translated into another and then another to produce the final result. The
text of the bible was first copied into two machine-readable formats: 480 pounds of punched
cards and 400 reels of paper tape. These punches cards and paper tape were then transferred onto
four rolls of magnetic tape each, for a total of eight rolls. These eight rolls were then fed
simultaneously into the Remington Rand’s Univac to compare and catch errors between the two
versions derived from different input methods. The Univac, after making corrections, then
produced an accurate master text on four rolls of magnetic tape. These four master rolls were fed
again into the Univac, which broke up the text into separate words, each identified according to

202
“Bible labor of years is done in 400 hours,” Life, Feb 18, 1957; Conference on the Use of Computers
in Humanistic Research : December 4, 1964 : Sponsored by Rutgers, The State University, and the
International Business Machines Corporation, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, The State University,
1964).
| 225 |

book, chapter and verse. The result was 63 rolls of tape which were then run through Univac to
eliminate unnecessary words, such as “the,” “and” “of.” This process of elimination produced 26
more rolls of tape. Another run through the Univac coupled each word with its surrounding
text—its context. Then the 300,000 entries derived from first process were arranged by Univac in
alphabetic order on 26 rolls of magnetic tape. The end product was 120 magnetic rolls of data
which Univac could ultimately translate and print up as words on paper. Those printed words on
paper were then sent to a publisher, edited, bound and sold as a book.
Producing concordances was not just about subjecting a traditional text to new
computational processes. It was also about translating that traditional text into multiple other
inter-mediums and ultimately into a machine-readable text. In order to create concordances,
literary scholars were forced to get their hands dirty with the written and/or printed structure of
canonical works, digging in and tearing apart their chapters, sections, vocabulary, punctuation
and graphemes; deconstructing down to the smallest detail, the work of author, scribe and
printer. Transferring canonical texts one line at a time onto individual punch cards or
continuously into paper or magnetic tape, made them feel, in some ways, less like scholars and
more like “a printer when he sets type.”
203
Early computing humanists, in fact, encountered
much resistance along just these lines. Many humanists deplored the idea of feeding canonical
texts into computers not just because the purely quantitative work of computers was thought to
be fundamentally opposed to the qualitative, interpretive work of the humanities enterprise, but
also, in some ways, because it was felt to be a mutilation of a sacred medium—of print itself.
“To a certain kind of sensibility poetry and electronics seem incompatible, and to put lines of

203
Parrish, Stephen. “Concordance-Making by Computer: It’s past, Future, Techniques and Application,”
in Proceedings: Computer Applications to Problems in the Humanities: A Conversation in the
Disciplines, State University College, Brockport, N.Y. April 4-5, 1969. (Brockport, State University of
New York, College at Brockport, 1970) 19.
| 226 |

verse into a computer, seems grotesque,” Stephen Parrish quipped at a conference on Computers
in Humanistic Research at Rutgers University in December of 1964.
204
In defending his work
and the work of his colleagues in this regard, Parrish made a rhetorical move common among
early computing humanists. Translating canonical works from print into machine-readable
formats, he argued, was not unlike transcribing the contents of manuscripts into formats
compatible with print technology. Both were necessary responses to the large-scale media
innovation and upheaval of their time and both were viewed with scorn by many contemporary
scholars. “The same sort of pain and disquiet must have been felt,” he reasoned, “by people who
thought of poetry in terms of illuminated letters on parchment, when they watched the arrival of
Gutenberg with his clumsy blocks of movable type.”
205

As the 1960s progressed, computing humanists became more and more interested in the
machine-readable aspect of what they were doing. That is, while in the late 1950s and early
1960s, humanists working with computers and texts were still chiefly focused on producing a
printed end-product—the book-bound concordance—by the mid-1960s they had become
progressively interested in the canonical text on punch-card, paper or magnetic tape they
employed to produce those concordances. They became interested in the machine-readable text
as an end in itself, as something, once created, to be regularly on offer to a community of
scholars or learners. This piece of media, like a printed text, would be passed around, possibly
checked out of a central machine-readable literary library or perhaps even passed along an
electronic network. More and more, in these years, computing humanists began to imagine a day

204
Parrish, Stephen. “Computers and the Muse of Literature,” in Conference on the Use of Computers in
Humanistic Research : December 4, 1964 : Sponsored by Rutgers, The State University, and the
International Business Machines Corporation. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, The State University,
1964), 14.
205
Ibid.
| 227 |

when a good portion of textual engagement and literary analysis would be performed, not on the
texts as represented on the printed page, but on machine-readable works available on a network.
In this way, early computing humanists were imagining something on the minds of many
scholars in these years—the formation of online intellectual and educational networks.
If concordance making naturally established humanists’ intellectual designs and expertise
on electronically networked textuality in the mid-1960s, they also had practical and real world
interests in such matters. On the one hand, they themselves looked forward to the day when all
texts, canonical and otherwise, were contained in a network or networks. Partly for efficiency’s
sake. Humanists felt a need to make their research more efficient along lines similar to
advancements in the sciences, to keep up with the “knowledge-” and “publication-explosion.”
“The problem for individual scholars today in the humanities is not a dearth of material and
interest but a surfeit,” Walter Ong wrote in 1967, “If we face this fact, we can better develop or
strengthen productive attitudes toward the tools which present-day technology has provided for
handling masses of material …We will welcome the computer, for example, which has been
invented by present-day man because his unbearable accumulation of knowledge demands this
new instrument for storage and retrieval.”
206
Thus the collection of canonical texts in machine-
readable formats was an early goal of computing humanists.

So far as data-processing.. . is concerned. .. the tasks of scholarship in the coming
years may be defined as the recording on master-tapes of the widest possible array
of literary works; ... the duplication of such tapes in key centers of scholarship;.. .

206
Ong, Walter. “The Expanding Humanities and the Individual Scholar,” PMLA, Vol. 82, No.4. (Sep.,
1967), pp. 1-7.
| 228 |

the searching of the tapes to provide the individual scholars with information ...
and the selective publishing of machine-print made from these tapes.

As we’ve seen, for this reason, humanists of the 1960s found themselves uniquely
aligned with the interests of groups endeavoring to turn text into something that could be read by
machines and passed along electronic networks—librarians, computer scientists and the
electronics industry. The interests of natural and social scientists in getting texts into machine
readable formats were aligned with librarians and others only to the extent that they too wanted
to bring the information explosion under control by employing better methods of document
organization and dissemination. Humanists, on the other hand, while sharing these concerns
about proliferating documentation, were also vitally invested in getting texts—their field’s
fundamental unit of analysis--into a format which could be stored, read, disseminated and
analyzed by computers. Doing so was the equivalent, in many ways, of numeric data processing
in the sciences
But keeping up with the electronic revolution, that is, updating the humanities for the
electronic era wasn’t just about efficiency. In a more abstract sense, getting the Great Works into
computer networks or at least into machine readable formats was felt to be necessary—plain and
simple—if the humanities were to not fall behind in the rapidly developing electronic era. If
translating the Great Works into televisual formats in the 1950s was thought to be vital for the
growth, if not survival, of the humanities in a world of electronic culture, so too was getting
those canonical texts into machine readable media in the 1960s. This is the direction, many
suspected, all future print materials were going. “In a few years every printing house which
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wishes to remain competitive will produce a machine-readable version of a text,”
207
wrote
Martin Kay, director of a RAND-funded research project “Natural Language in Computer
Form,” which involved several literary scholars.
208
It seemed equally clear to many, especially
those speaking at early humanities computing conferences that all past printed materials would
soon find their way into networks. “Imagine the time, then, surely in the foreseeable future,”
Alan Markman, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh envisioned at the Literary
Data Processing Conference held in September 1964 at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research
Center, “when the entire literature of the world, both of the past and what then currently being
produced is permanently in a machine format on magnetic tape.”
What’s more, humanists, like many other scholars in the mid-1960s envisioned the need
for “on-line” intellectual communities. The “online intellectual community” was an idea whose
time had come as early as the mid-1960s. Visions for such a community—a real-time, electronic
network for the retrieval and communication of information and ideas between scholars—began
to take concrete form with the coming of time-sharing computing. Prior to the early 1960s, all
computing was done by batch processing, a method whereby users fed a series of data and
instructions (a program) into a computer all at once by punch-card, paper or magnetic tape and
then waited for the computer to run the program from start to finish without any user
intervention. Thus, with batch processing, only one program could be run at any one time; all
computing was performed one user and one program at a time. In the mid-1960s, increased

207
Kay, Martin. “Standards for Encoding Data in a Natural Language” Computers and the Humanities.
Vol. 1, No. 5 (May, 1967), pp. 171.
208
Natural Language in Computer Form was a collaborative effort between the Linguistic Project of The
RAND Corporation, the Centre d'Etudes pour la Traduction Automatique of the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique in Grenoble, and the Machine Translation Project at the University of California,
Berkeley.
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processing speeds allowed developers to design systems where multiple users could execute code
from multiple terminals connected to a single mainframe—users could share computing power.
Users also shared a core memory, accessing, and in some cases editing, the same files located
centrally in the mainframe. This particular feature of time-sharing systems, perhaps more than
any other, led many to speculate about the possibility of distributing information access, full-text
documents and intellectual collaboration along inner-campus, inter-campus, regional or national
electronic networks.
In some ways it’s quite amazing, once time-sharing computing was a reality, how quickly
scholars and engineers together envisioned the methods of intellectual association that would
become the rough features of open access and collaborative communication on the World Wide
Web. The first time-sharing system in the United States, Project MAC (Multiple Access
Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions), was established in 1963 at the Massachusetts Institute of
technology. Project MAC is significant because it was the system around which specific plans
for an online scholarly network first emerged. From August to September of 1965 some two
hundred engineers, scientists, librarians and scholars from the social sciences and humanities
convened at Woods Hole, Massachusetts to formulate a coordinated program of experimentation
with an on-line, teleprocessing information network. Dubbed Project Intrex (an abbreviation for
information transfer experiments), the project was funded by the Council for Library Resources
and the National Science Foundation and was to be carried out by the school of engineering and
library system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Users of this network would
communicate with each other as well as with the library; data just obtained in the laboratory and
comments made by observers would be as easily available as the text of books in the library or
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documents in the department files.
209
Early computing humanists were fascinated with INTREX
and regularly spoke of establishing similar networks for their own subfields. “Not only could
these vast mines of information so vital in the work of art historians, be recorded by machine
techniques, but also their transmission to anyone, anywhere could be accomplished by a
communication network,” wrote James Humphrey, chief librarian at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, “At M.I.T progress along these lines is being made by the use of INTREX.”
210
In fact,
according to John C. Wells, Assistant Professor of German at Tufts University, on-line scholarly
systems in general, and INTREX in particular, provided “an excellent occasion for assessing the
situation of the humanist vis-a-vis the computer and for pointing out where real promise may
lie.”
211

But early computing humanists’ interest in electronic networks was about more than just
keeping up with the electronic revolution—about updating the humanities in order to benefit
their field of study. It was also about updating the social mission of the humanities. As with
educational television and multimedia instruction, humanists who wished to engage new media
and technology for practical purposes also found in their engagement a compelling means to
offer guidance for the development of that media and technology for larger social purposes. In
the case of early humanities computing, interest and expertise in concordance making and in
turn, machine-readable textuality, led to their involvement in the establishment of electronic

209
Overhage, Carl F. J. and Joyce Harman. Eds. Intrex: Report of a Planning Conference on Information
Transfer Experiments. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T Press, 1965), 1.
210
Humphrey, James. “The Computer as Art Cataloguer,” Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 5
(May, 1967), pp. 168.
211
Well, John. “On-Line Computation and Simulation: The OPS-3 System by Martin Greenberger;
Malcolm M.Jones; James H. Morris; David N. Ness,” Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Jan.,
1967), pp. 109.
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educational networks and the development of bibliographic control—both key responses to the
impeding information explosion to which humanists in general, and computing humanists, in
particular, felt committed. Once again, technology—that critically socially embedded
phenomenon of human affairs—proved a direct way for humanists to be engaged in the “day-to-
day business of living in this world.”

V. Early Humanities Computing and Educational Networks

While early computing humanists talked of establishing their own electronic networks
and while they were supremely interested in the larger-scale scholarly on-line systems like
INTREX then being proposed, they were actually involved in discussions concerning early
educational networks. Early computing humanists were not just concerned with the larger social
implications of the information explosion, but like those who endeavored to intervene with
educational television in the 1950s and multimedia instruction in the 1960s, they were
additionally concerned with how electronic solutions to the information explosion would play
out. In 1969, for instance, Joseph Raben, editor of first humanities computing journal, Computers
and the Humanities, opened a conference on Computer Applications to Problems in the
Humanities by addressing electronic education. Talking about computer assisted instruction
specifically, he asked “Will [computer-assisted instruction] evolve into true teaching, an
experience in which the student is lured and encouraged into new discoveries, or will all subject-
matter be reduced to the purely objective… Can the child who has been instructed in such a
manner … accept the polyvalence and even simultaneous contradictions of the humanities?” His
solution was to charge humanists with the task of finding humanistic uses for computers beyond
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what they needed to expedite their own research: “With patience, imagination, and conviction we
may mold the machine to our own ends. It may emerge as a truly interactive interlocutor,
catching the interest of the student, suggesting new lines of inquiry… [and imparting]
information [which] must be appreciated as creating or contributing to an intellectual and
esthetic whole.”
212
What’s more, Raben also acknowledged that the status of the humanities in a
generation demanding reform and relevance was at stake here. “[This] generation is challenging
the establishment on every front. The relevance of the entire humanities curriculum is being
evaluated.”
213

Early computing humanists’ interests in networked textuality, and concern for the
information explosion and electronic education found them intimately aligned with the interests
and affairs of the Interuniversity Communications Council (EDUCOM), the organization most
centrally involved in the establishment of electronic educational networks in these years. In the
mid-to-late 1960s, members of EDUCOM and early computing humanists were closely involved
in each other’s efforts, regularly attending each other’s conferences and publishing in each
other’s journals and newsletters. In fact, EDUCOM held two conferences for computing
humanist in the mid-1960s; the first, Computers for Humanists in December 1966 and the
second, the Computer and Humanistic Studies in June 1967. Both were critically concerned with
networks. However, the second was part of EDUCOM’s “summer study” to discuss and plan the
first national educational network—EDUNET. EDUNET was an attempt to further the “trends
in on-line computing and educational television networks,” but by bringing together “the

212
Raben, Joseph. “Computer Applications to Problems in the Humanities: A Keynote Address,” in
Proceedings: Computer Applications to Problems in the Humanities: A Conversation in the Disciplines,
State University College, Brockport, N.Y. April 4-5, 1969. (Brockport, State University of New York,
College at Brockport, 1970) 19.
213
Ibid.
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quantity of machine-readable materials and other recourses [which are] mounting rapidly.” It
was an effort to connect already existing college and university computer systems across the
nation so that they could share informational, educational and data processing resources. It
would also potentially bring critical electronic recourses to those without. This “college net” as
the Christian Science Monitor called it, would ultimately, “pool computer resources of
institutions and communities and make those facilities available to schools which lack the
resources to afford their own. The ultimate goal is to give EDUCOM participants immediate
access.”
214
Intellectually speaking, EDUNET was an outgrowth of INTREX. Robert M. Hayes,
Professor of Library Science and Director of the Institute for Library Research at the University
of California at Los Angeles, summarized the connection in Computers and the Humanities this
way: “The potentials implicit in the MAC facility and the INTREX experiments at MIT were
seen as the wave of the future. As a result, the work of that Task Force was directed at creating a
computer network among universities, and the ‘Summer Study on Information Networks’ was
regarded as a first step toward doing so.”
215

Humanists’ participation in these types of conferences only compounded their interest in
electronic textuality. Their participation not only allowed them to enter into discussion about the
potential benefits of electronic educational networks in these years, but it also allowed them the
further opportunity to think through and comment on the nature of electronic textuality in the
presence of experts who were offering up farthest-reaching possibilities. Reporting on his
participation at the EDUCOM “Summer Study on Information Networks,” mentioned above,

214
Cartmell, David. “College Net Planned,” The Christian Science Monitor ( Jan 18, 1969). Pp. 15.
215
Hays, Robert M. “Electronic Links to Knowledge. EDUNET: Report of the Summer Study on
Information Networks,” Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Nov., 1968): 126-127.
| 235 |

Norman Holland, professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, explained
his critical take on the likelihood of real-time, on-line educational resources:

A related possibility we discussed was the creation of an encyclopedia by
the storage of immense amounts of data at various points around the
country with consoles at a much greater number of points, consoles which
would deliver anything from a once-over-lightly summary of a given
subject to a full bibliography and print-outs of scholarly articles on one
aspect. Such an encyclopedia would accept corrections and controversies
as these came into it. It would thus be a truly McLuhanesque expression of
our age. Unlike the compendia of the thirteenth or eighteenth centuries, it
would have no physical location, no linear, sequential structure, no fixed
content; it would be clumps of electrons hurrying from place to place,
ordered not by any fixed structure of knowledge, but by the shifting needs
and opinions of its users.
216

VI. Early Humanities Computing and the Social Responsibility of Bibliographic Control

Bibliographic control was another area where humanists’ interest in machine-readable
textuality allowed them to get directly involved in technical solutions to information
dissemination and retrieval. Like members of the electronics industry, library scientists and

216
Holland, Norman. “Futures: A NonSummary of the EDUCOM Symposium on the Computer and
Humanistic Studies,” Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Nov., 1967). Pp. 58.
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others, computing humanists in the 1960s—that is, humanists who were invested in exploring the
relationship between print and electronic textuality—were supremely concerned with the
information explosion and the information management techniques and bibliographic control
necessary to combat its social ills. “You're not unaware of the flood of information that is
inundating us,” Alyce Sands, assistant professor of English at Queens College and Coordinator
the MLA’s first Abstracting and Indexing system provoked her reading audience on the pages of
Computers and the Humanities, “How do we deal with it? How can we provide what [Marshall]
McLuhan calls ‘civil defense against media fallout’?” Her answer was of course better
bibliographic control. The system she described then in development was sponsored by the
Modern Language Association but centralized and systematized “information about educational,
organization, curriculum, methods, and materials”—the Educational Research Information
Center. Today we know the system as ERIC. This system mimicked exactly, those systems set
up for science and medicine described earlier—experts read abstracts of all papers published in
their educational sub-field, produced lists of keywords for those papers and then those keywords
were inputted into computers to produce automated indexes and allow for future searches. ERIC
would become, and remains today, a massive resource for teachers and educators everywhere
and it was sponsored and coordinated by a group of humanities scholars at the MLA.
Information management and bibliographic control was, in fact, a very early interest of
computing humanists. The first humanities computing institute in the United States, the Institute
for Computer Research in the Humanities at New York University was engaged in numerous
efforts both at NYU and nationally to aid libraries, scholarly societies, museums and even the
United Nations in the management of proliferating documentation and information. The ICRH’s
first foray into information management for outside groups was with the Gould Memorial
| 237 |

Library at NYU. In 1965, modifying a previously developed indexing program at the ICRH, they
began a service to sort by subject matter all new acquisitions of the library and match them up
with faculty at the university. “The system works as follows:” their newsletter reported, “as soon
as a new book is received, a card is punched with the author, title, and call number (Library of
Congress classification). Faculty lists are compiled, using the first two characters of the Library
of Congress classification as a guide to the subject matter of the books in question… The faculty
is enthusiastic about this new service.”
217
After being approached by Carl Dauterman, Associate
Curator of Western Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ICRH began work
in April of 1966 on a Museum Computer Network. This network for sixteen museums in New
York was projected to sort, classify and store information on the holdings of each of the member
museums. Three pilot projects with sample databanks were set up before ISRH lost its funding
in 1968. Finally, the ICRH lent its services to the United Nations, for whom they wrote a
program to index the minutes from the twenty-second General Assembly in four different
languages. Members of the ICRH were also involved, as we’ve seen, in traditional concordance
making and stylistic analysis of great humanities texts. But they were equally involved in
bibliographic efforts in the world outside their fields and even outside academia. Computing
humanists in the 1960s were interested in more than the extension of stylistic analysis (in
particular, new criticism rigor) of canonical texts. They were concerned and engaged with the
translation of the accumulating human record into electronic formats.
What’s more, even beyond the straightforward bibliographic efforts of the MLA, ICRH
and others, it was clear that for early computing humanists, the analysis of “literary data” itself

217
“Computers aid in Library Information Dissemination,” New York University ICRH Newsletter. Vol.
1, No. 3 (November 1965) pp. 3.

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was part of the larger social and technical effort to turn all text into machine-readable and
therefore more manageable data. Early computing humanists, even those engaged chiefly in
computational analysis of humanities texts, felt they were a part of something much larger than
just concordance making and stylistic analysis. In particular, they saw themselves and their
hands-on experiments translating texts into computable data as part of larger efforts in
information retrieval in these years. “They are part of the same revolution,” Stephen Parrish
argued in his opening statements at the Conference on the Use of Computers in Humanistic
Research at Rutgers in December of1964. “The next large area of use for the computer in literary
research lies in bibliography, enumerative bibliography. Here we are in the field known as
information retrieval, IR,” Parrish summarized.
In fact, over and over again, one heard at early humanities computing conferences a kind
of hubris in this regard. So far, efforts in computerized information retrieval had been limited to
basic, though speedy, sorting and classifying. Computing humanists were in the actual game of
textual analysis—getting computers to identify complex textual elements—something that could
supremely aid in the effort to get machines to collate and compare texts and thus get the
information explosion under control. Humanities had something to provide here. More than
anyone else, or so they thought, humanists were pushing at the edges of the quantitative-
qualitative barrier in textual analysis—getting computers to recognize implicit features of texts.
The traditional textual elements of interest in humanities analysis—for instance, meaning,
context and style—meant they automatically entered into the discussion of natural language
processing at a level once removed from mere keyword searching. Style, for instance was a
topic of wide concern in early humanities computing literature—at conferences and in journals
and newsletters. It involved the effort to get computers to fathom, on some level, linguistic
| 239 |

patterns which suggested authorial word choice, conscious or otherwise.
218
Experimentation
along these lines revealed several options in these years: humanists used computers to count and
analyze the juxtaposition, grouping and positioning of certain words; the use of word, phrase,
clause and sentence types; word length; word derivation; punctuation patterns; and rhythm
meter. Such methods of literary analysis could, some humanists thought, potentially aid in the
overall effort to process natural language, a key area of information retrieval. Perhaps, for his
reason, Sally Sedlow, professor of English and Computer Science at the University of North
Carolina whose own work on “computational stylistics” led to work sponsored by the Office of
Naval Research in 1967, felt that this subfield of “literary data processing” was the most fruitful
intersection between literary criticism and technologists. "Computational Stylistics,” she and her
husband, Walter Sedlow, argued at the Literary Data Processing Conference held in September
1964, “is the result of a desire to give contemporary technology focused on language processing
the benefit of analytical methods devised used by literary critics and, at the same time, to give
literary critics the benefit of tools provided by contemporary technology—i.e., the large digital
computer and new programming procedures.” Others, including Parris agreed. Parrish himself
felt that, “stylistic analysis” and information retrieval in particular was an intersection where
humanists and scientists might truly come together. Having been present at Snow’s famous 1959
Read Lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Parrish took every opportunity at
early humanities computing conferences and in published articles to advocate for a recovery of
the breach.

218
In fact, computer analysis offered the opportunity, many argued, to get at “unconscious style” in ways
previously not possible. In this case, in particular, computers allowed scholars to leverage literary and
linguistic patterns, not straightforwardly perceptible to humans, to get “underneath” a text.
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VII. Toward the 1970s

Humanists continued to be involved in the establishment of electronic networks and in
bibliographic control in the years after these first forays. Indeed, these areas continued to be, as
in these first years, profitable areas of interaction between humanists and technologists. But for
humanists, the rhetoric of “engagement” disappeared rather quickly as they moved into the next
decade. The 1970s were years of broad consolidation in humanities computing. The
establishment of what continue till today to be the two central humanities computing
organizations in the English speaking world—the Association for Literary and Linguistic
Computing in 1973 and the Association for Computers and the Humanities in 1978.
219
These
years also saw the beginning of the biennial Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
conferences in Europe and the International Conference on Computing in the Humanities in
North America, in 1973 and 1974 respectively. Finally, endeavors to avoid duplication of effort
in machine-readable texts also led to the creation of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae in the
United States (1972) and the Oxford Text Archive (1976) in these years. In the mid-1970s into
the 1980s, talk about bibliography and machine-readable textuality in humanities computing
settled much more into rhetoric of business as usual—advancing humanities research via text
encoding and archiving. Compared to the mid-to-late 1960s, one encounters, in these years, far
fewer expressions to the effect that guiding the uses of new information technologies is a direct
way for the humanists to be serviceable to social ends outside the academy---that for instance,
bibliographic control was a way for humanists to provide analytic-somatic health for their

219
Today both organizations, along with the Société Pour L'étude des Médias Interactifs, are contained
within the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).

| 241 |

students combating the ills of the information explosion or that the use of, and intervention in,
computational processes was a way for interpretive scholars to help “humanize” computers in
general. The 1960s were unique in this respect. Technologically, they were the period within
which computational hardware and methodologies advanced to the point that humanists could
get computers to deal directly with their fundamental unit of analysis—texts. Intellectually, they
were a period of crisis in the humanities within which its practitioners felt an increased
responsibility to be critically socially engaged. In the Unites States, as I’ve shown, the
emergence of humanities computing occurred in reaction to both, at the intersection of these two
impulses.

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Epilogue
From Punch-Cards to Pixels: The Corporatization of Higher Education and
the Socio-Technical Humanities Today

Today the socio-technical humanities are almost entirely contained within the digital
humanities. The digital humanities are, of course, the larger set, also containing within it
humanists and others interested only in the advantages of digital media and computing power for
furthering research—to augment interpretive work in the humanities. But those who use new
media and technology, and advocate for its uses, as a way for the humanities to become more
deeply engaged in social and public matters, and in particular, those who argue that such
engagements are a necessary way out of the contemporary crisis, now constitute a significant
segment of the digital humanities. The socio-technical humanities are, in fact, alive and well in
2013. After a brief lull in the 1980s and1990s, during what I am calling the humanities “crisis of
confidence,” they have flourished in the last decade, responding with force to the terms of the
current crisis—the “crisis of power.” More and more the socio-technical humanities are gaining
advocates and apologists; unlike other periods, I argue, today they are surrounded by fellow
travelers. That is, more and more, the socio-technical humanities are thought to hold the key to
solving the humanities’ woes. In some ways, the current crisis in the humanities is theirs to
solve; it is their moment to seize.
My periodization of crises in the humanities is meant merely to indicate the dominant
ethos of each period. I do not mean to argue that the characteristic feature of each crisis excluded
all others. Indeed, from WWII forward, the humanities have continuously found themselves
trying to keep up with and connect to the sciences (crisis of the Two Cultures), to be more
| 243 |

socially engaged (crisis of engagement), to find internal coherence (crisis of confidence) and to
acquire the power necessary to survive in an increasingly instrumental world of higher education
(crisis of power). In fact, in some ways, the crises in the humanities from WWII forward, are
cumulative, and as such my moniker for each period is meant to indicate what has been added to
it with each period. For instance, the two cultures debate is still with us, as is the feeling that the
humanities remain critically disengaged from real world issues.

In the 1980s, there was added to both these sentiments a massively escalated crisis of
confidence. The 1980s and 1990s, can in fact, be seen, in some ways, as the nadir of the
humanities crisis. If the late 1950s and 1960s is the period in which the phrase “crisis in the
humanities” first gained widespread traction, the 1980s is the period in which the terms’ use truly
accelerated (figure 1). The first sign of escalating trouble was declining enrollments. Between
1966 and 1993, the percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded in the humanities dropped from
20.7 to 12.7, and the percentage of doctoral degrees awarded in the humanities fell from 13.8 to
9.1. The decline in bachelor’s degrees throughout the 1970s and in to the mid-1980s was drastic
indeed, a near free fall, and it struck humanities educators everywhere with total dismay. Added
Figure E.1.
| 244 |

to this was a problem of outright conflict as
politicians, cultural commentators, alumni
and influential humanists themselves
expounded on the rapid decline by lashing
out against what was perceived to be a leftist-
leaning, obtusely theory-laden humanities
enterprise. “It may well be the case that the much-publicized decline in in humanities
enrollments recently is due at least in part to students’ refusal to devote their college education to
a program of study that has nothing to offer them but ideological posturing, pop culture, and
hermeneutic word games,” Roger Kimball wrote in his 1990 Tenured Radicals.
220
The rise of
feminist criticism, African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, as well as a new focus on
language, objectivity and interpretation in the humanities was, according to some, a major
misstep away from the fundamental aim of humanities education—to “save the soul and enlarge
the mind,” as William Bennett put it in his 1983 piece, “The Shattered Humanities.”
221
A return
to a humanities centered on an engagement with tradition, with the authority of canonical texts,
was counseled by Roger Kimball, and among others, Allan Bloom in his widely influential, The
Closing of the America Mind and William Bennett, chairman of the National Endowment for the
Humanities from 1981-1985. While many took the claims of Kimball, Bennett, Bloom, and
others to be unfounded, by the time of the 1997 edited anthology, What’s Happened to the

220
Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education. (New York:
Harper & Row, 1990); 11.
221
Bennett, William. “The Shattered Humanities,” American Association of Higher Education Bulletin
(February, 1983); 3.
Figure E.1
| 245 |

Humanities?, generally considered a low water mark in humanities confidence, a good number
of humanists were willing to admit that something had gone drastically wrong in the prior two
decades.
Compared to the 1950s, 1960s and today, there was less talk during this period of using
new media and technology as a way out of the contemporary crisis in the humanities. This is not
to say that humanists were not using new media and technology in these years. Indeed,
humanities computing, text encoding and the use of educational technology, especially with the
arrival of the personal computer, occurred everywhere in these years. But these endeavors were
rarely accompanied by a rhetoric of humanities-oriented, socio-technical interventionism. Again,
this is not to say that one cannot find such rhetoric. “The existing and emerging technologies that
have ushered in the electronic learning age will not pass away or magically disappear,” Suzanne
E. Lindenau, director of foreign-language laboratories at the University of Georgia wrote in the
in 1984, “Instead, they could enable us in foreign language education, the humanities, and the
arts to shift out of reverse, improve the quality of education, and effectively educate Americans
for the twenty-first century.”
222
But one finds startling little of it in these years, especially
compared to the periods prior and subsequent to it. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, it just wasn’t a
climate of crisis within which the socio-technical humanities’ rhetoric of social engagement via
new media and technology could gain as much traction. The crisis of confidence was simply not
the kind of crisis appropriately dealt with via experimentation with media, or rather it was not the
kind of crisis whose features could be as easily mobilized while arguing for the needed social
engagement of the humanities via technological interventionism.

222
Lindenau, Suzanne E. “The Teacher and Technology in the Humanities and Arts,” The Modern
Language
Journal (Summer 1984); 119-120.
| 246 |

Of course, the crisis of confidence, though somewhat reduced, is still with us. One still
encounters statements to the effect that the humanities are at this moment completely lost at sea.
The humanities, Lynn Hunt, argued in typical fashion in 2008, are in an “interpretive cul-de-
sac.” “It is time for a new paradigm … for humanistic studies more generally,” she declared.
223

For as long as we can remember, the humanities have bemoaned their lack of influence and
power. The humanities have always, according to its contemporary practitioners, been on the
decline. The halcyon days of prestige, confidence, coherence and authority have always been
behind those assessing the status of the humanities in the modern world. When higher education
was opened up to the masses, scholars like Douglas Bush, lamented the incursion onto campus of
those who had always displayed an open disinterest, even disgust, for the humanities. Even as
humanities majors were on the rise in the 1960s, humanists lamented a general techno-scientific
turn away from the past and away from humanities interests.
But in the last decade an actual loss of power in the realm of higher education has begun
to register among humanists greatest fears: in the last decade, this has become the focus of much
of the crisis in the humanities literature, a literature which now verges on a cottage industry. The
outpouring of books on the situation, is itself, now cited as an indication of the scope of the
dilemma. A kind of feedback loop has been installed. “Higher education is in big trouble,” Ellen
Schrecker wrote in reviewing for the Bulletin of the American Association of University
Professors, “Otherwise, why would so many energetic, intelligent, and concerned academics
desert their traditional disciplinary pursuits to publish jeremiads about the pitiful state of the
humanities and the institutions that purvey them? A recent review article in The Nation surveyed

223
Hunt, Lynn. “The Experience of Revolution,” French Historical Studies (Fall 2009); 671.
| 247 |

ten such volumes; this review deals with five, mainly different, ones; and literally dozens more
are available on Amazon.”
224

Whether the latest developments in the loss of power for humanists can or should be seen
as a difference in degree or kind, commentators today point to a number of defining factors for
the contemporary situation. Actual departments are being shut down. Not many in reality; but
when they are, waves of near-hysteria spread across academia. When SUNY Albany closed its
French, Italian, Russian and classics programs and departments in 2008, leaving ten tenured and
twenty tenure track professors in the lurch, the signal was loud and clear. The increasingly
instrumental climate in higher education, plus the sudden finical situation (especially with state-
funded higher education) dictated the terms of the new regime: enrollment is everything.
Everyone knew the time would come when the financial feasibility of departments and programs,
not their overall role in the transmission of our collective human heritage, would matter most.
George M. Philip, president of SUNY Albany, put the terms quite starkly in defending the
decision: there were “comparatively” fewer students enrolled in these programs. But of course,
the loss of those seats is more an indication of an overall sea change—those seats are no longer
filled because requirements have changed. Declaring that “The Crisis of the Humanities [has]
Officially Arrive[d],” Stanley Fish wrote of the decision: “If your criteria are productivity,
efficiency and consumer satisfaction it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material
support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep.”
225

224
Schrecker, Ellen. “The Humanities on Life Support,” Bulletin of the American Association of
University Professors (September-October, 2011). Accessed online:
http://www.aaup.org/article/humanities-life-support#.UgVVRG02yt4
225
Fish, Stanley. “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives,” New York Times (Oct. 10, 2010).
Accessed Online: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-crisis-of-the-humanities-
officially-arrives/?_r=0
| 248 |

The status of tenure is another rallying point. Though a problem for faculty in all fields,
the humanities are, as one can imagine, singled out as particularly vulnerable in the
contemporary crisis literature. Some have argued that the erosion of tenure—today, only 31
percent of college teachers are tenure or tenure track, down from 57 percent in 1975—is part of a
silent and subversive strategy from the 1980s forward to take power away from would-be
“tenured radicals,” especially in the humanities. Gregory Jay, professor of English at the
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, puts it perhaps most ironically in reviewing and summing
up the arguments of Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the
Fate of the Humanities and Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-
Year Assault on the Middle Class:

[From the 1970s to the 1990s] hot disagreements over feminism,
poststructuralism, political correctness, multiculturalism, identity politics,
postcolonialism, border and queer studies (to name a few) dominated the
headlines and monographs. Meanwhile, and with much less fanfare, a revolution
was occurring in campus budgets, management, and the structure of academic
labor, resulting in changes that may have far more lasting effects than any of the
innovations in scholarship… the switch to non–tenure track academic labor is not
an end in itself, but one instrument in a larger effort to undermine the progressive
social development and egalitarian ideals of higher education in a democratic
society.
226

226
Jay, Gregpry.“Hire Ed! Deconstructing the Crises in Academe.” American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1
(2011): 163-4.
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Even the unprecedented increases in tuition in recent years—a forty-two percent increase
from 2000-2010 (after adjustment for inflation) for public colleges and universities and thirty-
one percent for private—are seen as a death knell for the humanities.
227
“In the 1990s students
were prepared to borrow more as a hedge on future incomes, but this model of financing higher
education now seems obsolete as fees have continued to rise while future incomes have
stagnated,” Colleen Lye and James Vernon wrote in the February/March 2011 Newsletter for the
Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.
228
"When the job market worsens, many
students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major," David Brooks wrote in a
2010 New York Times article, an article widely cited and commented on in the crisis
literature.
229
But the results are a little more complex. As the economy falters, students don’t just
seek out more practical degrees at the same campuses as before. They also seek out, more and
more, strictly vocational degrees from for-profit higher educational institutions, institutions
which explicitly marginalize humanities courses. They also seek out the cheapest educational
providers and degrees, meaning, often, online degrees, of which the humanities offer few. Much
of this is why for-profit higher education has become such a boon in recent years. In 1960s there
were a handful of for-profit postsecondary institutions; by 2003 there were 2,383 accredited for-
profit colleges and universities—a full one third of all two and four-year institutions of higher

227
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). Digest of Education
Statistics, 2011. Accessed online: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
228
Vernon James, Colleen Lye. “The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University,” Newsletter for
the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (February/March 2011). Accessed online:
http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/publications/humanities-and-crisis-public-university.
229
Brooks, David. “History for Dollars,” (New York Times, June 7, 2010). Accessed online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08brooks.html
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education in the United States. Their flagship, is in some ways, the University of Phoenix.
Founded in 1976, it has the largest enrollment of any American university: over 400,000
undergraduate and 78,000 graduate students. Phoenix offers associate, bachelor's, master's, and
doctoral degrees in more than 100 subjects. Of its 20,000 faculty members, most are part timers,
receive no benefits, and have no access to tenure. The fate of the humanities in the flourishing
world of for-profit higher education is easy for many to predict. “This is a corporation,” John
Sperling the president of the Apollo Group (The University of Phoenix’s parent company) has
argued, aggressively pitting the instrumental value of his brand of education against the
humanities directly, “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop
[student’s] value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds bullshit.’”
230

An increased focus on the instrumental impact of teaching and research, the undermining
of tenure, rising tuition, the massive growth of online and for-profit education; none of these are
taken in isolation in the contemporary crisis literature. Instead they are thought, by those
commenting on the decline of the humanities on campuses today, as part of an overall corporate
redesign of higher education—a redesign in which the humanities are losing clout and control as
never before. What the humanities face today most vitally, according to these commenters, is the
“corporate university,” or even a “corporate attack on the humanities.”
231
“The result,” according
to Ellen Schrecker, in “The Humanities on Life Support,” is an “increasingly competitive system

230
Cox, Ana Marie. “None of Your Business: The Rise of the University of Phoenix and For-Profit
Education—and Why It Will Fail Us All,” in Steal this University: The Rise of the Corporate University
and the Academic Labor Movement. Eds. Benjamin Johnson et al. (New York: Routlage, 2003); 19.
231
Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
(New York: Fordam University Press: 2008). Fettner, Peter. “The Crisis in the Humanities and the
Corporate Attack on the University.” Accessed Online:
http://www.academia.edu/875988/The_Crisis_in_the_Humanities_and_the_Corporate_Attack_on_the_U
niversity
| 251 |

of higher education permeated by the corporate values and inequities that pervade the rest of
American society.”
232

If one reads the full breadth of this contemporary crisis literature—the numerous books
that have come out just since 2000, the articles, conference proceedings, blogs and near endless
online commentary—there is a sense, at times articulated, at other times tacit, that the humanities
main deficit in all of this has been their inability to sell themselves, to demonstrate their specific
value or usefulness to the public. It registers both as embarrassment and as guilt. This feeling has
always been around—indeed, the humanities have always been a tough sell. But this
undercurrent of feeling is more palpable than ever before. Thus, it’s no wonder that in this
climate more and more educators, humanist and others, have begun to argue for the practical,
instrumental benefits of the humanities. In just a few short years, for instance, programs
specifically built for instrumental humanities undergraduate and graduate work have appeared on
the academic scene. The Brigham Young University Humanities+ program, started in 2010,
advertises its goal as “Bridging the Humanities and the World of Work.” Students in this
program are encouraged to minor in a professional field and to participate in overseas
internships. “In our globalized marketplace, many recruiters are turning directly to humanities
majors for their foreign-language and intercultural expertise,” their mission statement reads,
“their leadership abilities, communication skills and above all for their intellectual flexibility and
creativity.” Likewise, at the graduate level, the Master of the Arts Program in the Humanities at
the University of Chicago, established in the late 1990s, states its mission as “Bringing
Humanities into the World.” Their website boasts a number of graduates, called “MAPHers,”
who have found jobs in media, marketing, policy analysis and an 02’ graduate who became a

232
Schrecker, Ellen. Ibid.
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finance director for the Obama 2008 campaign. “The Master of the Arts Program in the
Humanities is a model for a more pragmatic kind of graduate education,” the programs
showcases an endorsement by a rather traditional humanities figure, Elaine Showalter, “This
seems like absolutely the right direction. What's original and incredibly timely is the
combination of an intensive, unwatered-down academic program with an introduction to a wider
professional context.”
Many other humanities divisions, programs or departments not explicitly dedicated to an
instrumental interpretation of humanities pedagogy have nonetheless begun to tout the value of
humanities skills in the marketplace by citing endorsements from successful entrepreneurs. “I
think maybe the best education, or the best foundation for business is probably reading
Shakespeare, rather than reading some MBA program out of some great business school. I think
I'd rather have an English major than an economics major,” Michael Eisner, CEO of Walt
Disney, and an English and Theater major, is quoted on the University of the Pacific’s
humanities division website, titled “Value of the Humanities in the Marketplace. “The most
valuable class I took at Stanford was not Econ 51. It was a graduate seminar called, believe it or
not, ‘Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages.’” Carly Fiorina,
former CEO of Hewlett Packer and a major in philosophy and medieval history is quoted on the
College of New Jersey’s Liberal Arts page, “the rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of
refinement …I've used it again and again.” Steve Jobs is cited everywhere: “The reason that
Apple is able to create products like iPad is because we always try to be at the intersection of
technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both." The humanities are learning to sell
themselves in the new climate.
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Indeed, there is, it seems, a movement afoot, if only rhetorical, between business and the
humanities. For those keeping abreast, in the last month alone (July 2013) there have been
articles in the Harvard Business Review, “Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the
Humanities;” in Forbes, “The Difference Humanities Makes In Business,” in Business Insider,
“11 Reasons To Ignore The Haters And Major In The Humanities,” and CNN Money, “Why the
humanities need to be saved,” with many, many more in the months preceding. When industry
leaders of late champion the advantages of humanities degrees in the marketplace, new blogs
devoted to the intersection of the humanities and marketplace light up. BYU’s Humanities+ blog
and Union College’s blog, “The Arts and Humanities in the 21
st
Century Workplace,” for
instance, work as clearing houses for articles and reports on these issues. When Christian
Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen, both senior partners at ReD Associates, recently wrote an
article in the Washington Post titled “We need more humanities majors,” or when a 2012 report
from Business Insider listed thirty “extremely successful” business leaders and public figures
with humanities degrees, the stories get re-broadcast again and again by departments and blogs
trying to revitalize the humanities.
233

While activity of this kind seems to be taking place more at smaller colleges and
universities, who, like community and state colleges, find themselves today caught at a
crossroads between vocational and elite models of higher education, it is definitely not limited to
institutions located at lower tiers. Stanford recently enacted a number of initiatives designed to
highlight the practical benefits of humanities majors including hosting an American Academy of

233
Madsbjerg, Christian and Mikkel B. Rasmussen. “We need more humanities majors.” Washinton Post
(July 30, 2013). Accessed online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/07/30/we-
need-more-humanities-majors/ Cutrone, Carolyn and Max Nisen. “30 People With 'Soft' College Majors
Who Became Extremely Successful,” Business Insider (Dec. 18, 2012). Accessed online:
http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-liberal-arts-majors-2012-12?op=1#ixzz2bzdAdJGF
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Arts and Sciences conference on the humanities and international relations, cultural diplomacy,
leadership and American competitiveness. The first thing they did was try to sell this new
emphasis to their alumni. “Stanford can’t ignore the pressures of a wider national context in
which students make their choices,” explains an article in their Alumni Magazine, titled “Who
Needs the Humanities at 'Start-Up U'?” “In this era of anxiety about graduates finding jobs, the
humanities are the subject of an intense debate about relevance and value. In short, humanities
majors are suspected of having no “real” or marketable skills, “ the article goes on, “The
response of Stanford philosophers, historians and literary scholars has been to saddle up and ride
into the fray. The University has launched a number of initiatives to highlight what the
humanities offer in both pragmatic and inspirational ways, to strengthen the preparation they
provide for careers beyond academia.”
At the graduate level, Anaïs Saint-Jude, established and now directs Stanford’s
BiblioTech Program whose slogan reads: “Bibliotech: Connecting Liberal Arts PhDs with
Forward-Thinking Companies.” Bibliotech reaches out to local technology firms setting up
“designships” with humanities Ph.Ds. or graduate students, or as the program calls them,
“humanities professionals.” The program also sponsors conferences, talks and what are
essentially mixers between Stanford humanities Ph.Ds. and members of the tech industry.
Humanities Ph.Ds., they continue the contemporary refrain, hold the essence of innovation: the
ability to communicate well, to be “comfortable with ambiguity,” and to puzzle through novel
problems in imaginative ways. “That's 500 of some of the country's most intellectually curious
thinkers,” their website markets Stanford’s humanities doctoral students to industry, “waiting to
meet you, identify your next challenges, and design creative solutions for tomorrow, today.”
Bibliotech was also behind the well-known 2011 two day conference, “Bringing Humanities
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Ph.D. Innovation to Silicon Valley,” which brought 120 students, faculty and industry leaders
together to discuss ways of getting humanities Ph.Ds. into Silicon Valley. It was here that
Google’s Damon Horowitz gave his much talked about keynote address, “Why you should quit
your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities,” and where Melissa Mayer, vice-
president of consumer products at Google, made an announcement that riveted the academic
world for a brief period: the technology giant would hire 6,000 people in 2012; of those, 4,000 -
5,000 would “probably” be humanities Ph.Ds.
Scholars, commentators and members of industry plugging the instrumental value of the
humanities in the marketplace today regularly find themselves endorsing the socio-technical
humanities. In the current crisis of power—that is, with the perceived threat of the
corporatization of higher education, and its projected effects on the humanities—commentators
endorsing the market value of technology-oriented humanities skills have become the socio-
technical humanities greatest outside advocates. They are now legion. And once again, the terms
of the contemporary crisis in the humanities have dictated the terms of their endorsement. For the
fellow travelers of the socio-technical humanities today, the argument for humanists’
engagement with new media and technology takes on a more instrumental justification than it did
in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s less about guiding the uses of new media and technology than it is
about increasing the competitiveness of humanities programs by thinking about the ways that
they can provide marketable skills. The socio-technical humanities have always had fellow
travelers. But in the 1960s, they often came from an expanding group of humanists who hoped
that scholars would in some way participate in the wider technology assessment movement of the
decade—they were advocates for a social mission of the humanities. Take Herbert Muller,
Professor of English at Indiana University, for example. Muller was a typical fellow traveler of
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the socio-technical humanities in the 1960s, during the humanities crisis of engagement. In 1970,
he wrote a piece for the American Scholar in which he relayed an experience one finds repeated
again and again in the 1960s literature on the relevance of the humanities.

In a recent seminar in political philosophy, centered on the issues of democracy, I
started for the sake of historical perspective with some study of freedom in the
ancient world - a major item in my professional stock in trade. One day an
impatient student suddenly launched a harangue on the terrific problems looming
up, such as the population explosion, the prospects that millions of people are
going to starve to death; and here we were way back in ancient Greece, reading
Plato's Republic.
234

Muller dropped a rehearsed line for the student: one needs a longer perspective before assessing
the contemporary situation. But the line, and the sentiment behind it, was too easy a routine for
Muller who, having written The Children of Frankenstein: A Primer on Modern Technology and
Human Values, was deeply concerned with the critical features of the contemporary world. “Are
the perspectives got from the political thought of the little Greek polis,” he confronted himself,
“really of much help in understanding our massive technological society?”
235
Muller’s solution
was engagement. Without forsaking a fidelity to the past, humanists must, in order to be
“involved” or “committed,” become obliged to critique the future, and for Muller, that meant
more humanities-oriented technology assessment: “What do teachers of the humanities have to

234
Muller, Herbert. “The ‘Relevance’ of the ‘Humanities.’” The American Scholar (Winter, 1970-71);
111-112.
235
Ibid. 112.
| 257 |

contribute to such enterprises? Although not qualified as forecasters, they at least have
something to say about the most important consideration, the question of what America ought to
do with its fabulous technology. They can promote criticism of the actual uses of this
technology.”
236

Today, by contrast, the dominant argument for the socio-technical humanities on offer
from its fellow travelers is much more instrumental. “[There is a] range of useful professional
competencies with which a humanities education equips 21st-century students,” Paul Jay and
Gerald Graff argued in a much commented on piece in Inside Higher Education, “The Fear of
Being useful.” “In addition to learning to read carefully and to write concisely, humanities
students are trained in fields like rhetoric and composition, literary criticism and critical theory,
philosophy, history, and theology to analyze and make arguments in imaginative ways, to
confront ambiguity, and to reflect skeptically about received truths, skills that are increasingly
sought for in upper management positions in today’s information-based economy.”
237
Sounds
familiar; it’s the same reasoning so widely on offer these years. But like many others today, they
then move directly from advocacy of the instrumental utility of humanities skills to an
endorsement of the digital humanities. “The concrete value of the humanities education [that
people in industry] celebrate is especially well epitomized in the new field of the digital
humanities,” Jay and Graff go on to argue, “Students in the digital humanities are trained [for
instance] to deal with concrete issues related to intellectual property and privacy, and with
questions related to public access and methods of text preservation….We believe it is time to

236
Ibid. 117.
237
Jay, Paul and Geralg Graff. “Fear of Being Useful,” Inside Higher Education. (Jan. 5, 2012). Accessed
online: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities
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stop the ritualized lamentation over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of
making them relevant in the 21st century.”
A good many of today’s socio-technical humanists have also taken a more directly
instrumental defense of their endeavors. This is especially true of what is perhaps the dominant
impulse in the socio-technical humanities today, what I would call “data-intensive humanities.”
In the current climate, they cannot, in some ways, help but sell themselves as uniquely capable of
imparting much needed technical savvy to their students (e.g. programming and database
management), of attracting much needed funding from corporate, non-profit, and governmental
agencies in a time of humanities defunding and, in general, of making humanities research, often
based on large datasets, more fathomable to academic administrators, policy makers and the
public. Take the Google offer as an example. Despite the media attention, Google never gave
much of an explanation—why would 80% of its hires in the next year come from the
humanities? Dig as one might, there was not much to find. Mayers mentioned that understanding
human behavior was fundamental to developing user interfaces and that Google Doodles were
often cultural in content. That was about it. But someone else at the 2011 Bibliotech conference,
not speaking directly to Google’s proposed hires, did explain the link. Bob Tinker, president and
CEO of MobilIron, in a panel discussion on “Silicon Valley Entry Points for Humanities Ph.D.s:
Google,” encapsulated one of the fundamental contemporary connections between the
humanities and the technology industry this way: "Technology is becoming more humanist and
at the same time the humanities are becoming more technical.” Big data provides perhaps the
best example here. Meaning making is not just taking place at an exponentially expanding scale
via posts, tweets, blogging, memes and image uploads online. We are online in other ways too—
and meaning is becoming increasingly important here as well. Corporations interested in the
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power of big data, especially it’s social and cultural variants, are beginning to explore the degree
to which traditional humanistic modes of interpretation can help power its analysis. As vast
amounts of data coming in about what people do, companies like Google, Apple, IBM and others
have become newly invested in making their technologies responsive to the individual user’s
experiences in innovative ways. This requires more than just empirical pattern-recognition;
where has the wearer of Google Glasses gone before? Do they usually go to Starbucks before
they go to the mall? Do they tweet or post about frustrating situations two weeks before they buy
a vacation package or three? To be truly responsive to the individual human experience, these
firms will have to start taking into account meaning, value and significance in regards to the
decisions users make and the experiences they have. People trained to ask and answer questions
about why people do what they do and how they feel about what they do will be needed to truly
harness the power of big data to make technologies responsive to users’ individual experiences.
At the same time that these companies hope to move beyond social-scientific pattern
recognition in their datasets of human activity, digital humanists themselves are starting to look
at meaning on a large scale. As more and more of the human record is born within, or converted
to digital formats, the large-scale longitudinal analysis of material traditionally examined by way
of intimate scholarly study has become both more feasible and more appealing. Humanists
currently skirting the line between large scale analysis of sizable data sets and traditional modes
of close reading, interpretation and meaning—the “data-intensive humanities”—are attractive to
industry for just these reasons. In some ways, the two groups—industry and data-intensive
humanities—are meeting in the middle, where large-scale datasets of human activity and the
large-scale analysis of human meaning come together.
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Ultimately the instrumental climate of higher education in which data-intensive
humanists find themselves responding today, combined with the new interests of industry in their
skills, has led many to be equally, if not more, concerned with saving technology than with
saving the humanities; or rather, has led them to believe that saving the former will automatically
save the latter. This is not to say that data-intensive humanists do not advocate for the
humanities; they are after all, as I’ve defined them, part of the socio-technical humanities. They
argue that the humanities are relevant and essential in direct response to the specific features of
the current humanities crisis. But given the current climate, they tend to advocate for the
humanities only by way of advocating for innovative digital breakthroughs in humanities
research. Part of the problem is this. The legions of socio-technical humanities fellow travelers
today—CEOs, tech columnists, high level academic administrators, leading industry
spokesmen—make it appear as though all humanists have to do is link their work up with new
socially oriented information technologies or with sizable data, train their students to do the
same, and the humanities will automatically be saved. Doing so will, in the short term, guarantee
their students jobs, and in the long term, transform the humanities into something—large-scale
data-based interpretive fields—that administrators, deans, funding agencies and the public
“gets.” Their social engagement with technology today is not, as in the days of socio-technical
humanists’ emergence, always hitched to a direct and robust humanities advocacy. In this way,
they could learn a lesson from their 1950s and 1960s counterparts—those original electronic
humanists who emerged out of an impulse to engage new media only as the product of the much
stronger impulse to shore up the humanities and to make them relevant again. The socio-
technical humanities, as I’ve defined them, have always flirted with this fine line—between an
instrumental interest in cutting-edge technology itself and in keeping an eye on what’s best for
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the humanities. Today they run the risk of thinking that because the two are, in some arenas, now
so indelibly linked up together that saving the former will automatically save the latter. But even
in an era when many industry leaders are convinced that humanists have something to add to
technology, only outright, vigorous humanities advocacy will save us.
There is another main, if unnamed, current in the socio-technical humanities today, what
I am calling the “immersive humanities.” My contention is that they have within their foci the
kind of inherent humanities advocacy perhaps necessary for our fields to survive the early 21
st

century. The immersive humanities, as I’m defining them, embrace the innovative use of new
media because they recognize the fundamentally and uniquely immersive quality of humanities
interpretation and argumentation—that is, they recognize that because the content of humanities
teaching and scholarly argumentation are so often experiential, narrative, affective and
contextual in nature that they seek to explore the ways in which those inherent features can be
enhanced through the use of electronic and digital media.
The immersive humanities have both a pedagogical and a scholarly component.
Pedagogically, they aver a commitment to digitally-enabled, integrative and immersive learning
in the humanities. The immersive humanities include those trying to find a way to negotiate
between the practices of close reading and the demands of the new digital world, between the
established mode of textual engagement in humanities education and a world of sensory and
information overload. “Hyper-reading” is, year by year, becoming more common place for the
born-digital generation; correspondingly, close, print-based, textual analysis is falling further and
further outside their zone of proximal development. As humanities instructors, immersive
humanist feel certain they must find a way to negotiate between the two—to admit that large-
scale social forces are changing the way people engage culture and information, and remain vital
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by helping to instill critical interpretative skills for these new modes of media engagement. In
short, the immersive humanities attempts to help guide the new cultural and informational
practices of the digital age and at the same time remain true to the traditional and perennially
important aim of humanities instruction—to teach the measured, contemplative and reflective
engagement of cultural objects. The immersive humanities have in just the last ten years become
deeply committed to intervening in the social nature of new media and technology. After all, the
media revolution of the past decade, even half decade, is fundamentally different than those
previously dealt with by socio-technical humanists. The participatory nature of the web today has
made digital humanists see themselves as uniquely capable of intervening in “newly emergent
public spheres”—that is, online collaborative spaces.
238
For many, if not most people of the
world today, the internet has become the chief realm where they engage in meaning making, in
employing both representational and interpretive strategies—the core focus of humanities
instruction—and immersive humanists seek to guide such practices.
In its scholarly guise, the immersive humanities aver a commitment to the multi-modal
publishing of works that function in an interpretive mode. That is, the immersive humanities seek
to explore the vital connection between the unique modes of reasoning and claim making in the
humanities and the inherently immersive character of digital media. Humanists often argue by
invoking their overall experience with materials; a lifetime spent reading the works of a single
author or years spent scrutinizing select archival collections. If we could just completely
immerse the reader in the works of James Joyce, or in the political discourse of the 1890s, we
seem to think, we could show the reader more clearly what we mean. Digital technology allows

238
UCLA The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0. Accessed Online:
http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf
| 263 |

for such possibilities, where the reader has the means to immerse themselves in the discursive
material which truly sustains an argument and the freedom to individually explore the separate,
but related, narratives that often constitute the argument of an interpretive work overall.
Given their pedagogical and scholarly modes, the immersive humanities, I’m arguing,
take on a number of social responsibilities that data-intensive humanities typically do not. Given
their foci, their practitioners often take as central to their mission in engaging digital technology
the responsibility to help students critically engage an immersive, multisensory world of rapid,
digital-media-driven social change; to explore the relationship between new media and
traditional print culture and to work toward new forms of digital literacy; to intervene in the
increasingly automated structure and networked transmission of knowledge; to preserve human
values in a world of automated, self-regulating electronic information systems; and to help
students critically engage the specific formal aspects inherent in various digital media, and in so
doing, resist the contemporary impulse to view all digital media as information delivery systems
without specific formal languages.

The distinction between data-intensive humanities and immersive humanities is not
meant to be exhaustive. Nor is it meant to be mutually exclusive. Indeed, there is plenty of
overlap. I am not dividing up people—that is, practitioners in the socio-technical humanities—
but rather impulses, either of which any individual may advocate or explore at different times.
What’s more, the data-intensive humanities are already well known, and their potential
complicity in the overall instrumentalization of higher education well argued. The terms of the
current crisis has, as I’ve shown, elicited very specific responses from the socio-technical
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humanities. Indeed, as in every period, starting with their emergence in the 1950s and 1960s, the
terms of the contemporary crisis has shaped their core rhetoric and molded their hopes and
expectations—it has dictated their essential character. Today’s crisis of power combined with the
unique features of digital technology has, as I see it, produced two leading impulses—the data-
intensive humanities and immersive humanities—the former, rather well identified, the latter,
not. Thus, it is the immersive humanities that I want to single out here. It is the immersive
humanities, I’m arguing, that is first, a coherent and unified (if unconsciously so) impulse in the
socio-technical humanities today, second, that is has a rich, though as yet unidentified legacy
starting from the 1950s and 1960s on which to draw, and third, that it is the kind of impulse
which, because it blends the most essential and time-honored values, aims and aspirations of
humanities research and instruction with the immersive qualities of digital technology, is better
suited to act as the kind of direct, robust and digital-oriented, humanities advocacy we need in
the current crisis.

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Conclusion
Throughout this dissertation I have argued for and established two sets of theses: the first
regarding the periodization of the humanities crisis in the post-WWII era and the second
concerning the emergence, in the 1950s and 1960s, of what I have called the socio-technical
humanities. First, I have shown the degree to which the post-WWII crises in the humanities has
changed its focus and features over time as the humanities have responded to social, cultural,
economic and technical developments both inside and outside academia. Within each crisis, as I
have shown, there existed a core set of perceived threats for the humanities, some shared with
other periods, others unique to the era under consideration. The early 1950s to early 1960s
constituted what I have called the “crisis of the two cultures,” invoking the title of C. P. Snow’s
famous 1959 Read lecture, “the Two Cultures.” On the one hand, humanists felt increasingly
marginalized in an era of "big Science"—of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, of rocketry and
radar, and of computers and cybernetic machinery; an era when ‘science' itself, and not for
instance the works of artists or philosophers, was continuously referred to as “man’s greatest
achievement;” an era when Time Magazine declared “The Scientist” the man of the year, and the
“the leaders of mankind's greatest inquiry into the mysteries of ... life itself;” an era when
scientists for the first time became permanent advisors to the congress and the Whitehouse; an
era, in short, when science attained a new levels of intellectual, and even cultural, authority . On
the other hand, humanists felt additionally threated by the increased focus on, and funding for,
vocational degrees in higher education. Finally, the nature of mass higher education made each
of these problems worse. The G.I. bill specifically, and the newly inclusive nature of higher
education in general, brought onto campus a new class of student, one generally unresponsive to
literature and the arts and often interested chiefly in the benefits of professional training.
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The social unrest of the mid-1960s to early 1970s then changed the conditions of the
ongoing humanities crisis. Within this period, which I have called the “crisis of engagement,”
widespread social disruption outside the academy, exemplified most by urban unrest, the
Vietnam War, assassinations of major public figures and an extensive student rebellion made
manifest a total disconnect between the traditional subject matter of the humanities—especially
it’s mid-century, analytic, formalistic and positivistic variants—and the rest of life. Why,
students wanted to know, were they reading Chaucer, or worse, Rudolf Carnap’s reduction of all
language to formal logical syntax, when blood ran in the streets. Why, students wanted to
know—students who, in the 1960s, came to the humanities in record numbers for answers to
fundamental human questions—was there such a wide discontent between what they engaged in
the classroom and what they saw outside that classroom. Within this period, humanists’
disconnect from real world issues generally, and from student’s direct experience of the modern
world, in particular, eclipsed, but also in some ways merged with earlier concerns regarding their
alienation from science and technology. During the “crisis of engagement,” the threat that
science and technology posed for the relevancy of the humanities during the “crisis of the Two
Cultures” combined with the accusation that humanists were generally socially disengaged and
thus found scholars everywhere clamoring for humanistic council on science and technology.
Into these crisis stepped the socio-technical humanities. For underneath and behind all the
various features of these crises was the fundamental sense that the import and aims of the
humanities were increasingly marginalized from the purposes of education, from the meaning of
modern life and from the activities and interests of the public at large. Socio-technical humanists
took this core problem of relevancy to heart and in their engagement with new media found a
way to deal with it directly. During the “crisis of two Cultures” socio-technical humanists’ use of
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educational television allowed them, at least rhetorically, to keep up with curriculum reform
geared towards science and engineering and to expand their cultural authority by trying to guide
the nature of television viewing habits and programming and by taking to the airwaves
themselves. During the “crisis of engagement” the use of new educational media provided
humanities educators an essential way to speak directly to student’s experience of the world—for
just as the traditional content of humanities instruction appeared disconnected from the concerns
of the real world, so too did there appear a disconnect between the traditional medium bearing
that content and the rest of life—between the worlds of print and electronic media. For others,
the engagement with machine-readable text, allowed humanists to answer the call for a
humanities-oriented council on technology by getting involved in the development of electronic
bibliographic control and in the establishment of electronic networks.
Socio-technical humanists’ engagement with new media had, as I’ve shown, four
essential components. First, they endeavored, and continue to endeavor, to turn the threat of
electronic media for the print-oriented world of the humanist on its head by transplanting
traditional modes of critical print engagement to the customs and habits associated with new
media. In so doing, socio-technical humanists end up, second, attempting to invert or subvert the
use of new media advocated by other practitioners and third, trying to guide the nature of new
media while its meanings and associated customs are still largely up for grabs. Fourth, and
ultimately, of course, socio-technical humanists advocate for the use of new media both as a way
to figure out their role and relevancy in an era of electronic culture—that is, by working through
the exact relationship between texts and new media—and as a way to expand the social
responsibility of the humanities. Both are in direct response to the humanities crisis in which
they live.
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Ultimately, charting the intellectual genealogy of the socio-technical humanities has
allowed me to add a much needed perspective to humanists' contemporary situation. For the
humanities in general, the legacies are, I hope apparent. Simply put: today is not the first time
humanists have been forced to come to terms with expansive technology and its effects on
society; today is not the first time humanists have been forced to see the potential migration of
information, knowledge and culture from print to electronic formats as either a threat or an
opportunity. The 1950s and 1960s, was like today, a moment when humanists were forced to
either get on board by embracing the nature of a changing media landscape, helping to instill
critical interpretative skills for new modes of media engagement or else stay entrenched within
the confines of print culture and risk total irrelevancy. Thus it’s important not just to know that
the humanities have been at similar crossroads in the past but that they have a legacy of making
necessary concessions to larger socio-technical forces when at those crossroads. That is, it’s
important to know that humanists have, in the past, been able to incorporate the principles of
humanistic education and research into the uses of new media, and in so doing, co-opt that new
media for their own purposes and, in effect, subvert the intended purposes of its originators and
or primary advocates—for example, in trying to improve television programming by
transplanting the literary experience of the page to the television screen or by using multimedia
educational systems to facilitate the interrogation of reality instead of simply transmitting
information more efficiently. Humanism is somewhat unique in its relationship to the
phenomena of human affairs. Its self-professed purpose is to offer values and guidance.
However, the accelerated development of science and technology over the last four centuries has
often served to place humanists on the defensive at the very moment when they feel they need to
offer guidance the most. Put another way, humanism often finds itself in a position where it has
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something unique to offer at the same time that it has something unique to lose. My dissertation
is about one of those moments.
For the digital humanities, the legacies are twofold. On the one hand, by looking at
humanists' encounters with educational television, multimedia instructional technology and
computing hardware, I've argued that early humanities computing was part of a larger effort
among humanists to come to terms with all the features of electronic culture--it's capacity to
store, retrieve and analyze information (computers) as well as its capacity to be impart
information in a multisensory, immersive and associative fashion (multimedia educational
technology) and its power to deliver information via the greatest mass medium in history to that
point (television). In doing so, I've shown the degree to which humanists' efforts to come to
terms with their role and relevancy in a world of electronic or digital culture has always
involved an intellectual endeavor to reconcile the tension between text and image (educational
television and technology) as well as text and data (computing). The standard story of early
digital humanities includes only the latter: a story in which humanists struggled to translate and
incorporate traditional lines of humanistic inquiry (interpretations of qualitative textual features)
into new forms of analysis which computers could manage and manipulate (quantitative, data-
driven questions about texts). But once we open up the story, once we see that early digital
humanities of the 1950s and 1960s—what I call the “electronic humanities”—included within it,
both early humanities computing and a corollary large-scale movement to intervene in the nature
of educational television and technology, we immediately realize that electronic technology in
these years forced humanists to reconcile the traditional features of the printed page (as well as
it's associated habits of mind) with modes of audio-visual engagement and modes of data
analysis at the same exact time. In some ways, it was a battle fought on two fronts. Early
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humanities adopters of audio-visual and computing technologies had to deal with analogous
confrontations with practitioners in their field; the former were told by their contemporaries that
an emphasis on sound and image over text ran the risk of turning people into primitives (Joseph
Wood Krutch, Jacques Barzun and others); the latter were told that an emphasis on data over text
ran the risk of turning people into robots (Lewis Mumford, Jacques Barzun and others). Both ran
the risk of emphasizing the inhuman. On the other hand, a history of the socio-technical
humanities also demonstrates the degree to which the “immersive humanities”—those who
embrace new media as a way to better exploit and highlight the inherently narrative, experiential
and affective qualities of humanities teaching, interpretation and argumentation—have a robust
intellectual legacy on which to draw, and further, allows us to better understand the need within
today’s digital humanities to help shape that other massively growing area of higher education—
online instruction—that is, to help shape the nature of massive, automated instruction and, if
possible, prevent humanities instructors from becoming mere content providers.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation is a study of the aims, interests and rationale underlying the endeavors of a distinct group of humanists who sought explicitly to guide the meanings, uses and developing customs and habits of new educational, informational and computing technologies in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, this study examines and historicizes the emergence of a new cadre of humanists in this period—""socio‐technical humanists,"" as I have labeled them, who advocated for a new kind of humanities made socially relevant and publically engaged via this hands‐on intervention with new media technologies. Ultimately, socio‐technical humanists laid the groundwork for humanists' contemporary engagement with digital formats. Yet, because histories of early humanities computing have been fixated on more recent eras—since the rise of personal computing and the Internet—socio‐technical humanists of the 1950s and 1960s have remained invisible to analysts and commentators on the “digital revolution” the “digital humanities,” and the “crisis of the humanities.” This dissertation seeks to recover that lost history. ❧ This study is based on an analysis of published scholarly discourse, conference proceedings, personal and organizational papers and reports from the U.S. Office of Education. It lies at the nexus of three separate scholarly literatures: 1) the history of academic humanities

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Asset Metadata

Creator Fletcher, Curtis Christopher (author)

Core Title The socio-technical humanities: reimagining the liberal arts in the age of new media, 1952-1969

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 08/19/2014

Defense Date 12/04/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag digital humanities,humanities,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Ethington, Philip J. (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Schwartz, Vanessa R. (committee member)

Creator Email cfletche@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-462449

Unique identifier UC11286775

Identifier etd-FletcherCu-2830.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-462449 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-FletcherCu-2830.pdf

Dmrecord 462449

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Fletcher, Curtis Christopher

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA