From its early applications in ancient Greece, the humanistic tradition has worked for the common good. Today, community-based learning and scholarship in the humanities can support institutions’ missions, and research shows that experiential learning is a high-impact practice that helps students succeed in college and beyond. While humanistic values do not emerge solely from Western thought—many cultures have long histories of working for the common good through education and civic engagement—elements of humanism used in higher education in the United States may be traced to the ancient Greeks. I turn, therefore, to Isocrates to help begin answering the question, What are the theoretical models that guide those of us in modern languages who are working in the public digital humanities? However, I make this move in agreement with Barbara Christian: the humanities should reconnect philosophy with practice to help students and faculty members achieve phrónēsis, or practical wisdom (40).
A decade before Plato, Isocrates opened the first school of philosophy and rhetoric in Athens, where he prepared students to contribute to the polis, or city-state (Bizzell and Herzberg 25–26; Hauser 377). John O'Malley writes, “Isocrates . . . worked at constructing a system for training young men for active life in the Athenian democracy . . . for ensuring the common good” (3). The most effective way of achieving this goal, Isocrates asserts, is teaching students theories that will help them in public work and then sending them into civic life to foster positive change. Isocrates argues that applying theory to practice is the best way for students to achieve phrónēsis and aretē (excellence) in the home and in public life (Depew; Garver; Haskins 5, 13, 114; Leff; Poulakos). Oleg Bazaluk argues that Isocratic philosophy is a “variety of educational practices, which are aimed at the full development of the internal potentials of man, the training of highly qualified personnel that satisfies the complicating sociocultural environments and the production sphere” (16). In short, Isocratic philosophy is an epistemology of praxis.
To summarize his work and defend himself against accusations of sophistry, Isocrates composed Antidosis, a fictionalized trial patterned after Plato's Apology. In Antidosis, Isocrates recounts the respected public leaders who studied under him, Nicocles being the most renowned (15.40). Later in Antidosis, Isocrates overviews his approach: “I hold that men who want to do some good in the world must banish utterly from their interests all vain speculations and all activities which have no bearing on our lives” (15.269). He concludes by outlining the virtuous orator, a description echoed by Cicero and Quintilian: “The man who wishes to persuade people will not be negligent as to the matter of character . . . he will apply himself above all to establish a most honorable name among his fellow-citizens” (15.278). As humanists today consider using Isocrates for their own pedagogy, they should recall that his model was the approach that most influenced Greek, Roman, and European education. Henri Marrou writes, “Sur le plan hiśtorique, Platon a été vaincu . . . c'est Isocrate qui, en gros, l'a emporté, qui eśt devenu l’éducateur de la Grèce, puis de tout le monde antique” (“On the level of history Plato had been defeated . . . it was Isocrates who defeated him, and who became the educator first of Greece, and subsequently of the whole of the ancient world”; 292; my trans.). Takis Poulakos and David Depew find that “Isocrates was a more central figure in discussions of civic education, and especially the role of rhetoric in civic education, than Aristotle ever was” (Introduction 2). And as Eric Touya de Marenne contends in this issue of PMLA, the humanistic traditions enable “students across disciplines to think critically about poverty, inequality, and social justice and to participate in creating new materials to expand the conversation.” Moreover, drawing on Isocratic philosophy for public humanities today connects an arcane corner of scholarship to its contemporary applications. For instance, as Elizabeth Coggeshall writes in this issue, “engaging with the wide swath of adaptations, appropriations, memes, mash-ups, and remixes of . . . [texts like Dante's Inferno] can help scholars value the expertise various publics generate about these objects of their long-standing interest and devotion.” Isocrates offers a humanistic pedagogy that incorporates civic engagement and collaborative knowledge production, both of which may guide public digital humanities scholars as they support their institutions’ missions.
Land-grant universities are charged with supporting the communities in the states that created them through the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890;Footnote 1 state universities and community colleges have similar missions. Faith-based institutions also share humanistic aims of improving the world. Even private research universities do not conduct research for the sake of research alone, though they may invest heavily in it. All these institutions recognize that community engagement helps achieve a goal that higher education frequently claims to pursue, that of improving the world beyond the university. From Isocrates to later scholars like John Dewey and Ernest L. Boyer, civically engaged pedagogy continues to foster excellent results (Bringle 49; Brizee et al. [2019] 224; Manning-Ouelette and Hemer 5). Integrating civic engagement into community-engaged research in the classroom leads to positive outcomes, especially when it follows a critical approach (“High-Impact Practices”; Primer; Eyler et al. 3–5; Fleischauer and Fleischauer; Mitchell 50). Positive outcomes for students include developing skills in leadership, self-motivation, clear communication, critical thinking, complex problem solving, and planning and organizing (“College 2030”). Positive outcomes also include “understanding the importance of, and the ability to work with, others from diverse backgrounds; also appreciation of and sensitivity to diversity in a pluralistic society” (Bringle et al. [2019] 10). Public digital humanities (humanities projects that integrate digital technology and are used by or developed with communities other than researchers) are a useful medium to foster these outcomes while preparing students for workplace technology, grounded in a rich, theoretical humanistic tradition. What follows are two examples of enacting Isocratic epistemology.
Enacting an Epistemology of Praxis: Racial Justice and a Tale of Two Cities
The Jesuit order has a troubled history of exploiting enslaved people. In 1823, the Maryland Province of Jesuits used enslaved people to establish the Missouri Mission and to expand Saint Louis University (SLU) (“What”; Schmidt). In 1838, the Maryland Province sold 272 enslaved people to protect Georgetown University from financial ruin (“What”). In 1852, having saved Georgetown, the Maryland Province established Loyola College in Baltimore City, which later became Loyola University Maryland. The Jesuits have attempted to atone for their actions by supporting community engagement and by providing financial recourse for some descendants of enslaved people owned by the order (“What”). Given my commitment to antiracism, it was my responsibility as an activist-scholar at Loyola and SLU to address this history, the systemic racism in Baltimore and St. Louis, and the student demand for culturally responsive history (“BMore Me”).Footnote 2
I began work on the website The Baltimore Story: Learning and Living Racial Justice as an associate professor at Loyola in 2018. At the time, my students didn't know much about slavery and structural racism in Baltimore. So I sent them to different sources for research on these topics, which proved confusing. To teach more effectively, I collaborated with a scholar specializing in the history of the United States to develop online material covering slavery and systemic racism in Baltimore. To address accessibility issues, my team and I used the content management system Squarespace, which allowed me to customize many features of the resources. For instance, we provide textual content that is rooted in scholarship but presented in small chunks of information. My team and I also developed the site by drawing on my experience with usability research from previous online community-based projects, including Purdue OWL (Brizee, “What Happens?” 340; Brizee et al. [2019] 224; Brizee and Wells 16; Brizee, “Toward Participatory Civic Engagement” 22). And we used .org rather than .com for the URLs to signal our nonprofit values.
After using The Baltimore Story to teach first-year writing, I integrated the site into my community-engaged professional writing courses. Students worked with a Baltimore nonprofit employment organization by helping their clients complete cover letters and résumés. Then my students conducted community-based research and wrote informational reports on topics such as health care and mass incarceration. We shared these reports with community members for feedback and then posted them to The Baltimore Story. For the third step in our work, we received a three-year, thirty-thousand-dollar grant from the McCarthy-Dressman Education Foundation to collaborate with Baltimore teachers on developing middle school lesson plans based on information from The Baltimore Story. Teachers also conducted research to develop material on the achievements of Black Baltimoreans.
To continue this work at SLU, my teamFootnote 3 and I began developing The Saint Louis Story: Learning and Living Racial Justice in summer 2022. In summer 2023, we received an eight-thousand-dollar internal grant to launch the site. To complete both of these projects while fulfilling my administrative responsibilities, I drew from Boyer's engaged scholarship model, which focuses my teaching, research, and service on civic engagement (Boyer xii). Currently, I am integrating The Saint Louis Story into writing-intensive courses in SLU's new undergraduate core curriculum. And The Saint Louis Story will form the cornerstone of new public digital humanities projects supported by the Walter J. Ong, S.J., Center for Digital Humanities, which I direct. Figure 1 is a montage of screenshots from The Baltimore Story, and figure 2 is a montage of screenshots from The Saint Louis Story, displaying the various kinds of resources these projects fostered.
Montage from the website The Baltimore Story (www.thebaltimorestory.org).
Montage from the website The Saint Louis Story (www.thesaintlouisstory.org).
Theories for Using Public Digital Humanities
Grounded in Isocratic philosophy, the specific theoretical approach that guides my public digital humanities research is the PIER model—participatory, iterative, empirical, and resilient. The PIER model also affirms the recommendations in the recent MLA publication Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship in Language and Literature Programs (MLA Ad Hoc Committee 7; see also Brizee, “What Happens?” 339). Underpinning PIER is the justice model of civic engagement (fig. 3) adapted from Thomas Deans and from Marcus Borg, which urges a move from a “charity” mindset toward one grounded in “justice,” or transformative change (Deans 97; Borg 201). In our efforts to address systemic racism, my team and I are informed by Ibram X. Kendi's work on “dismantling” racism through an “ongoing” process (9, 10).
Charity versus justice as models of civic engagement.
To collaborate in a participatory way with community partners, I also try to deconstruct the hierarchical approach to college-community engagement. Public digital humanities initiatives should move beyond binary models that place researchers’ expertise above community members’ lived experiences. When researchers are located in discursive spaces (spaces open for new roles and relationships to form), they should resist positivist forms of knowledge building familiar from traditional approaches to civic engagement, such as the charity model in figure 3. My own project draws from Jacques Derrida's ideas about discursive spaces in his essay “Signature Event Context.” Derrida's ideas are useful in my work for three reasons: deconstruction resists positivist models of knowledge building, which have limited value when dealing with the specifics of real communities; deconstruction offers a nonconfrontational approach to finding and addressing gaps between college and community; and deconstruction allows me to remain focused on the marginalized.
As a deconstructionist, Derrida might seem ill suited for college-community projects. However, resisting hierarchical notions of charity between the ivory tower and the public is fundamental to our work. Derrida helps me identify spaces between the binary of college and community, overturn these hierarchies, and cocreate knowledge with my community partners. Derrida writes:
Deconstruction cannot limit or proceed immediately to a neutralization: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruction will provide itself the means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions that it criticizes, which is also a field of nondiscursive forces. (328)
Tania D. Mitchell echoes this approach of critical community-engaged work: “The goal, ultimately, is to deconstruct systems of power so the need for service and the inequalities that create and sustain them are dismantled” (50). So instead of using an eristic notion of opposition (agōn)Footnote 4 to persuade community partners to collaborate with me, I meet with potential collaborators to learn more about them. Then we determine how we might collaborate. These relationships are opportunities for learning that move in both directions without assuming that knowledge flows only from college to community. Deliverables or artifacts imagined during these meetings depend on the needs of the community partner. And if we don't think that we are a good fit, we don't collaborate.
When I have deconstructed the hierarchical relationships as much as possible, my team and I can move into specific methods of collaboration, influenced by Robert Asen's model of discursive knowledge building. Asen argues that a discourse theory of citizenship creates the potential to “reformulate the relationship between citizenship and citizen, reveals differences in enactments of citizenship, and calls attention to hybrid cases of citizenship” (“Discourse Theory” 192). These hybrid cases are what researchers become when they deconstruct traditional roles to reinvent their identity as activist-scholars. In more recent work, Asen outlines his networked “multiple public sphere” where people collaborate to resist oppressive systems, which is our goal (“Neoliberalism”). To address the shortcomings of the neoliberal public sphere where “the market treats all actors equally [regardless of] . . . race, gender, ethnicity, class, [and] sexual orientation,” Asen, quoting Nancy Fraser, argues that scholars must develop “‘parallel discursive arenas’ where participants ‘invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’” (“Critical Engagement” 138). Asen's approach helps us work because public digital humanities are a parallel discursive arena that “complement[s] . . . traditional text-based methods . . . [where] a local community may foster more widespread change” (141). In this issue of PMLA, Devoney Looser reminds readers that researchers now have more options to enter this wider discursive arena. The digital realm offers opportunities for activism and cotheorizing that occur when scholarly efforts emerge from the public sphere. For example, in response to whitewashing curricula, my team and I develop resources that teachers and community members use that accurately present United States history. What follows is my discussion of the PIER model.
Participatory
Pelle Ehn's participatory model supports theoretical frameworks for our projects, specifically the interstitial and discursive epistemologies provided by Isocrates, Derrida, and Asen. Ehn emphasizes the democratic and cooperative relationship between designers and users where information and cocreation flow in all directions, emanating from the work itself rather than only from the researchers or the workers (96). Many scholars have applied participatory approaches to their community-based work, illustrating the strength of this methodology (Blythe et al. 276–80).Footnote 5 Participatory design also aligns with Kathleen S. Yep and Tania D. Mitchell's model, where Yep and Mitchell note that “what inspires us about an ethnic studies approach to community engagement is its focus on recentering the community . . . as the primary decision-maker in the collaborations” (301). Participatory design focuses every process on the community and resists traditional models of engagement like charity.
Iterative
Participatory design and iterative design are intertwined. Iteration is a mindset and a series of steps. The mindset consists of long-term commitments to collaboration. The series of steps will differ for each project as the activist-scholar works with their community partner to develop goals and processes that meet everyone's needs. Figure 4 illustrates the iterative steps of the PIER model that my team and I use for the two public digital humanities projects outlined above. After the meetings with community partners, the PIER model moves from meeting students to running the community-based learning and research class to developing lesson plans for Baltimore public school teachers and collecting their feedback to posting lessons and planning for the next year. Like the writing process, PIER is recursive, represented by arrows beneath the circles, and ongoing, represented by the “Repeat” arrow (Brizee, “What Happens?” 339). We also use logic models and strategic plans to establish milestones and quality indicators measured by empirical methods.
The PIER model used for The Baltimore Story and The Saint Louis Story.
Empirical
Faculty members integrating public and digital humanities in their projects will want to measure the outcomes of their work. Collecting formal and informal data allows for revisions to better meet partners’ needs. While systematic methods of collecting data provide detailed results, not every public digital humanities project requires a study approved by an institutional review board (IRB). In the beginning of The Baltimore Story, I collected feedback over coffee. In 2021, however, we began an IRB-approved qualitative longitudinal study by interviewing the Baltimore teachers who were developing and using lessons on the site so we could determine outcomes. This study helped us report results to our funder, improve our work, and share information with colleagues (Brizee, “Reimagining” 2; Brizee et al. [2022] 76).
Our research methods are also participatory. We collaborated with Baltimore teachers to determine methods for recruiting participants, generating research questions, and developing data collection instruments. In the past, my methods have included qualitative and quantitative data collection processes drawn from usability studies where researchers study human-technology interaction and measure the outcomes.Footnote 6 To code and analyze quantitative data, I use descriptive statistics (percentages, means, medians, modes, ranges, and standard deviations) while more complex statistical measures are completed by coresearchers from fields like psychology and education. To code and analyze qualitative data, I use grounded theory informed by scholars from the social sciences and from rhetoric and composition.Footnote 7
Resilient
Despite careful planning, failures will occur during public digital humanities projects. But as many scholars note, failure is not necessarily negative.Footnote 8 As researchers we learn from failure, and when we step out of our classrooms and into the community, we must plan how to handle it. One of my worst stumbles occurred early in my career at Loyola University Maryland, when my students and I collaborated with a Baltimore neighborhood to adopt an open lot in their community and plan a playground. My service-learning students and I worked over two semesters to find nonprofit organizations to support this project. As we were about to submit the grant proposals, the city denied the neighborhood association's plan because Baltimore's ambulances wouldn't fit in the alleys that access the lot. Everyone was heartbroken, and I didn't have a plan B.
Instead of giving up, my students and I practiced resilience and pivoted to collaborate with a nonprofit employment organization and the neighborhood association. As a team, we developed community workshops that helped attendees build digital literacy skills and gain job application experience. Nearly half (forty-seven percent) of attendees obtained employment (Brizee, “What Happens?” 359). Janet Ledesma writes, “people will respond . . . in three different ways when confronted by a challenge: They may (a) survive the incident, (b) recover from the incident, and (c) thrive as a result of enduring the hardship” (2–3). And Mark A. Zimmerman notes that “a resilience paradigm orients researchers and practitioners to positive factors . . . that become the focus of change strategies designed to enhance strengths” (381). When the adopted lot failed, we survived the incident, recovered, and then thrived by focusing on the “positive factors” that became the “change strategy to enhance our strengths.” My students and I used writing and pedagogy to contribute to our partners’ success. We didn't do this alone. Here is where I integrate Shari J. Stenberg and Deborah Minter's “social resilience” theory. Steinberg and Minter explain social resilience this way: “Dynamic, relational, and contextual . . . a practice and process that allows individuals or groups to maintain an ability to act” (646). Instead of struggling individually, we collaborated to continue our work. This approach also avoids the binary of success/failure, which aligns with the Derridean theory outlined above.
During one of my community-based projects, a participant, who was the president of a local civic association, said, “If the neighborhood and all groups of people . . . work together, we can accomplish a lot of things” (Brizee et al. [2019] 243). This may sound like an understatement, but it exemplifies practical wisdom (phrónēsis). As humanities scholars, we should realize that expertise exists off campus if we are to address the most pressing issues of our time. As Alison Booth and Miriam Posner note in their introduction to the PMLA special issue on digital humanities, “[Digital humanities] must concern itself deeply with race, gender, disability, economic and linguistic access . . . as demanded by this troubled moment in the world” (10). An important part of this process is expanding the theories that underpin our efforts, especially when we engage with the public using technology. Theorizing public digital humanities is vital because how and why we collaborate to “accomplish things” with community partners matters. There is peril in acting without clarity: we can harm our communities, our students, and ourselves if we stumble blindly into our work. My hope is that PIER and the other theories I outline in this article will help activist-scholars integrate technology into community-based work and achieve the accomplishments that community partners envision.
