Katherine Hayles and Nick Gessler look at how literature and cultural issues are affected by the digital era. | Megan Morr
Meet the New Faculty: Nicholas Gessler and Katherine Hayles
Connecting humanities to the digital generation
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Durham, NC -- Anthropologist Nicholas Gessler has spent his career exploring how to deal with cultural change caused by interrelated factors; In 1987, he got interested in how computers represent cultural problems.
In the early 1990s, literature professor Katherine Hayles was pondering the future of literature as the age of print gradually made way for the digital generation.
Two different people, in different fields with a common interest: This connection, among others, brought them together 16 years ago, and they were married two years later.
“We share ideas, we share plans, we share aspirations and inspirations. It is one of those relationships where the personal and the professional simply entwine together,” Hayles said.
The couple recently moved from UCLA and has brought several decades of teaching experience to Duke. Author of several books and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Rochester, Hayles writes and teaches the relations of science, technology, and literature in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Besides print contemporary literature, she is fascinated by “digital born,” literature that is written and meant to be read on a computer.
“It draws from the rich literary tradition developed through centuries with print (and millennia with oral literature), but it also adds components not possible in print, such as animation, sound, kinetic effects, and very different reading interfaces than print affords.”
Her project called “How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies,” explores how digital technologies affect research paradigms in the humanities. She said she hopes to attract computer scientists and engineers as well as humanities scholars and artists to the project.
As a research associate and faculty at the Information Science +Information Studies (ISIS) community, Gessler, who received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA, teaches a course called “ALiCE,” which stands for Artificial Culture, Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation.
Students use computer representations to study the consequences of complex “what-if” scenarios. They can design the world, how agents interact with one another and behave in their environments, and then turn the computer loose to weave the consequences.
“My motivation is to empower students to get inside a computer and make it do things that they want it to do rather than have it run other people’s software.” Interestingly, 90 per cent of students have no technical experience in programming computers, Gessler says. “And yet within the first week I have them writing small, highly graphical, visual programs that run in the Windows environment on PC.”
Gessler hopes their knowledge to write simulations would help students in their careers. (For more about his class simulations, click here.)
“Every day we are as citizens confronted by models that predict the future, models which predict what is going to happen to the economy. Hopefully, students will develop some critical skills so that they do not look at the models and take them as ground truth.”
Fascinated by the computer, Gessler has collected numerous computing devices, including more than 100 cryptographic machines, dating back to 1680. He often brings some to class to give students an insight into the evolution of modern day computers.
Meanwhile, as the couple finds ways to navigate the ever-expanding digital landscape, they are making time to enjoy the verdant landscape that North Carolina offers.
As they settle in their home in the semi-rural atmosphere of Hillsborough, Hayles said she looks forward to her time reading for leisure, walking and gardening. For the moment, however, her husband is grappling with another dilemma. How to find meteorites in a land of lush vegetation? “There must be a way...”
