The CUNY Humanities Alliance at LaGuardia Interview with Travis Bartley
Travis Bartley is a third-year doctoral student at the Grad Center. At LaGuardia, under the direction of Pablo Avila, Travis assists in developing the computational thinking modules taught in education classes and, more generally, the integration of technology with teaching and learning. In the following interview, Travis joins Michele Manoukian to share his views on the integration of technology and language, and the inclusive values of black metal. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Michele
Thank you, Travis, for joining us today to describe your Humanities Alliance experiences at LaGuardia.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your time on campus.
Travis
Thank you for having me, Michele. It’s a delight to be here. I’ve been designing module tools that take best advantage of the resources available through the ePortfolio platform and exploring ways to integrate the paradigm shift from a concept of computational thinking as traditionally understood in the computer sciences to holistic pedagogical practices that approach problem solving.
Michele
Am I right that you didn’t start out in digital humanities or technology? When we chatted earlier, you touched on your deep involvement with Irish writers, with Joyce, for example, and Beckett. You also shared being born in Southern California. It’s kind of wonderful to imagine these two rainy Irish writers in sunny Cali. How did love of literature morph into computational work?
Travis
This is a long, and kind of weird story.
Michele
Excellent. Tell us the weird story.
Travis
When I began my undergraduate degree, my focus on literature was largely modernist and romantic. Obviously, you come to Joyce and Beckett, and gosh, I went whole hog into Joyce. And with the modernist writers, you arrive at their experiments with language. For me, reading T.S. Eliot and Ulysses was just basically a romp through the history of the English language, which brought me into the world of linguistics, and a dual major in English and linguistics, which led to questions about the integration of technology and language, which is an outstanding problem for computer processing. I arrived at the Grad Center interested in the ways we engage with literature, with technology, and with language, and gradually arrived at digital humanities, and to thinking about how to holistically integrate these two different forms of thinking.
Michele
How do you integrate digital dimensions into your pedagogy? I was never taught that way; except for films, we were entirely paper-based. There was no tech space!
Travis
In my Great Works of Literature course at Baruch, groups of students created digital annotations. We accessed Hypothesis, a collaborative annotation tool; basically, you throw an overlay onto a digital text which everyone annotates together, and everyone’s comments are visible. When we read the Iliad, students commented as a class on every chapter of the poem, and they engaged with each other’s comments. The goal was to integrate the world of the classroom with their own worlds, with their online browsing habits, with the ways they participate in online forums. We used digital technologies to bridge divides between classroom thinking and everyday thinking.
Michele
And did you find that the students were engaged in the ways that you would hope them to be? Were they fluent in these new formats, or was a lot of instruction needed to bridge the text and these modalities?
Travis
Yes and no. At times, students had these lovely long discussions just bouncing off one individual’s thread. But very often students struggle with technology. We assume that the new generation of students is perfectly at ease with technology. But no, they still require skills and help and resources.
Michele
Many LaGuardia faculty and staff would agree with you.
Travis
I approach the humanities as a supplement to our engagement with everyday life. Humanities isn’t a thing you study in itself. The humanities inform our relation to the world around us. They change how we are with our friends; they change all our relationships. I just wanted to find a place for the humanities outside the classroom. One of my frustrations with teaching is that students want to believe that the class ends with the final examination. But the goal of teaching is that students take their learning out into the world, understanding that the course was just a starting point. I’ve wanted to find ways to go beyond the classroom, using humanities-centered questions in the design of a student’s entire educational trajectory so that they understand more clearly that they, as human beings, could use humanities skills in their lives.
Michele
Shall we talk a bit about humanities skills? There’s always an article in the Times or New Yorker that enrollment in the humanities is declining, that departments are increasingly cut, that the interest is just not there. How do you describe the value of the humanities? What are the skills that you hope they’ll take away?
Travis
I know those articles. I read them all the time. Sure, no one is enrolling in 21st century critical theory as applied to the works of Hermann Hesse. Maybe three people enroll in that class. But we will always need writing instructors, and writing classes are always over-enrolled. Students still take introductory literature classes. Maybe they’re not majoring in English, but let’s be fair, students really need employment: you can do a lot with the humanities degree. In my experience, students do love the value of the humanities. But they want that value to help in their life goals. I don’t try to give students a rationale for the humanities. I try to learn what they want and show how the humanities can relate to what they want.
I usually approach final examinations this way: Take what you’re interested in and what you’re working on and apply that to one of these works. If you are a business student, what does Plato’s Republic mean in your life? How about the Iliad’s Achilles, crying out in rage at the death of Patroclus? How does that influence you as a person studying for a computer science degree?
That’s the thing. Students love this stuff. Go on YouTube any time and you’ll find twenty thousand different humanities-focused channels that find ways to inject the humanities into what students need for their lives. These channels have thousands and millions of views. They don’t force students into a single vision of the humanities. The thing is to find a place for the humanities in their lives, filling the gaps that students are already confronting in their own experiences.
Michele
With regard to the Iliad, everybody understands loss. Everybody understands love, everybody understands being wounded and being betrayed and dissed and disregarded, you know? And that’s how the Iliad starts out, right? Everybody can feel that insult, the insult of something taken away from you. Nevertheless, the place of these core texts is not without controversy.
But let’s turn to the act of reading itself. For you, what does it mean to read now? Has there been a paradigm shift? Do you find students are sticking to the page the way we might have? Back in the day, you just had paper and books. We didn’t have phones or YouTube or any of those options. What about your students?
Travis
In the beginning, I overcorrected where I was, like, okay, we’re going to make reading “old literature” very Generation Z friendly. Like, what can be best for phones? What can be best for the TikTok generation? Yeah, my students didn’t like that. I found that when I just teach the “old” way of close reading, students actually dig that because they’re drawing from their language backgrounds. It’s kind of like translating a text, like when you start learning a new language, you’re awed by the fact that you can engage with this other language. French isn’t just random squiggles on the page. I’m actually engaging with the thoughts of another human being! It’s the same thing for Shakespeare and for the Iliad. These are new mechanisms that they’re developing to engage with these older, unfamiliar languages.
Michele
We’re returning to the skills unique to the humanities. Close reading teaches us to be attentive, and to find meaning where one may have thought there wasn’t meaning—thinking of words as just flat squiggles on a page. Then somebody begins to show us how to open the words. For me, that was, like, “Oh my God, really? That’s really there?” You must experience that expression of surprise often.
Travis
We under appreciate students’ awe of engaging with these texts. One of my favorite moments was a student’s reaction to Paradise Lost. We’re going through one of Milton‘s long sentences and this person was just completely surprised. “This is all one sentence? Man, there are hundreds of lines in that one sentence.” Yes, exactly. Or take Homer: If you’ve been trained, you’ve internalized the machinations of language and so perhaps you take its literary moves for granted. But for many students these moves are new; they enjoy seeing these techniques exposed, of getting let into the ways literature works. That in itself is enough, that awe of the machinations of language. The thing is to live with that awe, to not be callous to what it is to read literature.
Michele
One of the enlivening elements of studying literature or the humanities is just that, the surprise, rather than this super-cool “I’ve seen it all before” attitude, the fear of expressing feeling. Instead, with the arts, and sciences, it’s “I’ve never seen this before. How does this work?” So, is the humanities about asking questions? Pressing the text for questions? “How many questions can I ask about this particular passage, this one long sentence line in Milton?” I would think for you that’s the beautiful thing to do with students, getting everyone to ask questions—instead of knowing.
Travis
That’s one of the challenges. I think students definitely need some help with how to form a question. I think there’s a bit of an assumption that the classroom gives you all the answers. When we engage with the subject long enough, we realize that the point of the classroom is only to raise more questions.
Michele
Perhaps the reluctance to ask a question is attributable to a way of teaching. A classroom—or a meeting!—can intimidate. “I’m not going to ask a question that I was supposed to know the answer to.” There’s often the sense that we should have already known that we should say the bright or brilliant thing rather than ask the sincere question. The open question can often release so much more meaning and conversation than a closed assertion. How can we learn to ask the simple question without being embarrassed that it’s a simple question?
Travis
At my undergraduate commencement, the head of our English department, whose field was Irish literature, gave the commencement speech, the whole point of which was that the purpose of the humanities degree is to embrace uncertainty, to understand that we have limits on our knowing, and that this is completely fine. At the end of the day, I think that beyond the subject matter, it’s having students come to the point where they can just straight up say: “This may be a really simple question, but why does the Iliad begin with rage?” Well, you’re not the only one to have that question! It’s actually a fundamental question worth asking.
Michele
Yes, what is this place of anger in our lives? To speak this way in class is so revealing to students and teachers. We struggle with our own feelings, our own anger, and these are affirmed by Achilles, a character who means so much to us and to all of literature. In addition to learning to read closely, to accessing digital tools like Hypothesis, you’ve pointed us toward learning to ask questions. Perhaps we can say that the humanities can also impart a kind of humility in the classroom. So, here’s a simple question: Why did you leave Southern California for New York?
Travis
The simple answer is that the Graduate Center accepted my application. I was selling cigars at a speakeasy, and I needed a bit more stable income.
Michele
Wait. You were selling cigars at a speakeasy? When was that?
Travis
2018. Speakeasies are back.
Michele
I know a couple in the East Village. From the street, they look like barbershops and then you discover it’s a gin joint.
Travis
The cigar shop was a speakeasy; it was fun. I like experiencing new worlds. I went to school in San Francisco; I grew up south of Los Angeles, and I’ve worked in Seoul. New York is one of the world’s most important cities.
Michele
I’m glad you still think that. Last question: beyond your dissertation, what are you reading for pleasure?
Travis
I’m kind of jumping around. I’m getting back to music. I’m a musician, so I enjoy reading about music and different genres of music.
Michele
What’s your instrument? Or do you play a computer?
Travis
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been wanting to pick up a Moog synthesizer, though I’m actually trained as a jazz pianist. And I’ve been trying to pick up bass.
Michele
There goes the dissertation! So, what’s your book? We can share it.
Travis
It’s a book that’s just been released, Black Metal Rainbows.* I love it. It’s basically trying to find a space for queer narratives within black metal, which has traditionally been a very hostile realm of angry, bitter, teenage white boys. Black Metal Rainbows offers a more inclusive space, which is really great because I was a huge fan of this genre…
Michele
…and as an adult, you’re still interested.
Travis
Oh, I will put on Mayhem from time to time.**
Michele
Earlier I saw that you have a biography of Nietzsche in your bookbag. Metal and Nietzsche totally fit together. What do you think? Or is this just, like, a subconscious connection?
Travis
I cannot see Nietzsche in the mosh pit, but I can see him listening.
Michele
Right, he would listen; he wouldn’t jump into the pit. Would you?
Travis
Oh, yeah. I love the pit.
Michele
Hmm…So next time: more about moshing and more about your dissertation, Notes on Self-Supervised Methods for Multi-lingual Speech Technology. For your time today, thank you so much, Travis. You’ve given us so much to think about, to read, and to listen to. It’s been such a pleasure talking with you about the life of the classroom, the humanities, and black metal.
