The Haiti Lab

Some days it feels awfully good being an academic, and even better to be a humanist.  I'm just back from the first meeting of the Haiti Lab, a lab that will be convened next year as part of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute by Laurent Dubois (History and Romance Studies), Deborah Jenson (Romance Studies), plus two core faculty affiliates, Guy Uriel-Charles (Law) and Kathy Walmer (Global Health).   The Lab will last three years and include so many different and important projects, so many vital forms of research and learning, that it makes my head spin.

And HASTAC will be very proud to be part of the Haiti Lab.  Last night, we talked about archival courses, where students and faculty in North America, in France, and, of course, in Haiti would find documents, digitize and preserve them, and, in some cases, co-translate, including using crowdsourcing techniques, and then make translations available, in some cases for a first time.  We are emboldened in that mission, of course, by graduate student Julia Gaffield's recent discovery of the only known copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.  Julia will also be part of the Haiti Lab.  A librarian will be attached to the Haiti Lab and we'll be working with Duke University Press to discuss new forms of scholarship, the possibility of a Haiti Reader, and we'll also talk to the University of Michigan Press about a digital project as part of the HASTAC/UM publication series. 

We talked about transforming the Virtual Peace humanitarian assistance simulation created by Tim Lenoir and his team (a 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition winner) into a simulation focusing on a specific project in Haiti, with students doing research to contribute to a  simulation in the most realistic and useful way possible, including working with students in Haiti who might be part of distance online courses, so aid workers and development workers would be able to study Kreyol language and Haitian culture, politics, and history in a 3-D virtual environment to help prepare them for working in Haiti itself.  Our meeting last night began with Tim and Patrick Herron and others demonstrating how this simulation works.

[Patrick at Virtual Peace console]

 We discussed potentials for multimedia publications, for GPS mapping of Haiti's disaster areas and its surviving and new developments, many of them highly temporary.   We talked about partnerships not only across the humanities, law, medicine, and nursing, but with psychologists to focus on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a disorder that most emphatically needs the understanding of culture, for, of course, trauma is never expressed divorced from cultural expression.  And we'll be working with David Schade, a professor in the Pratt School of Engineering, who teaches and does research on Rebuilding after Natural Disasters and who directs Duke's chapter of Engineers without Borders.   Since much of Haiti is being rebuilt with sustainable solar power, we also will be working with students and faculty in the Nicholas School of the Environment.  And the Humanities Institute has also been talking about partnering with Nicholas in various environmental studies initiatives, in Haiti and beyond.

We talked about inexpensive ways that we could hook to universities and literary and arts organizations in Haiti to be part of a conversation with scholars and writers there, as part of the rebuilding of those communities too.   Students in each country could work together on projects, and it is possible we could involve K-12 kids through outreach programs such as Duke Engage and then make connections between kids in Haiti and in the U.S.

The list of possibilities goes on and on.  And I'll be blogging about these later, as the plans continue to unfold.  With ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies), we discussed ways that computer science students might build various complex data bases for such things as all of the various assistance and NGO's in Haiti, their resources and responsibilities, their reporting lines, their relationships with one another and other organizations.  Data management is enormously important to the rebuilding effort and the fruits of this labor would be made public and have an immediate public impact.  Humanities students would work side-by-side with students writing code to thing about coding the documents as well as social media that could be used to crowdsource information gathering and folksonomy tagging.  

We talked about ways Duke students could be involved in service-learning, in partnering with students and agencies in Haiti, in language learning and instruction, and in helping to create a Haiti-based game, as part of Paul Farmer's operation, that could be played by anyone interested in both learning about Haiti and learning more about interaction with Haiti.  Deborah Jenson mounted a course in Haitian Kreyol and Haiti's culture, politics, history, and religion last January in two weeks to help rescue workers be prepared for their trips to Haiti and Duke is hiring a professor of Kreyol next year who will be part of this lab, including part of a major translation project.   Game mechanics might also help all of us, as we move forward, to work through leadership simulations too. 

And we talked about new forms of scholarship, not only for professors and graduate students but also for undergraduates.    What if instead of a field-based, individually-based honors thesis, students could work collaboratively and earn collective honors for their thesis project?  What if classes could be organized not only across undergraduate and graduate and professional schools but with different projects each overlapping like some complex Venn diagram?   What if public policy courses and humanities courses and engineering courses and medical courses were all one course, with the monumental nature of Haiti and one of the greatest devastations in recent history "trumping" disciplinary boundaries and, instead, all of us thinking together, working together, seamlessly moving from campus to community, from one nation to another, one culture to another?  (How trivial the "two cultures" of science and humanities are when one culture, like Haiti's, is imperiled.  Over 200,000 people have died.  A society is devastated and trying to rebuild.  All of us are necessary.  Isn't it time we got over that disciplinary silliness?)

Since one HASTAC motto is "create, critique, collaborate, communicate," we'll be helping with the outreach, with getting out the word, and with coordinating international programs, projects, courses, and other aspects of the rebuilding effort on the HASTAC site and will have at least one HASTAC Scholar at Duke as our eyes and ears in the Haiti Lab for the year.  We will work to create an international "Haiti Network," including "citizen journalists" who can report, on the ground from Haiti or from events about and with Haitian scholars, on what is happening.  One hears that international relief efforts for Haitia are tiny compared to that for other major world disasters.  We can do whatever we can to keep the buzz alive, to keep hope alive, and to remind the world that this is a country determined to rebuild again.  Over the next three years, the Haiti Lab will help produce books, articles, syllabi, web resources, and pedagogical materials -- including those in and about Haitian Creole --and will help expand Haitian studies in the United States and Haiti and internationally.

Soon we will be posting a list of all the undergrad and grad courses we will be offering that are directly or indirectly part of or connected to the Haiti Lab.   What it is crucial to underscore is that this Haiti Lab is built from many existing resources being focused, coordinated, and then strategically deployed toward one crucially important end.  It's amazing how much there is when it is synchronized--it takes enormous work (I am humbled by how much my colleagues have done on this project), but also inspired work.  We'll also be applying for grants for future years, but, in the meantime, it is pretty amazing to see what unifying around a crucially important project can do and what people working together can accomplish.  It could lead to what gamers call an "epic win," one that demonstrates that what seemed impossible can happen.

I've dreamt this engaged, interdisciplinary vision of the learning for many years, with  all of the different areas of knowledge coming together with an urgency and purpose.  This could not be happening without the indefatigible and visionary leadership of Ian Baucom, Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute.  He's been tireless on behalf of the idea of a humanities lab.    There's also been effort by several deans (Srinivas Aravamudan, Lee Baker, and others) and provosts, and librarians, and so many others all coming together.  Tonight, I feel this expansive vision of learning and higher education is happening.  It's here.  It is very close and within our grasp.