Leanne Nisbet

Well, hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar, Humanizing STEM, How the Humanities are Transforming Research, Teaching, and the Future of Higher Education. My name is Leanne Nisbet. I'm a marketing specialist here at EBSCO, and I'll be your moderator for today's session.

Before we begin, let's cover a few housekeeping details. You can submit questions anytime during the presentation using the q and a box at the bottom of your screen. You can turn on closed captions using the CC or show captions button in the toolbar on the bottom of your screen. If you don't see that, click the more icon and select show captions. Our presenters may share helpful links via the chat box throughout the session. Our presentation will run approximately thirty-five to forty minutes with plenty of time reserved for audience questions at the end. And the session is being recorded, and you'll receive the recording via email in the coming days.

Joining us today is our presenter Richard Utz, along with John Kutzko, executive director of Atla. John helps launch new initiatives and deliver value to Atla members. We're also joined by Gillian Harrison Cain, Atla's director of membership and engagement. Gillian oversees membership initiatives and promotes Atla’s databases, products, and services to librarians, students, and scholars.

Also joining us today from Atla is Maura Hadaway, Atla’s business systems and marketing manager. Maura oversees key data system and leads communications for Atla’s brand, vision, and news. And Céire Kealty, Atla’s product marketing specialist, is also here today. Kira helps with marketing strategy and communications for Atla. I'll now hand it over to John for some brief opening remarks.

John Kutsko

Thank you, Leanne. Atla is so pleased to partner with EBSCO in sponsoring this webinar today, featuring Richard Utz, senior associate dean for strategic initiatives and professor at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Richard is also a scholar of Middle Ages, a medievalist. He serves in the strategic leadership role because he has advocated for holistic and inclusive educational practices and the integration of the liberal arts with STEM disciplines. He champions the teacher scholar model and the public humanities. He free frequently contributes his insights and experiences to higher education news and media.

As a scholar of a humanities discipline, I have followed the creative approach at Georgia Tech that Richard leads. That work epitomizes the amazing opportunity for insight through interdisciplinary studies. It is an exciting time to be in higher ed when working across typically siloed fields is being encouraged in order to find new and creative answers to human challenges. And to do so across humanities and STEM is revolutionary.

Richard, you lead Georgia Tech's effort to make such collaboration a reality for faculty and students who solve real world problems. What an honor and pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much.

Richard Utz

Thank you.

John Kutsko

So let's start with the Georgia Tech story.

Richard, you work at one of the world's premier engineering and technology universities. When most people hear Georgia Tech, they think STEM. And yet you spent the last fourteen years building the case that the liberal arts belong at the very center of that mission.

Tell us a story. How did the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts come to champion the idea that the humanities don't just complements them, they humanize it?

Richard Utz

Alright. Well, John, thank you, and thanks to everybody at Atla and EBSCO for today's event.

John, you're a scholar. You will remember Henry the fifth, you know, the beginning when you're being asked, on your imaginary forces work? And that's what I'm going to ask you to do right now.

Imagine me almost exactly fourteen years ago as the brand-new chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. I was standing in line to get my first double of espresso of the day, and I saw a student wearing a T shirt. Student was in front of me, and I only saw the back part of the T shirt. And the T shirt said “…not fiction.”

And then I couldn't wait for the student to turn around once they had gotten their beverage. And, when they did, the front of the shirt said “science...” So clearly, there was a notion on campus even fourteen years ago that there is science and then there is fiction. And they too are separate and the twain shall not meet. Now let's skip forward to this year to 2026. If you look up the term science fiction at Georgia Tech online, you'll realize, number one, that science fiction is the only field on our entire campus that has its own browsing section in the library.

The Science Fiction Lounge. Number two, our top faculty in science fiction, Dr Lisa Jacek, is a regents professor. Now that's the highest position awarded by our university system. In order to get recommended for that position, for that rank, you actually need to be recommended by a committee that is full of STEM professors.

So that means that her excellence actually is legible enough to our colleagues in STEM to be recommended. And then number three, science fiction and Doctor. Jasek plays a really important role, in in one of the most STEM focused research areas on campus, the program in astrobiology.

So, that's just sort of as an as an introduction, to show what's changed.

Obviously, the change between 2012 when I came in and 2026 for science and science fiction, and many other cross disciplinary collaborations, it began a long time ago because Georgia Tech was founded in the eighteen eighties. And already in the 1880s, there were not only engineering courses at Georgia Tech, but actually there were courses in public speaking and in writing because it was very clear that the technical skills and knowledge needed to be communicated. So the humanities actually at Georgia Tech are as old as the institution.

However, they were clearly a compliment. Right? They were not at the center of affairs.

Sort of grew gradually. We added modern language. We added film. We added media and so on and so forth. And finally, in the early nineteen nineties, we had a college of liberal arts. But it was small, and, faculty, when I came, still remembered what they used to say about themselves, what they felt about their presence at Georgia Tech. They felt, and I quote, “benign neglect.” Benign neglect. So what changed since the beginning of the college? There are two factors. The first factor is probably, that we had a group of really visionary presidents and senior leaders who realized that Georgia Tech would never become a world class university without a strong presence of the liberal arts.

And what that meant in their in their eyes was a group of faculty, students, and programs that went beyond the how questions, which is what the engineers are really good at, but focused on the on the why question, on the contextualization questions.

So Wayne Clough, one of those presidents, wrote a memoir. It's called “The Technological University Reimagined.”

And he explains in detail how the humanities and interdisciplinarity really enrich the intellectual ecosystem, especially at a university of science and technology. That's the first part that needed to happen, right, for us to succeed here. And the second part is simply that we in Ivan Allen College, humanities and social sciences, deans, chairs, directors, faculty, staff, students, we stopped making excuses and apologies for being here, but we kind of became, I guess, pugnacious is the real word, at explaining the value that we bring to the rest of Georgia Tech, not only in core or general education, but in our majors and minors. And by all the hybrid, collaborations and degrees that we that we that we brought to the campus.

And so if you if you ask me what I would hope, I haven't seen one yet, what a current student T-shirt should say right now, if I were to find one, I hope it would say “science needs fiction.”

Because, yeah, we've come off age as disciplines with our contributions to Georgia Tech. And quite honestly, our STEM colleagues recognize how our practices humanize and elevate education at our institution.

John Kutsko

Thanks for that. I think of science fiction as actually creating the ideas that science eventually builds.

And you've also described what you do as creating, quote, “border crossing collaborative problem solvers.” Can you give us a concrete example, a course, research project, or student experience at Georgia Tech where the integration of humanities and STEM produced something that neither discipline could have produced alone.

Richard Utz

Right. So we're really looking at the sum being, the sum total being more important than the, you know, the result the outcome being more important than simply adding.

You know, there needs to be more than that in the end. My first example so I have two examples for you, and we're going to see some listen to some examples and Sue see some examples. The first one is about how narrative, so stories, reflective elements, performance even, can support engineering and science assignments, to but at the same time, also broaden the scope of the humanities involved. So that's the important part.

So again, on your imaginary forces work, here is a professor in, let's say, material science, who realizes that his students are really excellent mathematicians and scientists, but they would even be better as mathematicians and scientists if they knew more about the context of the complex equations they're dealing with and could communicate them to audiences beyond their immediate collaborators. So this material science professor gets together with colleagues in the humanities, technical communication, performance, and creates a project called teaching quantum science with narrative-based learning.

You can find it on Apple Podcast. There are two episodes there. And students research, you know, they usually take the equations they work with as a given and use it to solve their science, their scientific, questions. But they realize when they work together with humanities and humanities methodologies that the equation is not simply a historical given that comes ex nihilo to us, but it came about by a process.

So what they do is they explain that process. They write skits, design playbills. And then in the end, imagine that they have to perform the skits on stage. So they entirely humanize what at a first glance appears to be the most abstract mathematical process, and they render it comprehensible to different audiences, including humanity's audiences. So the equation really comes alive. And this process also challenges and kind of expands what the humanists think about their own creative work and about mathematics. So let's go ahead and listen to what the instructor has to say about what happened when they assigned this work to the students.

Video Replay:

So can you provide an example of one of these skits that really stands out?

For me, the one that stands out is the one where there's an equation. I mean, it's the one that structurally is that shows the ideas behind analysis and synthesis most clearly. And that is they took an equation, and upon research, they realized that this equation is based on contributions from at least two different people, one of whom had their own equation associated with them and another at least two different people associated, you know, behind that equation, you know, with each of their contributions had their own equations. So now these equations, these three equations, the final equation that they were analyzing and the equations that preceded them were some of the characters in the play. They didn't show the equation that they were dealing with until very end.

I'll get to that in a second. But what they started with are the two characters who represented the two parts of the equation being brought together by a mediator. The mediator was another scientist, Niels Bohr, who come up like a matchmaker type that brought these two characters together. And then they essentially then became a partner, and they had baby, and the baby was the equation that that got produced only because these two parts came together that worked together. So they kind of really and then they adopted a basic aromatic comedy genre for this skit. And so, essentially, it was comical and followed the kind of over-the-top conventions of a rom com, but in so doing, showed the whole process by which this one equation came about.

Richard Utz

Alright. You know, you can see how romcom can serve in a situation like this. Not the first choice for most scientists, but that's what happens when you bring these two disciplines together. Second example I I'd like to share is pretty much self-explanatory. It's called EarSketch, one word, and it was created to offer a solution to bring students who might otherwise be uninterested in or intimidated by computer science, coding, mathematics to enjoy engaging with it. And in the process, and that's the other side, and the other outcome is to create beautiful and original pieces of music. So once again, the sum total of the integration of the two areas is larger than if each discipline had remained in its own separate area. Let's go and watch this one.

Video Replay:

Leah Dee Kilgore: What I like is I could let them be creative. I could give them some instructions, but the important thing for learning is to be creative.

Nylah Julmice: EarSketch was the first time where I could combine two interests of my liking. I have a very strong passion for music, and I didn't really know how much I would like to code until programming until I took EarSketch.

Narrator: To use EarSketch, you just have to go to this website, EarSketch.gatech.edu. This website contains a full curriculum for introduction to computer science, a code editor, a mean of sharing songs and code, a digital audio workstation, a script browser, and a sound browser. I also want to mention that the curriculum is aligned with the College Board AP CSP plan, but it can also be used in other teaching content. Research involving study schools and comparison schools have shown increased content knowledge and engagement from students who are using EarSketch, and this was particularly true for women and minority students.

Jason Freeman: So think what's important to me about EarSketch is that anyone can do it. You don't need to be able to play a musical instrument to use EarSketch, you don't need to know how to read music transcription. You can be a teacher who knows nothing about music and teach a really awesome class with EarSketch. You can be a student, and you can start making really awesome music right away.

Brian Magerko: You're taking this programming environment and using it as completely new, like, self-motivated way. And, you know, if we have kids who are taking their coding projects and bringing it home to show off to their friends and family or to collaborate on it with them, then that's that line that we've crossed. We've succeeded.

John Kutsko

Very cool examples. So Georgia Tech's provost said something striking at one of your symposia, that it's time to flip the narrative from technology influencing the humanities to the humanities influencing the stem. That's a bold claim at a technology university. What did it take to get institutional leadership, a provost, a VP of research to make that kind of statement publicly?

Richard Utz

Yeah, John. Hard work might be the quickest answer to this because a lot of the things that that we've been doing really took I guess, something like consciousness raising might actually be the right term for it. Now at Georgia Tech, you can only raise consciousness if you have evidence, usually hard data. So, you know, what we what we did over the years, and this started long before I came. Right? I mean, this started when the college was founded and even before. But the idea really was to prove that our presence on this campus was an advantage to the students.

So it's the educational value the institution provided, but also to the research value that we could also enhance the research at an at a research one institution. So we did a lot of outreach to our STEM colleagues, and we found that they were really, really open to what we had to offer. But to give you an example of the consciousness raising effort, my own school, School of Literature, Media and Communication, we published an essay collection. It's called Humanistic Perspectives in the Technological World, which, you know, focuses really, really on these questions.

And I asked every single faculty member to write a one-thousand-word essay, took a lot of work, to demonstrate how each of their work contributed essential human centered lenses to technological questions and also features a lot of collaborations with STEM faculty. So we published that. There's an online version, which is, I think, linked in the chat. There is a print version, which went to program advisers, admissions officers, deans, chairs, provosts, VP for research, president, advisory boards, student applicants, their parents.

And there's been copies sitting on the table in the waiting room of the provost's office for more than ten years because there were two editions. But that's really what it took. Right? You have to tell the story of the humanities in a way that is, so these aren't these aren't subject matter specialist essays. Right? These are written for a broad public that wants to understand if I send my kids to this place, why would I want to choose a liberal arts college at a technological institute?

And so that's what we try to prove. And so the most recent of these volumes, Humanistic Perspectives, is now five years old. But last week, our provost let us know that he wants the liberal arts at Georgia Tech to be the institutional voice for Georgia Tech's AI and Society project, which is starting in the next academic year. So what did we have to do? We had to leave a little bit of the comfort of our own discipline behind. We had to risk collaboration. There's always risk involved if you want to work with other human beings.

We had to move to toward a deliberate form of integration. Right? Not just providing a little module on ethics for a large engineering project or a little module on communication. No. But intentional integration.

And then and then the consciousness raising effort, you know, which is really you have to go all out and speak to everybody and convince them to become a coalition in which you play an important part.

John Kutsko

That's a great example. Just the fact you had data, but without storytelling off that data, it wouldn't have mattered. It wouldn't have communicated. So that that's a great example. So I wanted to talk more about evidence, how and why integration matters. So the first question on that is Nash the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a report in twenty eighteen called branches from the same tree. It compiled evidence that integrating humanities and arts with STEM leads to better educational and career outcomes. You've built on that evidence at Georgia Tech. What has the research shown you about how humanities training changes, what STEM students are able to do as communicators, as ethical thinkers, and as future leaders?

Richard Utz

Yeah. So let me start by well, let me put this in make this in two parts. The first one's really about branches from the same tree. It's an Einstein quote, and it provides detailed evidence.

Anybody who hasn't read that yet, please read at least the executive summary, you know, which is usually wonderful in these in these consensus reports. But if you have more time, go and look into the case studies that they're citing. What did the integration full integration, of, the humanities and arts, this is what this report is about, do for the STEM students. So the usual suspects show up. Critical thinking is enhanced. Communication skills are enhanced. Teamwork, the ability to work in groups, not just work in groups, but work well in groups. But then also the outcomes were that content mastery in STEM discipline was enhanced by adding the liberal arts to it. Improved visuospatial skills, increased empathy, resilience, self-efficacy, motivation, and enjoyment of learning. We sometimes forget about that when we're so serious about pedagogy.

There should be enjoyment in learning. And then also important, the recruitment, learning, and retention of students who are usually underprepared for challenging academic environments. So I ask you this rhetorically, of course, only: who would not want those factors to work for their own institution? At Georgia Tech, because I think that's what your question was really about, my favorite example is the two-semester junior capstone course in computing.

So that course usually has teams of five students, and they collaborate, on a software solution for a real-life client. So this is experiential learning, right, for a real-life client. But more importantly, for our purposes today, it's a two-semester sequence that is fully team developed and team taught by a computing specialist and a technical communications specialist. And what they do is they interweave the how to build the software with the why. You know, what were the historical social cultural conditions and potential outcomes of developing the software?

The first semester of the sequence is about project design and communication strategies, and then the second semester is about implementation. And they then the students have to do an expo presentation. Right? What is this project about? And then they have to write a reflection around all the deliverables. So this process goes way beyond using communication just as a smart tool. But the students come away with a really humanizing experience as they reflect critically, for example, on the various stereotypes inherent in programming culture, you know, which we've read a lot about in the software industry and in gaming.

So when these students move into their jobs, in their workplaces, they will ask these questions about their workplace culture, the consequences of technological determinism on human life, democracy, free speech, questions of gender issues, and so on and so forth. So it really, really enhances both subject matters.

John Kutsko

Thanks for that. Let me I want to ask a second question on the evidence, and this is going towards one of those anxieties in the humanities. So the department survey conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024 showed that humanities enrollments after years of steep decline are stabilized or rising even at some institutions. From where you sit, is this a genuine turning point, or is it a blip? Is it still fragile?

Richard Utz

Yep. That's a really hard one because these statistics come out, this specific one, at least every year, others every quarter. The trouble with any and all of them is that nobody in higher education has ever determined, correct me if I'm wrong, how many how many humanities programs or faculty and students would be ideal to have, because it's pretty much impossible to do.

And by the way, that's also true for the other disciplines. Right? That's not just true for STEM, but, I mean, we're all in the academy a little bit more like the, you know, the motto of the Spanish empire, which was Right? Yes.

It's always better to have more humanists on campus and always, you know, hire additional people. And but what we do know so there's a couple things that we know. We know that the presence of the humanities, which means sort of a focus on the on the cultural, ethical, and experiential aspects of life, about meaning, about agency, values, history, when that is present through the humanities, it positively impacts the entire ecosystem of the campus. And I already given some examples of that.

So when you have significantly fewer humanities programs, classes, faculty, and students, it just will mean that fewer of these issues will be front and center on campus. So that's what administrators need to think about before they cut programs. Right? And sometimes the humanities are so called easy cuts when it comes to that.

We also do know that the humanities at technological universities like Georgia Tech have seen fewer or no enrollment drops or cuts. To me, that would be a signal that would suggest that integration actually works. Then we also know that there are some universities have created applied humanities degree programs even if they're not tech institutions, like at the University of Arizona. And they attract new students. So they don't cannibalize other humanities programs. You know?

They attract new different kinds of students. And these students seem to want to develop, a, those elusive soft skills, but they want to combine them with something really real life, you know, like business administration, public health, game studies, you name it. So to answer your question, perhaps we're not at the turning point for the traditional humanities disciplines. But at least for those who innovate holistically and partner with tech, health, business.

And it seems that students and parents know that complex issues are not going to be resolved by any one discipline alone, and so programs that act on this insight may be more successful.

There's one more observation that I want to make, and that's really sort of going into history. Some of you may know Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, which is one of the most famous research libraries in the country. When you step outside of that library, there is an inscription from a letter that was written about 1940 by the donor gifting Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard.

And it reads, and I quote, “if the humanities were ever necessary, it is in this epoch of disintegration and dislocation.”

That phrase has never left me since I visited there as a as a visiting scholar. So because it's interesting. In the United States, and it’s pretty much North America, the humanities as a concept comprising the disciplines that we now talk about did not really exist in the academic taxonomy before the nineteen thirties. So the subjects are there, English and modern languages and philosophy, but as a package, they're not being talked about. They're being talked about at a moment in time when first World War II and then world, first World War I and then World War II create the impression that humanist ideals are fragile.

And so creating programs in the humanities and creating humanities colleges then is sort of seen as a as an essential defense against barbarity. Right?

And so this is a long winded, you know, coming back to your original question, is this are these new numbers fragile? You know, what is going to happen? I think that we may there are some signs that we may be at a similar turning point when human beings now feel under siege by technology and AI Yeah. And may therefore once again turn to the humanities and what they represent in order to fight off, sorry for the expression, technological barbarism.

John Kutsko

And that that quote, reminds me that, what's old is new again, and this the cyclical nature of realizing the values that we don't want to lose to the humanities. So I actually wanted to turn to some more examples. So I wanted to hear from some students. You brought some video clips of students at who've been part of these integrative experiences at Georgia Tech. So let's hear from you.

Richard Utz

Yeah.

John Kutsko

Yeah. Can you set yeah. Set yeah. If you could set those up, and then we'll, we'll, watch those.

Richard Utz

Right. Thanks, John. This is kind of the heart of the matter. Right? Because we want to hear what the students are thinking about this. And they have clear and loud voices about this. So I have three examples.

A first one, is from a student who is in chemical and biological engineering. That's his major. He took a class on Japanese culture, cultural sites and their preservation. And then the instructor in modern languages asked the students, to transfer what they had learned on Japanese culture into an indigenous site in the US and also see how this comparative perspective relates to their chosen major.

So that's what the first students are going to is going to is going to talk to us about. And the second one, I turned to an actual liberal arts student who has a background in international affairs and who just basically is enamored by her experience of being embedded at Georgia Tech, with two inter interdisciplinary research groups, one with civil engineers and one with computer scientists. And just listen to what she has to say about working holistically with these, students from these other, very different areas. And the third video, comes from a student.

It's really short, but it's in computational media, a degree that blends sort of methods and practices for computing, literature, media communication, and music and music technology. So programs from three different colleges. And, you know, that degree teaches them about aspects of the computer as a medium, about the technical, the historical, the applied. It offers hands on and theoretical knowledge of computing and an understanding of visual design and the history of media.

And the goal really is, for students to be able to plan and critique any new digital media forms, be they for entertainment or for education or business communication. So let's listen to these three and watch out what vocabulary they're using in order to describe their experience.

Video Replay:

Speaker 1: From a professional perspective, as a kidney student here at Georgia Tech, I was specifically interested in the material science, kind of the sophisticated masonry, the plaster they use, and the coloring technologies that, they use by, combining local minerals and organic binders, kind of what gives it that orange look.

And also the sustainability, there is, it's well documented that the cliff dwellings had efficient ventilation, thermal regulation, and use, great resource optimization, which are concepts that are still relative to modern sustainable design.

For the future ideas topic, many of the sites that we discussed this semester, that were Japanese, UNESCO sites, they emphasized harmony of nature, community, cooperation, and long-term sustainability, which are values that were also seen in indigenous American cultures and, more specifically, these cliff lines and their societies.

As for traditional approaches that sparked my interest, the respect for ancestors, built environments and natural landscapes, kind of like how they were able to build inside of the natural mountains was really cool to me.

Also, the craftsmanship that was grounded in purpose and community. And moving forward, things that we can learn from this. As a future engineer, embracing sustainable thinking and respecting traditional knowledge systems is a good thing as well as practicing cultural awareness and globally minded decision making. But most importantly for me, I think, is understanding that innovation can come from studying the past and not just the feed the future. And I think that's something we discussed a lot this semester with, especially, like, the wood joint building of the pagodas and things like that.

Speaker 2: What motivated me in wanting to do these, to research be involved in these two research groups kind of stems from my I love with interdisciplinary research. I love being on research groups where I'm not just surrounded by people with the same expertise as me, but everyone kind of brings something unique to the table. And so when I came to Georgia Tech, I really sought out groups that were integrating different parts of the school together. So with the civil engineering team, I'm a social studies major in international affairs.

However, everyone else in the group is either solo. We had some environmental engineers. So we kind of have a mesh of different thoughts and perspectives together to make a final product, which I find very valuable. And the same with document.

We work with computer scientists and, to make this machine learning model, and it takes, a village to be able to do it.

Speaker 3: Hi. My name is Zamaria Winston, and I'm a fourth-year computational media major at Georgia Tech. The reason why I chose to do liberal arts at Georgia Tech is because I recognize the importance of pursuing a background in technology. But along with that, I also wanted to pursue my passion for media, and I felt like computational media was the best of both worlds with that.

John Kutsko

So, one follow-up question. When you talk to these students who've had these integrated ex experiences, these projects, what do you what do they say they gained that they're purely STEM track peers missed? And do you think it's a long-term gain and will be valued in the workplace?

Richard Utz

Yeah. So in the in the in the first video, you had a science student. Right? Engineering students who realize that intercultural competency is really, really important. So it says two things that he has learned. Global minded decision making, I think, is what he says, about what the outcome is for the future, and then, that innovation can come from studying the past.

I mean, we that's what we'd like to see. Right? We want somebody embedded in in in historical knowledge and learning from the past. Now the second one, just, you know, what it exuded to me almost was the students' thirst for learning experience that blends more than one approach.

And that she specifically sought a degree program that made that possible. And the third one, as short as it was, I love the language in it because, so she said, I recognize the importance of a background in technology. That's her words. And then she says, I wanted to combine it with my passion for media.

So I recognize the importance. That's the logical kind because that's she thinks is going to get her a job.

And then she says, but I want to combine it with my passion for media, and that's where the love for learning comes in. And bringing that together, I think, is just wonderful. So, I mean, to summarize what I take away from these from these three videos really is there is a dichotomy between what gives faculty success at a university and what gives students success. Faculty reach success by increased specialization most of the time. That's what's rewarded.

And what's troubling me a little bit is that we ask students who are still especially undergraduate students, right, who are still in the process of forming their own identity, of orienting widely, we ask them really early on to declare a major and become second versions of ourselves when, in fact, their desire you just heard that from these three Their real desire is to understand the world better and want to compare different forms of knowledge and methodology. Thanks.

John Kutsko

Those are those are great insights. I'm going to skip a I want to skip a little bit ahead. I'd be out of touch if I didn't bring up the humanities in the age of AI. Last year, EBSCO and Atla cosponsored a breakfast session at ACRL on libraries, AI, and the future of learning. It was so well attended we hosted an encore webinar. Georgia Tech is at the forefront of AI research, and as someone who leads the humanities inside that environment, what is your case for why humanistic inquiry, ethical reasoning, historical perspective, cultural understanding is not just nice to have alongside AI, but essential to getting AI right.

Richard Utz

Yeah. Obviously, the jury is out about what exactly AI really is and what it does and how it does what it does. And those doubts don't just come from us as scholars, but they're widely shared.

You know, I want to make reference to, the recent encyclical that that that Publio published. It's called “Magnificat Humanitas”, magnificent humanity. And so to me, that kind of provides a guiding light to the answer to your question that that that I think I can have. So the encyclical was really about the role of humanity, the role of earthlings. Humanos means, etymologically speaking, earthling. At its core, to me, the encyclical was about making sure that human oversight, human dignity, moral responsibility will not be sort of canceled helter-skelter by those getting wealthy from relatively untested technological progress.

And Pope Leo had the founder of with him right when he made the announcement, and that person actually shares those concerns. Maybe I can answer it from the perspective of where Georgia Tech comes in in with that question.

To get AI right, whatever that exactly means, maybe morally right, humanely right, you need humanists who don't see as an enemy. And the reason I say this is because if you see STEM in an as an enemy, then you won't have enough energy and enthusiasm to try to codesign AI together with the engineers, together with the computer scientists.

And unless humanists are part of that equation, that integration, which includes friction because that's what we humanists often bring to these processes, if there if that integration with the engineers and the computer scientists is not there, then we won't get it right. I mean, we, now there's a couple of things that we may also consider. To get AI right, which, challenges us in ways that we haven't encountered before, at least that's what we think right now, we may need to break with some kind of beloved hierarchies of knowledge creation and acquisition that we've developed over centuries.

For example, a one semester class doesn't necessarily resolve anything because there's no educational reason why three semesters three hours per semester do anything. It's because the registrar's office needs to schedule classes in rooms that we have these so we may have to for complex questions, we may have to have multi semester classes, right, on a single topic. The other thing that we might want to think about is if availability of information is no longer the big issue, right, because we have access to a lot more, maybe we need multiple generations of experience levels of researchers together.

And Georgia Tech does this in what we call vertically integrated projects. Those are research labs where you bring undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, research faculty, academic faculty all together in the same classroom because we bring different things to the discussion. And then over multiple semesters, they discuss things like global social entrepreneurship, sustain sustainable mega regions. The most recent one I found was called Voice and Research Lab.

It asks how young people perceive and interpret the emotional timbre in human voices compared to AI generated voices. Right? So really going into depth, what is what makes a human being and what makes that AI product, and how do we respond to it? I think that's where Georgia Tech can help getting it right if we can get it right.

John Kutsko

It comes back to your T-shirt story. Sci-fi has given us plenty of things to be concerned about with AI in the future, and it might be good things to good thing to listen to those stories that are that that should raise our consciousness. I want to come back to something you just said earlier, that liberal arts should know that the STEM that STEM isn't the enemy. And that humanities community should stop lamenting and start building. For faculty, administrators, librarians watching this webinar now or recorded, many of whom work at institutions far less resourced than George Tech, what's your clarion call? What where should they start?

Richard Utz

Okay. So I wish I had that medieval instrument, the clarion with me, you know, so I could get everybody's attention. I want to, you know, there's always a little bit of hubris involved, you know, when you try to give anybody advice on this, but and each institution is different. I would say this. If, and this is the proviso for what I have to say, if you agree that complex questions cannot be solved well by any single discipline or method, let's ask ourselves how we can educate students to become comparative, human centered, and technology savvy thinkers and practitioners. If, proviso, if you agree with that, make that your priority and not the demands of your field or discipline.

All of those were created for the knowledge economy of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Instead of that, reach out across campus to somebody who doesn't seem to have any obvious connection with what you do. Now there's a time factor involved. This takes time. It takes hard work, and it takes more than one person to do it.

Convince your administrators and oversight boards that publishing just another article for some rankings category that may not be read or cited by anyone, as we well know, is not as important as creating long term meaningful improvement for knowledge creation. And finally, be a public humanist. Connect with your state humanities organization. We recently partnered with Georgia Humanities because what they do is they support programming that engages all ages, all backgrounds. And one of the issues with the academic humanities is that we're often unconnected with the nonacademic world. That needs to change.

John Kutsko

Thanks. Those are that's those are great, that's great advice, given that I hope we can all take. So I want to tee up a last question in the interest of time. I want to show a video that speaks enthusiastically combining arts and tech and that such creative solutions have greater impact and are more meaningful, and you touch on this, more meaningful to the wider public. So could we could we play that video here?

Video Replay:

Speaker: I think that there's oftentimes a gap between liberal arts and technology. But to really solve the problems of our future, liberal arts and technology need to combine in really unique ways, and that's done here at Georgia Tech. If we're not developing young liberal arts focused minds who can approach problems in creative ways, will stay stuck in the details that will never reach the wider public.

John Kutsko

That's a good tee up for my last question. So and, obviously, to leave time for questions posed by the audience. So here it is. So you once wrote that we shouldn't maintain the nineteenth century, and you touched upon this a second ago, of the nineteenth century demarcations that separated science and the humanities, that we need a newly holistic educational experience and approach. If you could fast forward ten years, what does success look like, and what role do the research tools and databases that support humanities play in getting us there?

Richard Utz

Yeah. So the crystal ball question. And I think we do need to get out of that sense that we developed in the nineteenth century. A lot of new knowledge was created. Everybody's very excited. And then we created bunkers because within those bunkers, we created the lab condition within which we could, you know, produce a lot of good results.

At the time, a lot of information was not readily available. That is completely different now. As I said before, this it's no longer about how to teach students a text or a specific detail.

I think now it's about the context. And that leads me to and so there's so much information available right now more than anybody than any individual can really deal with, which is why we really need to work in groups. We need to work in teams. We need to integrate knowledge. I would hope that ten years from now, branches from the same tree, the, revolutionary public acknowledgment of our colleagues in the STEM disciplines would have made its way into accreditation standards, which is one of the few ways with which the academy tends to change when accreditation, ask for it.

Also means to me, because you're asking about databases and resources, it means that databases and resources need to learn how to speak with one another. I know, for example, our librarians and information scientists are trade trained and employed the same way that faculty are. So maybe a little too specialized with the librarians often having an advantage that they serve more than one group of people.

So they've always been looking out for a more holistic idea of learning. But I have news for everybody because everybody wants to accelerate and get this done tomorrow.

What I've explained to you, those collaborations, that integration, it's hard and time-consuming work, and it needs incentivizing by administrations. It needs support by individuals who really make students their priorities. And, I mean, one of the areas that I find is kind of cool is, is linguistics because it provides this bridge between the humanities and the sciences within its own discipline. Right?

So there are some disciplines whose example we might follow. In the next ten years, things will accelerate even more. And I think I mentioned the word friction before, John, if you remember. What human what humanists often can do is they can provide a moment of friction where the so-called efficiency and acceleration can be slowed down a little bit for intensive reading, for deep understanding, human qualities that can be measured in human temporality, if we can you know, that would be that would be my goal. I hope that's possible. And then AI and other information, other new ways of getting informed may remain human and humane and not drive us to a speed that will actually eliminate who we are as human beings.

John Kutsko

Thanks. Hopefully, these are the road maps we can take for the future, and this is this really is inspiring. It's also not about saving the humanities or any discipline, but how education can focus on humanizing solutions and better education.

Thank you so much. I'm sure questions are queuing up. I don't know if we have how much time we have. I'm going to kick it to my colleagues.

Leanne Nisbet

Hi, everyone. Yeah. We are unfortunately out of time for today, but I do appreciate everyone's attendance and Richard and John's presentation.

We will try to answer some questions in our follow-up, if possible, but just wanted to thank everyone for joining us today. You will receive an email within the next few days with a link to the recording of today's session. This webinar was sponsored by Atla. To learn more about Atla databases, you can visit www.ebsco.com or www.atla.com. Links to relevant resources will be provided in the chat and included in the follow-up email as well with the recording.

Be sure to follow EBSCO on social media for updates on future events and resources and thank you all again for spending your time with us today.