Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    University Transformation
Sign In
The Review

How an Experiment in 3-D Printing Illuminated Our Humanities Classroom

By Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran October 22, 2017
How an Experiment in 3-D Printing  Illuminated Our Humanities Classroom 1
Eric Petersen for The Chronicle

M idway through a workshop aimed at demystifying 3-D printing and other new technologies, we were handed a small, roughly hewn representation of a human head. It was a copy of an Assyrian artifact remade from a 3-D printer in strangely light, off-white plastic. By layering thin strips of this plastic, the printer had reproduced the sculpted head from a composite, many-sided scan.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

How an Experiment in 3-D Printing  Illuminated Our Humanities Classroom 1
Eric Petersen for The Chronicle

M idway through a workshop aimed at demystifying 3-D printing and other new technologies, we were handed a small, roughly hewn representation of a human head. It was a copy of an Assyrian artifact remade from a 3-D printer in strangely light, off-white plastic. By layering thin strips of this plastic, the printer had reproduced the sculpted head from a composite, many-sided scan.

Part of what made this plastic copy misshapen and uneven was the damage that the original artifact had weathered over millennia. The other part had to do with what our workshop instructors described as “pixelation.” When their equipment scanned and reproduced the sculpture, some of the detail got lost, resulting in a three-dimensional equivalent of a grainy photograph. The two forms of roughness — historical and printer-induced — did not clash with each other. Indeed, as we took turns holding the plastic head and taking pictures of it, we felt that its computer-generated zigzag edges were helping us understand how far the object reproduced had traveled in order to reach us, and how intense and fragile was the manual labor it originally involved. We were drawn in by this experience: Two inconceivably distant media and periods had unexpectedly touched borders, and illuminated each other. Oddly enough, the imperfection of 3-D printers and scanners also answered the question we had brought to the workshop: Would we be able to use such technologies in a humanities classroom without reducing them to a sideshow or gimmick?

Innovators Cover for Package revised.jpg
Innovators: 10 Classroom Trailblazers
Meet some devoted faculty members who might spark your interest in taking risks and trying new things in class.
  • Commentary: Could Apple Computer Have Survived Higher Ed?
  • Dahpon Ho Brings History Alive
  • Justin McDaniel Opens a Door to Contemplative Life

As we confirmed by introducing these technologies into our teaching, their buggy unfamiliarity could help students see with fresh eyes older media that they might have otherwise taken for granted. For a year prior, the two of us had been developing an undergraduate course at our institution, Yale University, called “Selfhood, Race, Class, and Gender.” The course had two aims. First, we planned to set abstract theories of the self in conversation with reflections on how particular social identities shape who we are. Second, we wanted to help our students see how accounts of the self that emphasize people’s similarities and those that insist on the differences can mutually illuminate each other. To this end, we decided to have our students read Plato and Augustine alongside anti-colonial writers such as Frantz Fanon and feminists such as Sara Ahmed; the sonnets and comedies of Shakespeare alongside the ghazals of the Persian poet Hafez and the plays of the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa.

Just a few months before this course was scheduled, we received an unexpected invitation. Yale had joined a pilot program sponsored by HP to test equipment for “blended reality.” Would we want our students to participate in these tests? We weren’t sure what blended reality was, but we were eager to find out. Neither of us is a skilled digital humanist, but we have both worked on histories of media and science, and here was a type of craftsmanship that we hadn’t seen before. We decided to give it a shot.

To learn more about blended reality, we watched some instruction videos and attended workshops like the one where we marveled at the reproduced Assyrian artifact. We found that it’s a branch of digital technology devoted to enhancing the realism and precision with which we can reproduce, model, and recreate our environments and everyday objects on a computer screen, and making these experiences as immersive as possible. The makers of these tools describe them as “blending” reality because they feed parts of our environments into computers, improve them virtually, and pop them back out all ready for use.

The equipment involved consists of 3-D scanners, high-tech design software, and 3-D printers. You feed your chosen objects into the scanner by taking many overlapping 2-D pictures that the software integrates into a single 3-D model. Once the model is up, you modify it virtually. Then you print the final form in your chosen size and material, which can include various colors of plastic as well as platinum, silver, or gold.

Our experiment was a play on materiality and imagination, on the gleam of virtual possibilities and the historical record.

We found out that the purposes of these technologies can vary widely: from the creation of better virtual-reality gaming environments to the production of personalized prosthetics, humane taxidermy specimens, and wedding rings. (One of our instructors proudly displayed an instance of the latter, which he had designed himself.) In the process, we also discovered that 3-D technology is becoming shockingly affordable. Scanning apps for smartphones, such as Autodesk’s ReCap360 and Meshmixer, convert photographs into 3-D models; and you no longer need to own and maintain a 3-D printer, which can be noisy and noxious, when online “printing farms” such as Shapeways permit rapid and affordable products.

ADVERTISEMENT

W e were skeptical of the glamorous aura around this equipment and deeply conscious of our own lack of expertise. But we latched onto our experience of the Assyrian head and its revealing imperfections. We decided to use blended-reality tools — which we felt were excitingly unfamiliar — to get our students to think about their own selves, as well as the more canonical genres and media we would be studying, in new ways.

As we hoped, the bugginess of blended reality piqued our students’ interest. One of them discovered — to much collective excitement — that the process of slowly turning an object on the scanner, necessary for the machine to capture it from all angles, could be manipulated to produce monstrous, usually unprintable variants on the original. Another student, who tried to replicate a childhood memento, soon realized that 3-D scanners are bad at recognizing shiny surfaces. Her precious pink barrette was rendered as an indistinct blob.

It might seem that this exercise would only breed technophobia. Instead, it gave our students a bolder critical edge. They began to speak of particular genres and media as each having their specific, not necessarily interchangeable capacities and functions. Instead of trying to adapt themselves to the current features of these genres and media, they speculated about what combinations of such features would most ideally suit their ideas and needs.

In a brainstorming exercise on “what is blended reality?,” students reflected on the difficulty of separating “reality” and its representations, and on how their individual realities were constantly in dialogue with others’ perspectives and narratives. In an exercise on analyzing their own selfies — a response to the philosopher Simon Blackburn’s critique of the narcissism of selfie culture — they articulated the complex self-consciousness and critical suspicion behind their apparent embrace of Snapchat or Facebook. The older media and genres to which we exposed them — plays, letters, films, and philosophical dialogues — also gained sharpness in their minds, as malleable expressive and technological choices.

ADVERTISEMENT

A s we brought questions about technology, society, and selfhood into the heart of our course, we realized that tech in teaching can mean more than testing a suite of new educational apps, using the quantitative tools of digital humanities, or engaging in the historical work of media archaeology. Our experiment — which we ended up calling “Born Digital” — was a play on materiality and imagination, on the gleam of virtual possibilities and the textual stuff of the historical record. The phrase itself captures the early utopian promise of the internet, and refers quite specifically to material that has only a virtual presence. But as a number of scholars have shown, even these seemingly ephemeral, evanescent digital objects leave physical traces.

“Born Digital” for us was thus a humanistic play on words that captured how technology can forge ties between a range of environments and communities both past and present. It was also an expression of an equally humanistic hope that our technologies, old and new, can speak to each other rather than merely supersede each other. Opening ourselves onto a widening range of them ultimately increases the sensitivity and care with which we approach each one. In our case, it helped students read more deeply, write more insightfully, and articulate their intuitive sophistication about media and technology more boldly than we’d expected or hoped.

Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran are both assistant professors of comparative literature at Yale University and Public Voices Fellows with the OpEd Project, an organization that seeks to diversify the range of perspectives represented in contemporary media.


More on Teaching and Learning

photo_83234_widescreen_850x530

The Making of a Teaching Evangelist

Premium

How Eric Mazur came to realize that the traditional classroom lecture had to go.

photo_77692_widescreen_850x530

The Case for a New Kind of Core

Premium

A methods-based curriculum could empower students in college and for life.

A version of this article appeared in the October 27, 2017, issue.
Read other items in Innovators: 10 Classroom Trailblazers.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Opinion
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Black and white photo of the Morrill Hall building on the University of Minnesota campus with red covering one side.
Finance & operations
U. of Minnesota Tries to Soften the Blow of Tuition Hikes, Budget Cuts With Faculty Benefits
Photo illustration showing a figurine of a football player with a large price tag on it.
Athletics
Loans, Fees, and TV Money: Where Colleges Are Finding the Funds to Pay Athletes
Photo illustration of a donation jar turned on it's side, with coins spilling out.
Access & Affordability
Congressional Republicans Want to End Grad PLUS Loans. How Might It Affect Your Campus?
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, Jr. delivers remarks during the State Board of Education meeting at Winter Park High School, Wednesday, March 27, 2024.
Executive Privilege
In Florida, University Presidents’ Pay Goes Up. Is Politics to Blame?

From The Review

Photo-based illustration of a tentacle holding a microscope
The Review | Essay
In Defense of ‘Silly’ Science
By Carly Anne York
Illustration showing a graduate's hand holding a college diploma and another hand but a vote into a ballot box
The Review | Essay
Civics Education Is Back. It Shouldn’t Belong to Conservatives.
By Timothy Messer-Kruse
Photo-based illustration of a hedges shaped like dollar signs in various degrees of having been over-trimmed by a shadowed Donald Trump figure carrying hedge trimmers.
The Review | Essay
What Will Be Left of Higher Ed in Four Years?
By Brendan Cantwell

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: A Global Leadership Perspective
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin