Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 815.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 08:05:53 +0100
From: John Unsworth <unsworth@uiuc.edu>
Subject: Cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social science
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission
on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences
http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm
(At the URL above, you can subscribe to a one-way, spam-free email list for
updates and announcements concerning the meetings and other work of the
Commission. Input from the community represented by Humanist is
particularly relevant to the Commission described below, and may be sent
to: cyberchair@acls.org)
The Charge to the Commission
As scholars in the humanities and social sciences use digital tools and
technologies with increasing sophistication and innovation, they are
transforming their practices of collaboration and communication. New forms
of scholarship, criticism, and creativity proliferate in arts and letters
and in the social sciences, resulting in significant new works accessible
and meaningful only in digital form. Many technology-driven projects in
these areas have become enormously complex and at the same time
indispensable for teaching and research.
For their part, scientists and engineers no longer see digital technologies
merely as tools enhancing established research methodologies, but as a
force creating environments that enable the creation of new knowledge. The
recent National Science Foundation report, "Revolutionizing Science and
Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure," argues for large-scale
investments across all disciplines to develop the shared technology
infrastructure that will support ever-greater capacities. Those capacities
would include the development and deployment of new tools; the rapid
adoption of best practices; interoperability; the ability to invoke
services over the network; secure sharing of facilities; long-term storage
of and access to important data; and ready availability of expertise and
assistance.
The needs of humanists and scientists converge in this emerging
cyberinfrastructure. As the importance of technology-enabled innovation
grows across all fields, scholars are increasingly dependent on
sophisticated systems for the creation, curation, and preservation of
information. They are also dependent on a policy, economic, and legal
environment that encourages appropriate and unimpeded access to both
digital information and digital tools. It is crucial for the humanities and
the social sciences to join scientists and engineers in defining and
building this infrastructure so that it meets the needs and incorporates
the contributions of humanists and social scientists.
ACLS is sponsoring a national commission to investigate and report on these
issues. The Commission will operate throughout 2004, and is charged to:
I. Describe and analyze the current state of humanities and social science
cyberinfrastructure
II. Articulate the requirements and the potential contributions of the
humanities and the social sciences in developing a cyberinfrastructure for
information, teaching, and research
III. Recommend areas of emphasis and coordination for the various agencies
and institutions, public and private, that contribute to the development of
this cyberinfrastructure
Among the questions to be explored in pursuing these three goals are:
I. Describe and analyze the current state of humanities and social science
cyberinfrastructure.
1. What can be generalized from the already significant digital projects in
the humanities and social sciences? Which humanities and social science
communities are most active and why? Of those that are not, which might
soon, easily and/or profitably, engage more deeply with digital technology?
How have those scholars developed computing applications to accomplish
their scholarly and expressive goals? Where have they failed to do so, and
what can be learned from those failures?
2. What new intellectual strategies, critical methods, and creative
practices are emerging in response to technical applications in the
humanities? To what extent are disciplines in the humanities transforming
themselves through the use of computing and networking technologies? What
are the implications of that transformation?
3. What organizations and structures have empowered or impeded the digital
humanities? What are examples of successful and durable collaboration
between technologists and humanities scholars? Where and how are people
being trained to support and engage in such collaborations? What has been
the role of libraries, archives, and publishers in these projects?
II. Articulate the requirements and the potential contributions of the
humanities and the social sciences in developing a national
cyberinfrastructure for information, teaching, and research.
1. What are the "grand challenge" problems for the humanities and social
sciences in the coming decade? Are they tractable to computation? Do they
require cyberinfrastructure in some other way?
2. What technological developments can we predict that will have special
impact in the humanities and social sciences in the near future?
3. Which are the most important functionalities necessary for new research
and development in cyberinfrastructure generally? What kinds of humanities
or social science problems are theoretically difficult or expressively
complex, or challenge our ability to formulate a computable problem in some
other way? What kinds of humanities or social science problems are
computationally intensive, require especially high bandwidth, or present
resource challenges in other ways?
4. What are the barriers that confront humanities and social science users
who wish to take advantage of state-of-the-art computational, storage,
networking, and visualization resources in their research? What can be done
to remove these barriers?
5. What impact will the availability of high-performance infrastructure
have on enabling cross-disciplinary research? What will high-performance
infrastructure mean for the broader social impact of humanities and social
sciences?
6. What can be done to improve education and outreach activities in the
computer-science and engineering community to broaden access to high-end
computing? How can computing expertise in the humanities and social
sciences themselves be increased?
III. Recommend areas of emphasis and coordination for the various agencies
and institutions, public and private, that contribute to the development of
humanities cyberinfrastructure.
1. What investments in cyberinfrastructure are likely to have the greatest
impact on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences?
2. What research infrastructure should be coupled with cyberinfrastructure?
3. How can private and public funding agencies coordinate their efforts and
cooperate with universities, research libraries, disciplinary
organizations, and others to maximize the benefits of cyberinfrastructure
for the humanities and social sciences?
4. How should new investments in infrastructure and technologies be
administered so as to include the humanities?
The Scope of Work and Method
Over the course of 2004, the commission will investigate the questions
raised above, and others as they become relevant, by:
* inviting expert testimony in public meetings, in writing, or in personal
interviews;
* examining and documenting ongoing practices and projects;
* administering a web-based survey;
* reading broadly in recent literature on scholarly publishing, libraries
and archives, intellectual property, and other relevant topics;
* consulting with foundations and funding agencies.
The commission will hold a number of public forums designed to encourage
thoughtful, wide-ranging reflection among stakeholder communities:
1. Monday, April 27th (at the annual meeting of the Research Libraries
Group)
2. Saturday, May 22nd, Chicago
3. Saturday, June 19th, New York
4. Saturday, August 21st, Berkeley
5. Saturday, September 18th, Los Angeles
6. Saturday, October 9th, Houston
7. Tuesday, October 26th, Baltimore (at the Digital Library Federation's
Fall Forum)
The Commission expects to publish its findings and recommendations early in
2005.
Commission Members:
Paul Courant
Provost & Professor of Economics
University of Michigan
Sarah Fraser
Associate Professor and Chair
Art History, Northwestern University
Mike Goodchild
Director, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science
Professor, Geography
University of California, Santa Barbara
Margaret Hedstrom
Associate Professor, School of Information
University of Michigan
Charles Henry
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Rice University
Peter B. Kaufman
Director of Strategic Initiatives, Innodata Isogen
President, Intelligent Television
Jerome McGann
John Stewart Bryan Professor
English, University of Virginia
Roy Rosenzweig
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor
History, George Mason University
John Unsworth (Chair)
Dean and Professor
Grad School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Bruce Zuckerman
Professor, School of Religion
Director, Archaeological Research Collection
University of Southern California
Advisors to the Commission:
Dan Atkins
Professor, School of Information
Director, Alliance for Community Technology
University of Michigan
James Herbert
Senior NSF/NEH Advisor
National Science Foundation
Clifford Lynch, Director
Coalition for Networked Information
Deanna Marcum
Associate Librarian for Library Services
Library of Congress
Harold Short
Director, Center for Computing in the Humanities
King's College, London
Steve Wheatley
Vice-President, American Council of Learned Societies
Senior Editor:
Abby Smith
Director of Programs
Council on Library and Information Resources
Washington, DC
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