April 10, 1998
As you know, "Computing & the Humanities" is a collaborative project conducted by NINCH with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, the Coalition for Networked Information, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Two Ravens Institute.
Following up on the publication of the report on the "Computing & Humanities" Roundtable, a meeting was held March 26 to discuss the project's next steps.
To more easily facilitate discussion, the Summary Report's "Next Steps" were organized into seven headings:
Under this last heading, it was proposed that a "Joint Council" be established to structure the advance of this broad initiative. Members of the Council would be the current working group [D. Green (NINCH), C. Henry (Rice), Joan Lippincott (CNI), Jane Griffith/Marjorie Blumenthal (CSTB)] with the addition of S. Wheatley (ACLS) and S. Freitag (AHA). Proposed advisors would be: D. Clark (CSTB), J. D'Arms (ACLS), C. Lynch (CNI), and W. Wulf (National Academy of Engineering). Proposed consultants would be D. Bearman (Archives & Museum Informatics), M. Joyce (Vassar), B. Schatz (UIUC), J. Unsworth (UVa), S. Katz (Princeton), K. McDonnell (Getty), S. Fox (Society of American Archivists). CSTB is examining how such a council structure would fit with its own current modus operandi.
In the discussion, a number of ideas for projects and funding surfaced. One was for a broad project on archiving digitized cultural material in a way that could engage computer scientists. Another was the suggestion from Michael Lesk of the National Science Foundation that there was a good likelihood of a humanities project here that could be funded by NSF, so long as it was well-defined and broadly agreed upon. Lesk hazarded that such a project might, for example, consist of helping the community sort out intellectual property issues or the issues around the production and distribution of scholarly journals and other publications.
The most intriguing and fertile discussion developed from David Bearman's suggestion that what the community needed was serious work on developing an "Humanities Informatics." This should become a discipline in itself, a legitimate area for research and study that could guide all of those working in the humanities in the digital age. Part of this has to do with developing a metrics for success in scholarship and teaching in the electronic arena. Beyond this, however, it was clearly important to demonstrate in very concrete ways what Humanities Informatics was through focusing on the requirements and activities of specific academic disciplines. What are the particular discipline-based problem sets that networking technology can assist in solving?
One proposal was for a series of workshops that would frame the issues for specific disciplines. It is here that the American Council of Learned Societies could have a crucial role as convenor of humanities and social science disciplines in the U.S. Finding funding to enable such a series of "building block" workshops should be an initial priority.
It was thus proposed that the Joint Council work in two phases. The first would develop in the next six months a strategy and program for action; the second would implement these recommendations over the following two years.
The first phase would include: further discussion and clarification of issues and themes such as knowledge representation and Humanities Informatics; identification of key areas of potential collaboration between humanities and computer science professionals; the development of a 3-year strategy to discuss and launch collaborative projects; identification of funding agencies; and an extension of dialogue to a broad and national constituency.
It was suggested that ACLS, working with the Joint Council, would in parallel initiate a project that could ascertain the impact of digital networking technology on teaching and research practice within specific disciplines and could determine which areas would benefit most from collaboration with computer scientists.
During the next few months, the work of the Joint Council might help the work of ACLS, and the information generated by ACLS should influence the Council's Phase Two activity. The Joint Council will be meeting next on May 28, 1998.
The NINCH session at the upcoming CNI Spring 1998 Task Force Meeting (Washington, DC, April 14-15) is dedicated to the humanities and DLI-2. As I trust you are all by now aware, the second phase of the Digital Library Initiative has been announced and positively welcomes arts and humanities projects.
This is a real challenge for our community to develop serious, ambitious, well thought-out projects. I have invited comment on the NINCH discussion list as to the kinds of projects we should encourage and on April 14 at CNI we will have speakers from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities to explain the initiative and its challenges. David Bearman and John Unsworth will also offer their own take on the kinds of responses the community should be making to the DLI-2 challenge.
David Bearman, Archives & Museum Informatics
George Farr, National Endowment for the Humanities
Stephen Griffin, National Science Foundation
Michael Lesk, National Science Foundation
John Unsworth, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia
For the next round of the Digital Libraries Initiative, the sponsors of this award have expanded beyond NSF, DARPA and NASA to include the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. This recognizes that the humanities have a significant contribution to make to the development of the nation's digital infrastructure and provides a major opportunity for the humanities to present projects that demonstrate their unique challenges on a larger scale than before.
Speakers will address the growing awareness of the importance of including the humanities in such research and demonstration projects as well as approaches that are being recommended.
One of the great desiderata for our community is a reliable database of digital humanities projects. Building a reliable database that is constantly refreshed and that has useful information about the details of how projects have been constructed is a daunting task. One of the results of the "Computing & Humanities" Roundtable was the suggestion of building an international distributed database, with lead institutions in each nation committed to funding and staffing their component of the resource. NINCH has taken the lead in orchestrating this project which is outlined below as a draft project description. The project is still in early stages: a prototype is being displayed to members of the working group in Washington DC, coincident with the CNI meeting.
Draft Description--Under Revision (March 28)
Arts and humanities computing has since its inception been hampered by the lack of an adequate means for collecting and publishing information about activity in the field. Its interdisciplinary scope and methodological nature, coupled with rapid changes in the technology and long undervalued contributions to scholarship, have so far thwarted the development of a practical bibliography of published and ongoing work. The lack of such a bibliography has been repeatedly and urgently noted by researchers, administrators and funding agencies, all of whom need to know what work is being done, by whom and where publications from it may be found. It seems clear from the brief attempt in the Humanities Computing Yearbook (Oxford University Press, 1988-90) that the medium of print is inadequate for the task. Current online publishing tools, however, would allow an accurate survey of arts and humanities computing to be maintained and distributed at very low cost: thus the International Database described here.
A preliminary attempt to construct such a Database was made at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton and Rutgers), 1995-96, while Susan Hockey was Director. It was then proposed as an international collaborative project at the "Computing and the Humanities Roundtable Meeting" held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (U.S.), March 1997. (For the published proceedings of that meeting, see Occasional Paper 41, American Council of Learned Societies, <http://www.acls.org/op41-i.htm>.) Subsequently a small group of prominent administrators and scholars in humanities computing (listed below) have begun work on a more ambitious prototype of the Database and have arranged for it to be developed and maintained by centres in Europe and North America.
The International Database is to contain peer-reviewed information on research and resource-building projects that make significant use of humanities computing methods. Projects that collect, encode, analyze or present source materials and those developing computing tools would be considered. Project websites would as a rule be used in documentation of projects, but the International Database aims to go far beyond the kind and depth of information usually available on the Web. It would not deal with electronic publishing as such, since there are already resources dedicated to tracking and cataloguing these.
The core audience for the Database would be working scholars, administrators, libraries and funding agencies. It would also aim to benefit scholars who are curious about the technology but unfamiliar with the kinds of work currently making good use of it.
Due diligence will be done to ensure that this project is not duplicating other work and due publicity will be given to ensure that others in the field know of the development of the project. One current, related effort is the "Directory of ARL Digital Library Projects," conducted for the Association of Research Libraries by a team at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The Database will be developed by a geographically distributed team. Initially, Rice University and the Office of Humanities Communication, King's College London, will be the lead US and European institutions. (The respective administrators from Rice and King's, Chuck Henry and Harold Short, have expressed considerable optimism that the project will receive funding at their institutions and from other US and European sources.) An Editorial Board will shortly be created and a managing editor appointed.
A group consisting chiefly of the participants listed below met during the Digital Resources for the Humanities conference in 1997 at Oxford, England, to finalize the overall concept and parameters for the project. Currently, a prototype is being assembled jointly by Rice University and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. This prototype will shortly be made available online for inspection and commentary by the team. After adjustments are made the group will reassemble in the summer or fall of 1998 for further commentary and sign-off on an organizational infrastructure for the project.
Pamela Ellis, New York Public Library, New York
David Green, National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC
Daniel Greenstein, Arts and Humanities Data Service, London
Charles Henry, University Librarian, Rice University, Houston
Susan Hockey, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Lorna Hughes, Humanities Computing Institute, New York University, New York
Willard McCarty, Office of Humanities Computing, King's College, University of London
Michael Neuman, Academic Computing Services, Georgetown University
Chris Powell, Humanities Text Initiative, University of Michigan
John Price-Wilkin, Humanities Text Initiative, University of Michigan
Seamus Ross, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow, Scotland
Harold Short, Office of Humanities Computing, King's College, University of London
John Unsworth, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia