COMPUTER SCIENCE
& THE HUMANITIES

BUILDING
BLOCKS

TOWARDS A HUMANITIES INFORMATICS.

 

INTRODUCTION AND
INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE

 

Fri, 22 May 1998/revised October 27, 1999

Early applications of computers and networking technology have been driven by business and technical research and education needs. However, newer kinds of applications arising in the arts and humanities create and use knowledge in different ways than typical of conventional applications. Although it may well be that some conventional technology may transfer well to the arts and humanities, we are at the point where it makes sense to develop technology that serves those needs better and more explicitly.

Some efforts have been made to determine what the humanities should be doing to take a more activist and thoughtful role in using and creating computing technology. In 1996 the Getty Information Institute issued a report proposing an outline Research Agenda for Networking Cultural Heritage with eight essays by scholars on generic issues (<http://www.gii.getty.edu/ranch/index.html> and see below for details*); currently, the Council on Library and Information Resources with ACLS is holding a small series of conversations with scholars and librarians on their perceived electronic needs, organized by media: text, images, sound etc.

As part of NINCH's ongoing research project with the National Academy of Sciences (see the ACLS Occasional Publication #41, "Computing and the Humanities") we are proposing to seriously address this issue. We propose to systematically engage a set of core humanities disciplines through their representative learned societies and, through a series of workshops, examine what their discipline-specific intellectual issues, problems and requirements are. Results from these workshops can then be used to create a work-plan for projects that could engage computer scientists and humanities scholars in creating solutions, tools and more usable technologies.

This work would ultimately be able to contribute to the creation of what might be called an "Humanities Informatics," a study of how the humanities create and use knowledge, that could itself be part of a needed study of the broader history, philosophy and sociology of the arts and humanities, which, unlike the sciences, it has never had.

I look forward to hearing from societies that would be interested in talking further with us about how we might move forward.

 

David Green

The Getty Topics were:

  1. Tools for Creating and Exploiting Content
  2. Knowledge Representation
  3. Resource Search and Discovery
  4. Conversion of Traditional Source Materials into Digital Form
  5. Image and Multimedia retrieval
  6. Learning and Teaching
  7. Archiving and Authenticity
  8. New Social and Economic Mechanisms to Encourage Access.