May 3, 1999

July 27 Project Update

May 3 Meeting

Present: Brenda Bickett, Lindy Biggs, Sandria Freitag, David Green, Elaine Martin, Katherine McGinnis, Steve Wheatley; [by phone: Jay Malone]

Present at ACLS Lunch meeting, May 1: Anne Betteridge, Lindy Biggs, Phyllis Franklin, Sandria Freitag, David Green, Eric Hoffman, Elaine Martin, John Monfasani, Carroll Purcell (Society of History of Technology--Delegate).

1. PROJECT DEFINITION & SCOPE
2. UPDATE ON PARTICIPANTS
3. PROJECT STRUCTURE & FORMATION OF FIELD COMMITTEES
4. QUESTIONNAIRE UPDATE

1. PROJECT DEFINITION & SCOPE

Twin Goals

At the Philadelphia ACLS meeting, we reassured Building Blocks participants that this project was not about defining the ways humanists did their work. We reasserted our twin goals of:

• enabling participating constituencies to themselves tackle issues of using and creating digital resources and
• creating a research agenda and framework for humanists to work with computer scientists on the bigger "grand challenge" problems.

Questionnaire

Specifically, we agreed that the questionnaire, with its questions about how humanities practitioners worked with their materials and resources, would not pretend to be a survey of the field, would not be published or be treated as a stand-alone document. The questionnaire is rather being designed as a tool to help organize participants' thinking, to ensure the workshops start off from the same point (they have comparable information to work from) and that they can begin in an efficient manner. [See section 4, Questionnaire Update, below].

3-Day Workshops; Think-Tank Model for Later Phase

Several at the meeting thought this project was so important that we should ensure that it started out with some good sustained thinking. They recommended planning for 3-day, even 4-day, workshops instead of the proposed 2-day meetings. It was decided that all workshops should meet simultaneously at the same site to allow for some cross-field discussions on particular issues

Another suggestion was that we seriously think about a year-long think-tank model of bringing five to ten computer scientists and humanities practitioners together to design new systems and software. Many felt this was a very good suggestion but would be more applicable to a second phase of the project, after the Research Agenda itself had been created. We would probably want to scale this up as well.

Balance

Another theme to be emphasized was the necessary dynamic balance in this project between the ambitious, cross-field, "break-the-box" distant future thinking and the short-term, consolidating pragmatic thinking that could quickly report back to the field. This augmented the group's earlier conviction about building in a vital balance between top-down and bottom-up thinking and strategizing.

Lindy Biggs, Secretary of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), has agreed to be the field representative/liaison for the History field. Both the SHOT and the History of Science Society are recent additions to the History field. We are currently looking for law societies to add to the current Philosophy & Religion field and social science related societies to add to Social Sciences.

It was agreed that we needed a complete, separate listing and explanation of the different groups involved in this project (see separate sheet). Here we will describe the responsibilities and functions of the groups most directly involved in the project:

David Green and Sandria Freitag (co-directors); other staff to be announced.

This comprises the 7 field representatives, David Green, NINCH director; Steve Wheatley, Program Manager, ACLS; Sandria Freitag, co-director of the project; and advisors Willard McCarty, Center for Computing in the Humanities, Kings College, London; John Unsworth, Director, Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities (IATH), University of Virginia; Worthy Martin, Computer Science Dept. and IATH, University of Virginia.

Each field representative sitting on the Steering Committee will organize and chair one of the seven field committees. The executive will assist the field representatives assemble the committees, typically comprising six people, of whom three should be scholar/administrators and one should be a computer scientist. Each supporting learned society should have at least one scholar and/or administrator representing it.

We are planning for the field committees to meet three times: (revised August 10, 1999)

• Decemberber 1999, (to finalize the questionnaire distribution list and to create the workshop groups, i.e., add a further 14 people to the six on the field committee to make up a workshop of 20 people);

• April 2000 (to finalize the agenda of their respective first set of workshops); and

• November 2000 (after the first plenary to set goals and agendas for the second workshop series; to organize specifics for the workshops; to outline emergent national "society-based" projects; and to begin to identify larger, broader issues that could lead to the "grand Challenge" agenda.)

These seven groups of 20 people would comprise some 140 scholars, teachers, librarians, archivists, publishers, humanities computing professionals and, computer scientists. These would be selected by the field committees, that themselves would be part of the workshop groups). Each of the members would complete the questionnaire (in addition to practitioners who would not participate in the workshops) and some might be interviewed. The Workshops would meet for a total of five days (three days in February 2000 and two days in July-August 2000). All travel and accommodation costs for participants would be covered.

David Green has made contact with Carole Palmer, an assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. Professor Palmer has been directing a series of projects on how information is used in a number of fields ranging from literary studies to artificial intelligence. Contacted to review our set of questions, Professor Palmer was impressed by the quality of the questions and by the thrust of our project. She was very interested in reviewing how our questions, in her experience, could be best modified to achieve the results we wanted. She is currently preparing two alternate proposals for preparing the questions and processing and analyzing the results, within our time-frame. Carole Palmer's previous work would clearly contribute to our project and she was also interested in how our results could contribute to her own work. As she has studied the sciences extensively in the past, is completing a study on interdisciplinary humanities use of material and is engaged in other studies of humanists, Professor Palmer's work appears to have the potential of adding a great deal to our work.

Sandy Freitag and I have produced a core proposal and have formally submitted proposals to both the National Science Foundation ($120,000) and National Endowment for the Humanities ($150,000). (I'll post or mail you all the proposal shortly so you can see where we are). We've recently had very positive meetings with the NSF (Michael Lesk), Getty and the Rockefeller Foundation. We are now lining up conversations with other foundations in the next few weeks.

Partly as the inevitable result of the way things move and partly as the result of a specific conversation with the Getty grant program, we have stepped back our timeline somewhat. Here is what we currently have in mind:

We have broadly divided our budget into five chronological segments. We've asked the NSF to support the first segment (up to the first set of workshops) and Michael Lesk, our program officer at NSF, is promising a quick turn-around review of our application: we should have an answer by the end of August.

Because of the great lead-time needed, we have asked the NEH for the final section: the final plenary. It looks now as if we will ask the foundations we are approaching to fund the "heart" of the project, the middle three sections ($450,000).

Another positive development has been our discovery of the work of Carole Palmer, a University of Illinois, Urbana Champagn, information scientist who has been studying scientists' use of resources and who is now turning to a study of how interdisciplinary humanities scholars use information (as reported at the recent conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities). Dr. Palmer's development of our questionnaire, based on the work we've already done, has been written into the NSF grant application.