Topical Session A: Possibilities & Constraints of Digital Media: Discussion Reports

David opened with brief remarks and some guidelines. He brought up the fact that issues of disciplinarity had arisen at some tables, suggesting that reporters might point to some of the differences in perspective among fields.

Table 1: CONSTRAINTS

Constraints include: money for projects, particularly for independent scholars; structure of the material that might impose constraints; expectations and audiences one wants to pitch to. The lack of academic recognition and reward (tenure for example) for digital work is a big constraint.

There is a need for the current technology to serve the way humans work, to develop linkages with other disciplines, to serve different modes of access, and to enhance the preservation of archival materials.

Participants did not agree that there is a single way that humanists work, and discipline difference appeared in one example in which an historian and art historian understood the role of texts and images.

Table 2: PROJECT CONCEPTION

This group discussed the process of conceiving projects, stressing the importance of goals. What should projects focus on? Teaching, archiving, research, or elements of all of these? They raised the issue of how to fund projects and the often different judgement by faculty and funders about what is a "good" project. We need discussions on how to change the academic culture and to recognize pioneers in humanities computing. Scholarly associations could be more supportive of digital projects, as could editors and scholarly journals.

Table 3: SUSTAINABILITY & REPLICABILITY

These exemplary projects were wonderfully provocative and brilliantly brought together very diverse materials. What are their pedagogical possibilities and how could student activities be structured around such projects? Should we invest in crtical mass production or on high-quality limited production? What should the relative priorities be for establish standards for collecting versus digital preservation? The projects shown in the session were funded by large institutions; could they be easily replicated on a smaller scale and could they leverage resources at smaller institutions? Beyond money, another constraint is the academic reward system which does not support these kinds of projects and there must be a change in the culture.

Table 4: SKILL

To develop skill, we need more models, tools and information about how these projects were created. Another NINCH conference might have detailed accounts of the projects, how they work, and how they were created. We need a clearinghouse of useful tools that would be helpful to people at a variety of skill levels, especially those who are more insecure. A moderated discussion list where people could query each other about tools to use and the creation of a center for the publication of projects. They also pointed to the need for discussions about the process by which academics talk to technology people. With regard to the academic culture issue, they pointed to history as a discipline in which support for web projects is growing, evidenced by recent programs at the AHA.

Table 5: COMMUNICATION/PERSISTENCE/TOOLS

The projects that we saw were good leadership models for pedagogy and research. They were inspirational, but what about the marketing? They need to communicate better to both the academic and wider community . One constraint on electronic projects is that their stability is often linked to the project director. What if the vision of the director changes? Different disciplines have different approaches to design and interpretation. We need genre-based template tools, GIS tools that are downloadable, the development of GIS in your system, idea of sharing tools, series of guidelines, to help scholars create scalability, mutuality of pedagogy and research, and interdisciplinary??

Table 6: EXTENSIBILITY

This table noted that the applications we saw were highly tailored to a particular use and they called for more extensible models that would be broadly usable. They suggested that it may be valuable to make tools more customizable depending on the user community. There need to be ways to get materials in generic form to be used by as many user communities as possible. It is important to know your audience. There is often a gulf between an archive and its user community. Function can expand audience. They suggested that, with regard to tenure issues, it is the smaller schools that are often more innovative and it is often the non-tenured people who are more likely to have the skills to produce these projects.

Table 7: TEACHING/SUSTAINABILITY

Table 7 suggested that projects that address difficulties of the class room may be more likely to get funding while it may be more difficult to get scholarship funded if it is not tied to class room work. They pointed to the need for preservation of archives; the sustainability and maintainability of websites; the role of scholarly societies in developing resource links in fields of interest. OCLC cooperate collaborative center catalog index resources free on web.

Table 8: CLEARINGHOUSE

The projects enhance access, the preservation of materials, and the integration and cross referencing of materials although they can become overwhelming and perhaps overmediated. Copyright, acquisition, technological expertise, quality control of technology are all constraints. They suggested a "recipe format" clearinghouse for processing projects that use complicated processes but not complicated technology. They pointed to the difficulty within certain disciplines of making non-text material available (e.g., dance notation).

Table 9: CROSS-CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS

They admired the way the current projects weave together media and text. The constraints include intellectual property; coding. There is a need to address multiple audiences: does one size fit all? Some projects (Amiens, for example) are not just an archive and data and the creative interface is important. A problem is that this is a more transient, ephemeral medium and there needs to be a distinction between content and performance. We need to interrogate the cross cultural implications of unicode and the problem of access to the broad band width technology.