January 30, 2003

FOLLOW-UP REPORT (Draft)

Following the January 17-18, 2003 conference: "Transforming Disciplines: Computer Science & Humanities" (web site under construction), some 20 participants of the 2000 Building Blocks Workshop gathered for a brief meeting to assess the status of Building Blocks as a whole and the many project proposals that were outlined. In sending out the report, we asked all participants to send in updates and reports on any "spin-off" projects inspired by the 2000 Workshop.

David Green

Progress of Proposed Projects

The only clearly successful project with roots in Building Blocks was the Performing Arts “Performance Modeling” proposal that went on to win a $900,000 NSF ITR grant as "Virtual Vaudeville" (see October 2001 Press Release.) We learned that this was made possible largely due not only to David Saltz’s diligence and organizational capacities but also to the fact that he had a sabbatical that year.

Also in Performing Arts, Jeff Burke reported that as an indirect result of the Workshop, his Hypermedia Workshop at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television received a $97,000 NSF grant for the technological research component of "The Iliad Project", a collaboration lead by a playwright, director, and technologist with the intent of simultaneously developing the text, technology, and performance technique for an original performance work drawing its themes from Homer's Iliad.

Spin-offs
This led to a discussion of the many successful “spin-off” projects that were inspired by the meeting and it was suggested that we actually survey all BB participants for a sense of what current funded activity came about as a result of the Workshop. At this meeting, Mary Lyman-Hager mentioned two projects: Institutes for Language Development run by the Language Resource Centers (spin-off of Language & literature’s “Professional Development” proposal ) and the development of an online proficiency test (from the Designing Language-Learning Environments proposal ). Roger Bruce mentioned how the discussion around the Visual Arts project on Federating Digital Image Repositories helped shape George Eastman House’s approach to online collection-sharing with the International Center of Photography – see http://www.Photomuse.org

Status Review
A brief review of projected projects by discipline

HISTORY
No-one present could give a clear sense of the development of (or influence of) the “Visualization of Historical Landscapes” in its various manifestations, although the independently developed Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) is a clear manifestation of some of the impulses behind that project. Ed Ayers could probably give us more information.

The Forum for Advancing Historical Scholarship has produced a variety of spin-offs under the leadership of Mike Grossberg and the History Cooperative, but Mike was not present to update us.

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
The group thought that technology had mostly caught up with the “Recognizing & Representing Multilingual Texts" project and that Unicode did seem capable of more than it had been imagined in 2000, but that the test-bed project (creating a library of legal texts from around the world) was still doable though should be housed by and led by a library. Nathaniel Knight was still willing to pursue this. As for the Search and Filter Technology proposal, the ITER Project underway at the University of Toronto and Harvard University Libraries had pursued this further through its ITER Gateway.

The International Center was still seen as an urgently needed development.

LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
New Model for Peer Review of Electronic Scholarly Publication has been presented to an MLA committee and was the basis for a presentation at the 2001 MLA conference. Steve Olsen was unsure of its progress with the MLA’s new executive director, but it was still on the agenda.

PERFORMING ARTS
Of the many projects outlined by this group, the leading contender for further development was the Institute for Digital Scholarship in the Performing Arts. Although this was specifically about developing digital scholarship in the performing arts that would integrate theatre, music and dance, it had elements that could join the other “Center” proposals. Frank Hildy at the University of Maryland was keen to pursue it as a priority.

VISUAL ARTS & MEDIA STUDIES
The Federating Digital Image Repositories had come along fairly well (to a revised second draft - but had hit the usual roadblock of no time, staff or resources to really develop it further into a final proposal.
One strategy forward might be that the small part of a larger NSF grant proposal to develop a federated visual image database across several repositories at the University of Maryland could eventually form the basis of a larger proposal.

Strategies Forward
Following the presentation at the “Transforming Disciplines” conference on the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute, it was suggested that in order to achieve some of these proposals a group with a California representative might apply for a proposal to explore the problem represented by the outline Building Blocks proposal and that the time spent at the Institute could be spent actually finishing the proposal. Other Centers, such as the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities might assist, at least by helping groups with foundation contacts and perhaps by acting as champions for one or other of these projects. We needed champions with infrastructure.

It was further suggested that NINCH itself might be an agent in working to federate existing digital humanities centers into some (semi)-permanent structure. This could operate as a think-tank for the humanities in a digital environment.

On that optimistic note, the group agreed to continue the conversation with the larger group and to decide on the feasibility of reassembling a Steering Committee to decide on next steps.