September 29, 2000

NINCH MEMBERS REPORT

BUILDING BLOCKS WORKSHOP: A "LANDMARK EVENT"

"...one of the most invigorating and worthwhile workshops I've ever been part of....every other participant I spoke with agreed that it was a truly significant gathering for the humanities and for scholarship online." Michael Jensen, National Academy Press

 

 

"The vision...for extending and enhancing scholarship through the use of digital media is a clear one and given the proper resources, they will succeed. The ...projects that we proposed would provide opportunities for groundbreaking scholarship and for exciting new ways to teach history." Jeffrey Greene, Houghton-Mifflin

The evaluations are still coming in and the Building Blocks Workshop that occurred last week (Sept 20-24), after more than two years of extensive planning, is being called a "landmark event" in the humanities by participants. The workshop was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. It was organized, through NINCH and the facilitation of the ACLS, by the representatives of 26 scholarly and professional societies

Following the "Computing & The Humanities" Roundtable Discussion of 1997 (report available at <http://www.acls.org/op41-toc.htm>), the Building Blocks Workshop was the second step in the ongoing Computer Science & the Humanities initiative that has as its objective the staking out of the common ground where the interests and challenges of humanists overlap with those working in computer science and information technology.

With the overall mandate of "Intellectual Needs Shaping Technical Solutions," the Workshop had three objectives:

How We Work: to review and critically evaluate scholarly current scholarly and pedagogical practice, with particular attention to the use of primary source materials (using the 250 returns to a Questionnaire, "Working With Materials,");

What Do We Need: to articulate by field and across disciplines the most pressing needs in the humanities that networked computing can address;

Where Do We Go From Here? to outline short-term, practical, collaborative projects; and to outline areas to be potentially included on a longer-term research agenda to be developed with computer scientists.

The format of the meeting interwove three panel presentations of topical issues (Possibilities of Digital Media; New Models of Publication/Dissemination; Interactivity & Visualization); cross-disciplinary discussions of the implications of the presentations; and discipline-based discussions.

A website was developed for the conference with details of the 90 participants, background and context of the conference and reporting areas. NINCH members may view the website at http://www.ninch.org/bb/project/project.html

Janet Murray opened with a keynote that, analyzing our current situation, quickly focused on the need to think clearly about "Inventing a New Medium," especially in its relationships to other "legacy frameworks." Michael Lesk from the National Science Foundation focused attention on the goal of outlining "short-term" project proposals in a talk specifying funding strategies and opportunities at NSF. Mary Estelle Kennelly (Director of the Office of Museum Services at IMLS) followed up with a popular, practical talk on writing good proposals. In concluding remarks, NINCH President Stanley Katz placed the workshop in the perspective of the creation of NINCH as a truly collaborative platform for the cultural community to develop strategies for networking cultural resources in ways that are richly usable by all in our democracy.

For many,the core of the meeting was the set of intensive discussions in discipline-based "field meetings," where the state and needs of a given field were debated by scholars and teachers alongside librarians, archivists, curators, publishers and others. Participants, selected by representatives of societies and displaying a great diversity of backgrounds and approaches, discovered both fruitful similarities (common values and methodologies--firm foundations for creating the short-term project proposals) and differences (the value of particular expertise and specialties) that served to energize the process.

More than 15 project proposals are now being developed (from drafts produced at the meeting). Each project has its own team (typically a university-based center, a number of scholarly societies and selected consultants) that is developing the proposal to be submitted by a lead team-member, under the aegis of the Building Blocks Steering Committee.

Beyond the "short-term" (projects to be developed in the next 2-4 years), the workshop participants made first iterations of statements of issues and problems to be further developed with computer scientists that should be included in the longer-term research agenda. The most likely forum for the creation and implementation of this research agenda will be a series of three annual conferences on Computer Science & the Humanities recently funded by the Carnegie Corporation to begin in the fall of 2001.

"By all standards the workshop was a rousing success. Despite a grueling schedule, the overwhelming majority of participants were clearly energized and enthused by the discussions,...several important collaborative projects were identified [and] common perceptions and needs emerged across fields." Mark Kornbluh, Michigan State University

 

"I have often in the last few years had a rather despairing sense that many different people were going off in entirely different directions, ...but after these 3 days, I feel now that there may be enough coherence emerging. Moreover, due to the high level of expertise (and influence) of those involved, I feel very positively about the chance for humanists to have some impact on what happens in the use of new media technologies in their own fields." Gregory Brown, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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