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 Building Blocks Workshop was enormously important to me as a
representative of a learned society...[this was] a priceless
opportunity." —Elaine Koss, College Art Association
"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 We Need: to articulate by field and across disciplines the
most pressing needs in the humanities that networked computing can
address;
- Where 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
| 
PRESS RELEASE