May 6, 1999
revised November 2
Introduction
Data
Best Practices
Copyright Town Meetings
Building Blocks#BB
Conclusion
As you know, we are half-way through the third of NINCH's first three years. These three years are in many ways a "proof of concept" as the original members were asked to invest in three years of support to test the idea of whether NINCH could become an important engine of activity in digital issues in the humanities that had been envisioned by its founders.
As my discussion piece, "The Difference So Far," emphasizes, NINCH has succeeded to date in creating:
Our new brochure, in its first iteration, clearly announces our vision, our values and our sharpened mission statement, describes the platform or framework we are building and itemizes the practical projects underway.
Our goals for this year are the twin ones of strategic planning for our next three years (laying the organizing infrastructure) and putting into place core practical projects for the future, on which we can build.
The news is that these core projects are moving forward with increasingly broad support; we have a lot of enthusiasm and much commitment of time and some money, with the indication of substantial future financial backing. A lot of people are working on these projects and they are developing strong and rapid synergy among themselves.
I want to draw your attention to four core projects.
The goal of our international distributed database of digital humanities projects is to provide regularly updated, peer-reviewed "deep data" on current projects and works in progress. The database is primarily for practitioners, others creating digital resources ( to avoid duplication of effort; to foster co-operation) and funders.
Its strength is that it is being directed by a working group of directors of campus-based humanities computing centers, many of whom have experienced earlier ventures on which this is being built. There's a determination to make this work. We've designed a Dublin Core-based database structure; the NEH has just delivered 110 records of its funded digital projects over the past three years; Michigan and Rice each have donated .25 fte catalogers and library staff to get us to a working system. A prototype is now being built to be reviewed by our next meeting June 9 at ACH/ALLC. And see the accompanying press release from the University of Michigan that mentions the database project.
Value created: an information and community-building tool that can also be used in policy formation.
Taking advantage of the broad scope of its constituency, and the urgent need for a guide to best practices in networking cultural heritage material across all object types and institution types, we established a working group to determine the best route forward. The Group has created an initial set of six guiding principles in networking cultural heritage materials and then derived a set of evaluative criteria from those principles, by which to judge existing practice. Our next step is to work with a consultant to survey current practice as found in projects, production centers and existing guidelines and statements. The consultant working with the Group will then write a Guide to Good Practice, as outlined in the handout.
We are currently refining a "Request for Proposals" as a tool for soliciting a consultant to work on this project between this summer and next Spring. The Getty Trust has been very encouraging as we prepare our funding proposal.
Value created: aGuide to Good Practice for practitioners, a clear complement to the Database, that should also be used by funders and policymakers in guiding increasingly cooperative, integrative and standards-based work.
As we have learned, one of the areas of greatest difficulty and uncertainty that dogs much of our work is the intellectual property landscape. NINCH has developed a strong reputation both within and outside our membership for providing clear guidance (and encouragement) in thinking through intellectual property developments. It has especially encouraged organizations and institutions to develop their own appropriate sets of guiding principles and policies concerning the creation and management of intellectual property in the digital landscape.
Following up on the series of Copyright & Fair Use Town Meetings organized with ACLS and CAA in 1997-1998, NINCH has taken the lead in organizing a 1999-2000 series of Copyright Town Meetings and has received a $40,000 grant from the Kress Foundation to do this. Partnering with CAA again, we have added the American Association of Museums, the Association of Research Libraries, the Visual resources Association and the Association of American University Presses to our Working Group and are organizing a series of meetings at 3 conferences and on three campuses (Syracuse University, the North Carolina Research Triangle and the Chicago Historical Society).
Value created: copyright education; expanded benefits to a broader community (to individuals, university presses, etc); and linkage of the Copyright Guides or Primers that being published this coming year by AAM, CAA and VRA.
With a knowledge of who is doing what; of what the best practices are in the creation and management of digital material; and of how federal law and local/institutional/associational guidelines can help (or hinder) us in handling intellectual property problems, perhaps the greatest deep problem that we, across the humanities, have to face is our inability to clearly define our needs in a longer-term perspective. and to develop a longer term agenda.
Convinced that there is much work to be done with computer scientists and information technologists, NINCH worked with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies of Science to organize a Roundtable on Computer Science and the Humanities in 1997. This fueled great and passionate discussion about the differences and commonalities between our two broad fields and a determination to find ways of bridging the gaps and to try to work together. Our conviction that this is important has been championed by Bill Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering who has given Congressional testimony to the effect that the biggest and best problems for computer science and information technology in the next century rest within the humanities. It is our ambition to do what we can to articulate and find solutions to those problems and challenges.
A Steering Committee for working with the National Academy of Sciences has been formed and we now have three clear projects: Building Blocks, a conference series, and the Two Ravens Institute. Building Blocks is a detailed and thorough plan for working with the academic disciplines organized into seven fields (working with ACLS societies) in order both to help the societies themselves clarify and define shorter-term issues that they should be able to work on themselves (within societies or across a field) as well as to create a more ambitious "grand challenge" research agenda of problems that we can talk to computer scientists about.
Building Blocks is essentially about enabling our community to think about how it would like to shape the future by paying attention to the intellectual and practical needs of our scholars, teachers, "public intellectuals," publishers, librarians and archivists. It is about meshing our grand ideas of "what might be possible" together with the daily needs of the humanities practitioner.
This will work by our alternating between intensive 3-day workshops for around 20 practitioners in each of our seven fields, with plenary sessions where commonality and difference, patterns and definitions can be shared across fields. We will do this twice with the ambition of creating the Research Agenda for the next phase by December 2000.
This activity will be combined with a proposed series of three annual conferences bringing together best examples and best practices from humanities computing practitioners and computer scientists, alongside funders and policymakers. The establishment of the Two Ravens Institute, the place for symposia for longer-term consideration of the impact of developments in computer science and of networked technology on the humanities as well as on society at large. Two Ravens will enable the perpetuation of the dynamic of these other components.
This arena of activity has been met with a swell of enthusiastic interest from funders: especially fro the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Carnegie Corporation.
So in this collection of projects that many people are working hard to put into place, I think you can see the building of a very solid and synergetic base for future activities. This encompasses the short-term construction of tools and guidelines that are clearly needed, to the longer-term construction of ways of engaging all parts of our community and those beyond it (in industry, science and technology) in a framework for constructive dialogue and the creation of a research and development agenda for deep and meaningful longer-term work that can make our vision of a truly lively and useful networked cultural heritage more of a working reality.