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COMPUTER SCIENCE & THE HUMANITIES:ACLS/NINCH
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Tuesday July 28, 1998, 1-4pm
American Historical Association
400 A ST, SE, Washington DC
August 10, 1998
Still, hard conceptual thought within the broader Humanities community...needs to go on before we can speak with full confidence about how humanistic scholarship will be conducted in the brave new world sketched out by the more visionary of this meeting's speakers. Hard thought, discipline by discipline, about what, substantively and methodologically, is at the heart of what we do. Hard work in persistently rethinking traditionally categories, in order to be confident when we reaffirm ...their enduring value. Hard work, finally, to better inform the computer scientists and engineers, who have to date designed most of our technology, what the Humanities, in essence, are and how we Humanists conduct our scholarship.
--John D'Arms, ARL Meeting, May 1998.
The crucial advantages of digital libraries lie in the flexibility of knowledge representations to support different intellectual perspectives and functionality. However, if they are to create a unified and comprehensive library of useful knowledge, the arts and humanities must make significant progress in the next decade in shared methods of representation.
--David Bearman, "Overview & Discussion Points," Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage
Seventeen representatives of twelve learned societies, ACLS and NINCH met July 28th to discuss a proposal for a workshop series that would analyze and define the ways that humanists in different fields use and create resources. This would be the first "building block" towards: a) designing, with computer scientists, new digital means for practitioners to use their materials more powerfully; and b) laying the groundwork that would enable the community to more successfully build integrated resources in the future across all fields.
As Susan Hockey has pointed out, knowledge in the arts and humanities lies within cultural objects themselves, in information about the objects, in interpretive commentary on the objects, and in the links and relationships between them. But, as David Bearman has written, to fully develop the potential promised by the digital networking of humanities materials, we need first to more clearly understand how different fields represent the knowledge that is most valuable to them.
Questions to be considered in these workshops would include: What is valued in the objects (objects, texts, images, recordings) humanists in particular fields use in their work? What knowledge about any set of materials is important for practitioners in a field? How is this knowledge currently represented? What new things would practitioners most like to be able to do with their resources?
Armed with greater analytical understanding of the ways that humanists and social scientists represent, use and create knowledge in their different fields, participants would then enter part two of this initiative that would bring humanists together with computer scientists and engineers to design new tools and environments that would enable them to more powerfully use primary and secondary materials as well as create their own.
Among other benefits, these building block workshops would enable several ACLS societies to work together around a shared set of concerns and practices. When juxtaposed, the workshops would also provide particular societies with a larger intellectual, technical, and practical context in which to situate their own efforts to serve their members and fields.
Although there were many questions about more closely defining this project, there was considerable interest in moving forward by discussing a sample workshop structure and reviewing a sample set of questions to be asked and problems to be posited to begin the conversations.
Brenda Bickett (Middle Eastern Studies Association); Tim Bryson (American Academy of Religion); Cynthia Freeland (American Philosophical Association); Sandy Freitag and Robert Townsend (American Historical Association); Phyllis Franklin (Modern Language Association); James Gaudino (National Communication Association); David Green (NINCH); Elaine Koss (College Art Association); Elaine Martin and Tom Prein (American Comparative Literature Association); John Monfasani and William Bowen (Renaissance Society of America); Roy Rosenzweig (Organization of American Historians); David Sicilia (Economic History Association); John Stephens (American Studies Association); Steve Wheatley (ACLS).
The meeting opened with brief introductions. David Green declared that his goal for the meeting was to discuss the organization, by the societies, of a set of four or five parallel workshop series to discover, as Phyllis Franklin put it later, "how the fields have done their work," with a specific emphasis on how they use, create and represent knowledge. The meetings would produce their own final reports as well as a plenary, cross-discipline report. This would then lead to a phase-two engagement with computer scientists and engineers exploring how humanists and scientists could design new tools and environments that would use digital technology far more effectively.
David Green described some of the context of this meeting, principally the formation of the "Computer Sciences and the Humanities" initiative by NINCH, ACLS, CNI and the National Academy of Sciences to investigate and stimulate greater deeper collaboration between humanists and computer scientists. Before humanists and computer scientists begin to work together through this initiative it seemed wise to work on creating a structured understanding of how humanists actually conduct their work, specifically how they use, re-use and create knowledge. Learned societies, as the chief organizing instruments in humanities fields and disciplines, seemed the best forums through which to conduct such an investigation.
Sandy Freitag spoke briefly of AHA's earlier determination to create a similar project for historians and of the added synergies to be gained from participating in a series of parallel investigations by clusters of learned societies, organized around certain rubrics that would allow them to come together easily. The added potential of actively engaging computer scientists as a second part of this process was an additional attraction to working in this way. Thus AHA was already committed to working collaboratively in parallel with other societies rather than going it alone with its own project.
Steve Wheatley spoke of his experience at meetings of the National Academy of Science initiative of the intense interest among computer scientists about what humanists did and how they did it and what they hoped to be able to do in the future. He found this a refreshing change from assumptions that humanists would always be trying to "catch up" and "fit in" with advances made by scientists and technologists and declared that there really was a tremendous opportunity here.
It took some time before most in the meeting grasped the concept of Knowledge Representation that David Green declared as the underlying organizing theme and principle of these workshops. To ask "how do scholars, teachers, librarians and publishers within the field study, represent, teach, organize and create knowledge?" was in itself not enough. [One helpful formulation is the section entitled "Knowledge Representation" in David Bearman's "Overview" in the cited "Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage."
There was also a lack of immediate understanding of the level or pitch at which the proposed meetings would operate. Throughout the meeting several still felt that the series would be defining technical and intellectual standards for encoding documents and actually working on designing tools. Further, some worried that any move towards standardization might imply a normative definition of a field and an effort to control or direct experiments in the field. Others made clear that, to the contrary, this was a way to create a space for discussions to take place, without the recognition that politicized views of a field, and related scholarly contentions, were a natural part of the process.
David Green ventured to distinguish the proposed series from other workshops designed to elicit scholar's needs in a digital environment, by speaking of the more immediate "service needs" addressed by, for example, the ACLS/CLIR Task Forces on Scholarship and Technology" (looking at how librarians can help organize resources and infrastructure for scholars) or the UK Arts & Humanities Data Service's workshops on "Scholarly Exploitation of Digital Resources," which also focused on the more immediate needs of scholars.
This NINCH/ACLS series would focus more on the intellectual activity within each discipline: it would be an opportunity to reflect on and define the nature of the disciplines and scholarly enterprise and practice. This would be a first step, the "part one" of a larger enterprise, the "part two" of which would engage humanists and computer scientists working collaboratively to design the new spaces, tools and guidance systems that would make the digital environment far more useful, useable and responsive to scholars' deep intellectual needs than it is today. As the AHA workshop proposal puts it: "to ensure that intellectual needs shape technical solutions, historians...must take the lead."
In speaking of the American Studies Association web-based "Crossroads" project, John Stevens and Roy Rosenzweig attested to how both the project in particular and web resources in general were changing the way that teaching and scholarship was now being done. Rosenzweig declared that Randy Bass's work with Crossroads was one of the few projects that was engaged in a systematic analysis of the impact of the use of digital technology on learning.
Rosenzweig continued by saying that technology did have a way of forcing practitioners to begin to confront the first principles of their practice. He began to see how this proposed workshop series would take advantage of this by opening up a large space for more reflective considerations of the way disciplines worked and how technology might better serve them in the future.
Sandy Freitag briefly described the AHA's current proposal for a workshop series for history, which had a focus on building consensus in the field about how to prepare historical materials for use online. The model structure here is of a large plenary opening workshop, the creation of several workgroups that would meet independently (but be linked through listservs), and a final plenary meeting and report.
Several spoke about the importance of realizing the dynamics and histories of fields and disciplines. They do not move or develop in a linear way, but rather as evolving matrices. Phyllis Franklin said that it was important to be aware of whatever debates or battles over methodologies might be waged within disciplines and to ask how a field has done its work over time, to avoid asking about what the "essential" elements of a discipline are and risk privileging one faction over another.
One commentator spoke of the workshop series as constructing an "architecture" of knowledge, which helped some in understanding knowledge representation.
Rosenzweig suggested that for many it would be useful to start a workshop series by examining specific, concrete problems that practitioners deal with and to work out and define what the methodologies and ways of working are from a set of such different concrete problems. This would dramatize and concretize the experiment. We need a hook or a way-in to this project that could answer the question, "why should those not interested in technology be interested in this discipline-defining workshop series?"
There was some discussion about the positive and negative promises of technology. The negative was that technology would assist in the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries and question the very notion of learned societies as a useful organizing principal in intellectual life. But this struck many as a useful challenge to learned societies: to discover and exploit the promise of digital technology so as to demonstrate their value in the digital arena.
Douglas Bennett's essay, "New Connections for Scholars: The Changing Missions of a Learned Society in an Era of Digital Networks, " (ACLS Occasional Paper No. 36,) seemed useful to review here. Bennett opened his essay by declaring that "we believe the technologies of digital networks will plow up and replant the worlds of scholarship and education. We believe these technologies can serve us well if we take care in making the transition to using them. But we also believe they may do great damage if we are inattentive or timid or simply dazzled by the technology."
There was enthusiasm for societies to work together on the workshop series. Phyllis Franklin pointed out the importance of seeing the commonalities between societies as different fields would be at different places. Others saw the importance of casting this as a broad "non-normative" umbrella connecting many people and practices through a common medium. It would not be passing judgments but opening a common space for thought, discussion and analysis.
Participants agreed that at least three groups would be formed, comprising: the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association; the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Economic History Association; and the American Studies Association, Middle Eastern Studies Association, Renaissance Society of America and possibly the American Academy of Religion. It was clear that we should also have groups representing the visual and performing arts as well as those fields, such as anthropology and political science
Cynthia Freeland said that before she could report back to the American Philosophical Society she would need: a desired set of outcomes; a timeframe and a sample list of workshops. Steve Wheatley recommended we report back out to the CAO to ensure that no societies would be left out of this process.
Some members enjoyed the fact of being together to simply talk about digital issues and exchange news of digital projects. It was suggested that we start a bibliography for this group. One was opened with a contribution from David Sicilia.
The group agreed to meet again within the next month or so. For that meeting we would need: