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American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 37
Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship:
Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges
The United States Focus
IV. TO CHALLENGE AND INVIGORATE FUTURE SCHOLARSHIP
Introduction
The preceding overview of computer-based humanities projects may give the impression
that computer-based research in the humanities is thriving. However, many of these projects are run
on shoestring budgets. If the initiatives described in Section II are to become the norm in the
humanities, then action must be undertaken to overcome a number of barriers: institutional,
organizational, material, and personal. Information technology involves not only the provision of skills
and equipment, but also changes in attitudes and working practices. Dramatic growth in
funding, distribution of resources to assure broad coverage, and encouragement of an
information-rich scholarly community are all essential.
Training and Support
Adequate training and support services are key to the successful implementation of new
technology. Lack of understanding of available resources and shortcomings in the skills to exploit them are
major factors preventing effective use of information among researchers, teachers, and students in
the humanities. Some institutions have been unable to network their campus buildings, and
many humanists still have considerable difficulties in gaining access to even the most basic
computing resources.
Project Management
Traditional humanities scholarship relies largely on the work of an individual scholar,
while successful projects in humanities computing often involve the collaborative efforts of
scholars, librarians, and technologists from different fields and institutions, along with the support of
national funding organizations. The future of humanities scholarship lies in such large-scale
collaborative projects, which can draw on expertise from a variety of sources.
Furthermore, projects focusing on primary sources or scholarship in electronic formats
are increasingly attractive to academic publishing houses. The University of Michigan Press
actively seeks electronic publishing projects, while Johns Hopkins University Press delivers
electronic versions of many print publications. This growing interest points to future projects between
the university press and humanities departments, units that have traditionally had limited contact at
most campuses.
Research Infrastructure
In articulating their needs on a national level, humanities scholars are hindered by the absence
of a national agency for coordinating humanities technology, which has implications for both
funding and promotion of research and research requirements. Cultural change within the
humanities themselves is clearly needed. Electronic and network publication has not taken off in the
humanities for a variety of complex reasons: problems with refereeing, lack of standards governing the
citation of electronic publications, the ostensibly ephemeral nature of electronic documents, difficulty
of access, and lack of consensus on what constitutes a publication and what it means to be
published. Electronic journals have generally not achieved the academic credibility of their printed
counterparts. On the other hand, it is already apparent that the barriers to acceptance of the CD-ROM
medium of publication have begun to break down.
Digital Libraries and Archives
An important phenomenon of the electronic age is the building of large-scale digital libraries
and archives. This activity received a major incentive when the National Science Foundation (NSF),
the Department of Commerce, and NASA announced a multi-million dollar program to fund
competitive proposals for the creation of digital libraries of national significance. Participating institutions
include the University of Michigan, working with Bedford Stuyvesant High School in Brooklyn and
other libraries focusing on issues of information retrieval and usage in the earth sciences; the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign, exploring applications of science and engineering journal
articles; the University of California at Santa Barbara, whose Alexandria Digital Library project focuses in large
part on graphical information such as maps; the University of California at Berkeley's Digital Library
Project, investigating the fundamental transformations in traditional concepts of the library; and
Stanford University's Digital Library Project, exploring ways to link a vast array of information, from personal data to
large-scale information services employing meta-system retrieval software.
The Library of Congress recently teamed with about a dozen of the largest research
universities in the United States to form the National Digital Library Federation (NDLF), a consortium that will explore the
technical and methodological aspects of constructing a digital library of owned resources. A national
digital library of sufficient size, scope, and complexity would support a meaningful test of the effect
of distributed digital libraries on equitable access, learning and scholarship, and the economics
and organization of libraries.
At the same time, large-scale archival projects are coming to the fore. These include
Harvard's Israeli Posters project, which will eventually digitize over 70,000 religious posters in its
collections; the Huntington Library's William Blake Works <Roosa@romeo.caltech.edu>; Project Utopia at Cornell <hth2@comell.edu>, which aims to
digitize 150,000 images of Renaissance art and architecture; and the recently announced plans by the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. for converting its
archival holdings to digital format, making these materials accessible over the Internet for the first time.
Information Resources
Humanists depend to a very considerable extent on libraries in their own and remote
institutions, and on a network of museums, galleries, and archives. Much evidence suggests that library
resources are diminishing as a result of shrinking budgets; rising numbers and costs of traditional
publications; the need to conserve books from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the introduction
of automated catalogs; and the need to purchase new electronic resources and the equipment to
make them accessible to library users. At the same time, the growth of new ways of accessing
information, from Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) to CD-ROMs and Internet search engines, has
raised users' expectations, with the result that research libraries now find it difficult to strike a
balance between expenditures on traditional and novel forms of providing information.
A review of libraries conducted by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Cummings et al.)
examined the changing budget structures at universities. It concluded that libraries were continually
losing ground as a percentage of expenditure by educational institutions, thereby exacerbating
problems created by increasing costs of journals and exchange rate fluctuations. As noted earlier, Project Muse is a possible future application to address this problem, as is JSTOR
, a large-scale project funded
by the Mellon Foundation to digitize science serials for greater accessibility and preservation.
The growing number of projects creating electronic resources and the increase in demand
for electronic information highlight the fact that no agency has taken an active role in fostering
the growth of a national electronic archive for the humanities, analogous to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) data archive for the social sciences. A national strategy is required for the holding, maintenance, and provision
of access to such material. Funding is needed, as well, to secure the conversion of information
into electronic form. Since many sources are of national and international significance, attempts
should be made to support collaborative efforts to create electronic information sources and tools.
Regulatory Issues
The field of information technology is subject to rapid change. In the rush to exploit new ways
of creating and accessing information, regulatory issues are often neglected or brushed aside. A
case in point is the variety of coding systems devised by individual scholars for textual analysis
of electronic texts, described earlier in this report. Standardization is always several steps
behind innovation, but remains essential for information technology to yield real benefits. Cooperation
is hindered by a lack of common standards. The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) and
similar systems, are, of course, relevant, but there are other areas more closely associated with
humanities computing where humanists can have a direct influence. An example is SGML, described earlier;
its acceptance will transform electronic texts and electronic publishing in general. The great
changes underway in humanities information justify standards like SGML, which are extensible and
have application across disciplines and data types.
Intellectual property and copyright are additional areas of concern. The advent of
electronic information systems has created a host of problems not addressed by the 1976 Copyright Act.
These demand urgent consideration if they are not to hinder the development of electronic
publications and information resources. Two fundamental themes involve the determination of fair
compensation based on ownership of object by the creator, and the issue of what constitutes fair use.
Encryption, image fingerprinting, and other security measures have arisen from these concerns.
Preservation and Access
Research libraries have traditionally seen to the
preservation of fragile books and rare materials. These activities are highly dependent on cooperation among institutions, and libraries
have historically worked together to develop methodologies and standards for producing
microfilm, which is the preferred preservation medium. A library participating in the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), for example, has access to established procedures and
mechanisms for signalling to the rest of the library community that it will take responsibility for the
preservation of a particular item through microfilming. Other research libraries need not duplicate the effort
and can use the product of the preservation work undertaken by the first institution. In addition,
libraries with particular strengths have often worked together to preserve all materials in a particular field
or subfield.
Digital technology is emerging as an effective and affordable preservation and access tool.
In addition, libraries can add value to their collections by providing scholars with digital facsimiles
of library materials supplemented by rich background and contextual information as well as text
and image manipulation tools to which they might not otherwise have access. The Griffis Collection
and the Early American Fiction Archive exemplify a new approach to preservation that not only
captures some of the physical qualities of a text, but also provides additional means of access to the
texts, via searchable textbases or archival finding aids.
Funding
Inevitably, many of our observations are concerned with funding. Additional resources are
necessary for the humanities to play an expanded role in higher education and to continue to produce
scholarly research. At the same time, scholars in the humanities can achieve much themselves,
both individually and collectively, by making their needs known to those responsible for policy and
funding at the institutional and national levels.
Both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts
have seen their funding sharply reduced over the past two years. Humanists will therefore need to
turn to private foundationsthe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Ford, Wilson, Spencer, and
Rockefeller Foundationsfor support of projects that employ technology.
Still, the nation must confront an important public policy issue: How will the cultural heritage
of the United States find its way into digital, networked form? How will this heritage become
available, and in what forms, for education, for support of a democratic ethos, and for other civic
purposes? Should public funding play a role in this process?
Humanities Support Services
Several research universities have established support units specifically for humanities
computing endeavors. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities was established at the University of Virginia in 1992, with a major grant from IBM and a multi-year commitment of
support from the university. The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, founded in 1991 as a
joint project of Rutgers and Princeton Universities, has received substantial support from the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Center
serves as a clearinghouse for information about computer-based research in the humanities and
sponsors several projects for developing access to electronic texts. The University of Michigan sponsors
a Collaboratory for the Humanities: several scholars are given a computer workspace at the
Humanities Text Initiative where they create multimedia projects for research on teaching with
computing consultants.
These services bring together staff with expertise in computing languages, textual
encoding, digital imaging, organization, and access issues to facilitate the development of humanities
electronic scholarship and publishing. Support, however, is often limited to scholars on their home
campuses. Since many colleges and universities do not sponsor humanities computing services, their
faculties may suffer a disadvantage which will ultimately have an impact on humanities scholarship as
a whole.
Contents
Preface | I. Background
II. Information Technology and Scholarship | III. New Developments and Change IV. To Challenge and Invigorate Future Scholarship | V. Principal Recommendations and Follow-up Activities
APPENDICES |