“Cyberinfrastructure” is a daunting term, but it is gaining currency. The term was put into play by the Atkins report on cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering, and extended to the humanities a couple of years ago by the now well-known report produced by and ACLS committee headed by John Unsworth, the Dean of the Library School at the University of Illinois (UIUC). The idea is to explore the services and capacities needed to undergird the development of both teaching and research in the humanities fields, to see what sorts of investments, strategies, and institutional arrangements might best facilitate the progress of the digital humanities.
This is a problem I began to worry about when I became the President of ACLS in 1986, when I first realized that information technology and computing were the phenomena most likely to change the nature and direction of humanities scholarship. It seemed to me, even then, that the new technology was both enabling humanists to do things they had not been able to do before and making it possible to perform some traditional tasks in a better manner. There are lots of examples of both phenomena. For instance: The creation of digital databases and high-powered search capacity has led to many exciting scholarly developments; the emergence of digital publication has made multimedia publications feasible.
Developments in the digital humanities have largely been campus-based, with exciting things happening here and there, but with very spotty diffusion of new knowledge and new practices across the country (and across countries). Several campus-based centers have emerged over the years — two outstanding examples are the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. But the question addressed in the ACLS report was how we might generalize the effort.
One possible approach is now emerging. It is Project Bamboo, a Mellon-funded planning initiative being led by humanities computing experts from the University of Chicago (Chad Kainz) and the University of California-Berkeley (David Greenbaum). The object of Bamboo is to explore the possibility for a distributed system of shared technology services to support the digital humanities (both research and teaching). The idea is to bring together academic humanists with library and information technology specialists (and others interested in the use of digital technologies for research and teaching) to think through the sorts of support systems that faculty and students will need to engage in digital scholarship. The first phase of the planning project has been a series of workshops held this spring and summer at Berkeley, Chicago, Paris, and Princeton (where we hosted the last of the workshops earlier this week).
What has become clear is that no one campus can fully provide the digital infrastructure, nor can one faculty even figure out what such an infrastructure would look like. Bamboo is an important attempt to build a collaborative community in order to begin an orderly approach to the problem. I am excited about Bamboo, and will describe the Princeton workshop in a post to follow shortly.
