December 28, 2007
Tech and the Humanities: A Report from the Front Lines
Among the great agonies in the humanities over the last three decades has been the wave of new technology that has swept over its disciplines and scholars. Would it eliminate long-cherished pleasures and customs in the humanities?
The now-burgeoning field of the study of the book is one response to that debate. Yet technology also promised a way to reduce costs and close considerable gaps of distance between scholars and the materials they study. And the ethos of the technological revolution — openness and access — is closely aligned with that of the humanities and its stance on knowledge.
So how is this difficult transition playing out in archives, classrooms and tenure committees? A panel on Open Digital Communities, organized by the MLA’s Committee on Information Technology, offered a few glimpses into the process.
“Much of the work we publish is not accessible,” said Geoffrey Martin Rockwell, an associate professor of humanities computing and multimedia at McMaster University. He said that the question confronting scholars was fundamental: “Do we want to be an open community of researchers, and what does that mean?”
While the panelists strongly concurred with the desire to create such a community, they offered a number of answers to the question of what it would take to make it happen.
One problem is found in basic infrastructure. If scholars and archival materials are not on the same technological page, their efforts may overlap or even conflict.
In his presentation, John Merritt Unsworth, dean of the graduate school of information and library science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, offered a history of the Textual Encoding Initiative, which offers a common language for the encoding of digital texts in the humanities and social sciences and linguistics.
A key question, said Mr. Unsworth, was “how to enfranchise when you can’t enforce,” and he described efforts to widen participation in the consortium and increase transparency while finding ways to continue paying for the effort.
In describing the efforts to created the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship, or NINES, Laura C. Mandell, an associate professor of English at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, also touched on issues of infrastructure and copyright. How can scholars create larger communities of research material from discrete archives?
But she also said that NINES has faced difficulties in creating language for what it does that translates readily to administrators who are evaluating scholarship and service. Part of the effort is not only building a network, she said, but finding “a convenient wat to brand the tools.”
The classroom has also been touched by this revolution in technology, observed Robert James Blake, the director of the University of California’s system-wide consortium for disseminating language teaching materials. He described his program’s successes in parlaying small grants into larger projects and courses devoted to in-demand languages including Chinese, Arabic and Filipino. Though he noted that there was “quite a bit of politics involved” in navigating a course that satisfied the many constituencies in the system, but he felt that the consortium had a number of accomplishments already chalked up.
Richard Byrne | Posted on Friday December 28, 2007 | Permalink
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