 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
Teaching the Crisis | Comment
Sanity and Humanities Centers | Comment [1]
The Big Questions and General Education | Comment [13]
Educational Brutalism | Comment [12]
Recommendations, Ben Bernanke, and General Education | Comment [8]
Featured Articles By the Author
The Princeton Bamboo Workshop
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I spent Monday through Wednesday of this week attending the fourth of the first series of workshops for Project Bamboo. The organizers provided participants with a list of the 94 institutions whose staff have attended the workshops in Berkeley, Chicago, Paris, and Princeton. They represent a remarkable range of colleges and universities, libraries, learned societies, and other organizations interested in some aspect of the digital arts and humanities — and a significant number of institutions applied too late to be seated at the workshop tables. Institutions represented at Princeton ranged from the Ivies to the Australian National University, the City University of New York to the University of Kansas and the University of Puget Sound. Documents Compass (a newly emerging digital-editing facility), the Federation of American Scientists, and the American Numismatic Society were also here. It was a diverse and quite remarkable group of humanities scholars, librarians, IT specialists, and others concerned with arts and humanities research (and, to a lesser extent, I think, teaching).
This first set of workshops is intended as a planning process to try to assess the nature and needs of arts and humanities scholarship. The organizers sought to traverse what are too often separate domains of thinking and action within universities: academic departments, computer science, information science, libraries, and scholarly communications (though no presses were present) and central information technology organizations. All of these institutions play key roles in the production of digital humanities scholarship, and yet they frequently don’t communicate, coordinate, or collaborate. The library and the information technology office sometimes work at cross purposes, and the faculty seldom interface with either organization in a synergistic fashion. In the long run, Bamboo hopes to propose collaborations of many kinds that will bridge these gaps and contradictions, and will bring free-standing institutions into effective collaboration.
But the organizers (and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has funded this initiative and the lion’s share of other projects in the digital humanities), were smart enough to know that these communities have to begin to agree on what the common problems are before attempting to devise institutional solutions for them. Thus three rich days of talk (following on what I gather were nine good days at the three earlier workshops). In a way, the most striking part of the project is the total acceptance of everyone involved that the digital humanities cannot advance significantly solely as an effort of scholars. This is a world in which technology and ideas are inextricably entwined, and in which the humanities tradition of lonely individual scholarship cannot serve us well. We sat at tables composed of information technologists, librarians, scholars, computer scientists and others whose wisdom and skills are core to the effort. The talk was thrilling.
The results (or at least summaries) of our discussions will shortly be posted on the Bamboo Web site, and I am not going to try to anticipate them. But the talk at the tables I was assigned to ranged from discussion of what constitutes discovery in the arts and humanities to how junior faculty who engage in digital scholarship can survive in the traditional university environment. The reality is that despite the existence of a handful of fine digital humanities campus-based centers, most scholars are left to their own devices in doing digital research. That must change if the humanities are to thrive in the new technological age, and it can only change through enlightened leadership and collaboration. We need cyberinfrastructure more than we need new software or hardware at this stage of our development. Project Bamboo is a great start.
Posted at 04:03:41 PM on July 18, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzCommenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Humanities Cyberinfrastructure: Project Bamboo
Next: Who Is Sara Martinez Tucker?