At the HC Summit at UCIC John Unsworth asked us to reflect on the challenges that the humanities computing faces. Here is my list taken from the discussion:
- Learning and Training
- Dissemination and Publication
- Methods and Tools
- Crafting Theory
1. Learning and Training. The evidence we use in the humanities is going digital and we need to do a better job of training the next generation of scholars to create it, study it, and critique it. Selected universities have HC centres where students can apprentice through projects, a small number of places have graduate diplomas or programs, but the bulk of graduate students are not learning to use information technology in their disciplines. The arts, by comparison, are doing a much better job. Is there an MFA program left that doesn’t deal with digital techniques in some fashion? The same is true in the social sciences where basic statistical literacy is a context for training in numeric methods and technologies. The humanities, by contrast, are still dreaming paper despite the shift by our supporting libraries and journals from print to digital text delivery.
2. Dissemination and Publication. Much of the scholarly evidence we work with is being remediated in digital form by e-text projects. These projects are often funded by grants to create the e-text, but not to maintain it. We are facing a second generation crisis where we don’t have in place the incentives and mechanisms to maintain these resources. One aspect of the problem is that we haven’t worked out who will pay for the ongoing maitenance the way academic publishers and libraries fund maintenance of print resources.
Maintenance is not just a matter of making sure the server keeps on running. E-resources depend on delivery tools that have to be maitained too. E-resources can also be updated in ways that print can’t. The University Virginia E-Imprint project and NINES are two projects that are experimenting with models. Open Access rhetoric, despite its moral authority, needs to be modulated by the need for funding streams for technical and editorial continuity. Add to this the hairball of copyright and we have complex long-term dissemination and publishing challenge.
3. Methods and Tools. What gets often called the tool problem is really a methods or techniques challenge. The tool problem is that we have an excess of scholarly e-texts, but don’t have accessible tools to deliver or analyze these rich texts; it is also a methodology problem. We don’t know how to ask questions of electronic resources and what sorts of methods might help us answer new types of questions. To imagine what you might ask of an e-resource you need to understand what interpretative techniques can be automated and how to formalize your questions. Then you need the tools that appropriately implement methods so as to be responsive to formalized questions. Finally we need to develop a culture literate in digital methods so as to be able to critique their application so as to get beyond the spectacular to the meaningful. To put this another way, what matters in interpretation is at stake; the matter of interpretation is being digitized and the practices are being automated (often in ways that hide them from scrutiny) which is changing what we ask and what we conclude from our inquiry. The medium isn’t the message, but the practices constrain it.
4. Crafting Theory. Important to the reflection that is characteristic of the humanities is the disciplinary self-reflection on our evidence, practices, organization, and theories. Each of these is touched by digitization and automation. To think that the disciplines will not be affected is to ignore the profound changes in other labour sectors due to automation. Now that we have extensive experience with the digital representation of evidence it is time to step back and theorize the digital. Digital theory should not be left to new media scholars, nor should we expect to get it right so that we can go back to encoding or other humanities disciplines. Theorizing, not a theory, is needed; we need to cultivate reflection, interruption, standing aside and thinking about the digital. We don’t need to negotiate a canon or a grand theory, instead I wish for thinking about and through the digital in community.
Each of these challenges make certain assumptions about who we are and where we want to go. Thus, in the spirit of recursion, I should add that such challenges and their assumptions should continue to be challenged. That is the fifth, after challenge.
That said, there are concrete steps that can be taken to address these challenges.
1. Learning and Training. We need to develop the full suite of training activities needed for the different levels of engagement expected. We should not assume that every humanist or discipline is going to obsess about digital text the way we do, or that they have to. For those like many philosophers, for whom the text is just a starting point, we need training woven into existing programs. For those for whom textual scholarship is a professional requirement we need short courses or graduate certificates. For those for whom the digital matters centrally, we need programs. And for those that are hired to work on e-text projects we need training seminars. I would add that we should try to develop inter-university training and group training wherever possible, as computing is rarely done alone. Graduate students should be introduced to working in groups with peers from other institutions at a distance as that is the reality of most HC projects.
2. Dissemination and Publication. We need to fund more projects that experiment with long term evolution of digital resources and these projects need to explore different community access models. We also need to alert funding bodies, from our departments to national organizations of the importance of properly funded digital repositories, journals, archives, and libraries. We are not the only community facing these problems, for which reson we need to ally ourselves with the library community and others interested in research data preservation. Finally we need the our associations to initiate exemplary e-publishing projects that draw on our expertise to deliver paradigms.
3. Methods and Tools. We need to develop strategies for the development of techniques and associated tools. We don’t just need more tools, we need critical discussion about technique, practices, and their tools. TAPoR is one project tackling this, but we need others.
4. Crafting Theory. We need to start doing theory and engage those theorizing media, communications, information technology and automation. Theorizing should continually check itself against three perspectives: knowledge, ethics, and power. This means encouraging theory tracks at our conferences, encouraging the publication of theoretical engagements and other theory building activities.
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