Category: Education and Administration

Social Computing in 2020: Bluesky Innovation Competition – UC Transliteracies Project

From Susan a link to Social Computing in 2020: Bluesky Innovation Competition – UC Transliteracies Project. This competition is hosted by the University of California Transliteracies Project and UC Santa Barbara
Social Computing Group and is open to any student from any discipline. I think competitions like this and T-REX are going to become a more common way of fostering innovation and rewarding ideas.

Ithaka: Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources

The Ithaka organization has released a report on the Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources with support from the Strategic Content Alliance and JISC in the U.K. The report deals with the difficult question of how to sustain all the free online resources we have built in the first enthusiasm of the web.

There is no single formula that Online Academic Resources (OARs) can apply to achieve sustainability, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ plan that any organization can follow to reach a point of financial stability. There are, however, a variety of processes and approaches that can help to improve the likelihood of entrepreneurial success. In an age when traditional content producers – including scholarly publishers and newspapers – struggle to maintain their financial footing in face of the challenges of the digital world, OARs cannot turn to lessons of the past to find their way, but must see themselves as nimble players in a quickly shifting field.

Part of the problem is that we think of the digital as if it were a grant project with a print outcome. You do the research, you develop the resources, you publish it and then you move on. Digital publication seems to be cheaper and faster than print, but the true cost is the sustainability. You can get it up faster, but then you have to maintain it forever. The report argues that the problem is that academics, as smart as they are, don’t know how to think like entrepreneurs.

Clearly the leaders of these initiatives are competent professionals; why do they not rely on processes that have proven effective in both commercial and not-for-profit contexts? We have concluded that a key reason for this is that academic researchers tend to approach these problems from a different perspective, and with a different mindset, than do commercial entrepreneurs. (Page 5)

For this reason the report presents an entrepreneurial start-up model which excludes academics who can’t focus soley on a project (which is most of us):

Running a start-up is a full-time job and requires full-time leadership. The mode of principal investigators, in which they divide their time between overseeing a variety of research grants, teaching courses, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success. New initiatives aiming for sustainability require fully dedicated, fully invested, and intensely focused leadership. If a principal investigator cannot provide it, he or she will have to retain a very capable person who can. (Page 7)

This is the second time in a week or so I have heard people calling for the professionalization of academic resource development (the other time being at the Tools for Data-Driven Research meeting where the view was voiced that tool development should be taken out of the hands of the academics.) Reading the report I wonder what the role of academics in scholarly resources is, if any? It reminds me of calls for MBAs to run universities rather than academics. I wonder what it would look like to apply the logic of this report to the university itself (as a type of institution.) I think it fair to say that the university has clearly proven to be longer lasting (more sustainable) than commercial enterprises. For that matter ask how many software companies still exist ten years later (see my blog entry on In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters). To be fair I think the report is looking at models for large-scale academic resources like online journals and other non-profit resource organizations that are often run by professional staff already.  Hereis a list of their major points:

  1.  Most OAR projects should not assume ongoing support from initial funders.
  2. Sustainability plans must include and provide for resources to support future growth.
  3. OAR projects create value through the impact they have on users.
  4. Projects should think in terms of building scale through partnerships, collaborations, mergers, and even acquisitions.
  5. In a competitive world, strategic planning is imperative.
  6. OAR leaders must see both the needs of users and the competitive environment as dynamic and constantly changing.
  7. OAR leaders must become fully accountable both to their projects and to their funders.
  8. Catalysing a dynamic environment for agility, creativity, risk-taking, and innovation is imperative.

While I am skeptical of the entrepreneurial thinking the report starts with we can learn from these points about sustainability by looking at the issue from an entrepreneurial perspective still stands. We can and should think about the long term sustainability and we can learn from other perspectives.

The really useful part of the report is “Section 4: Revenue Generating Options for OAR  Projects” which systematically discusses direct and indirect ways of generating revenue including the much avoided approach of allowing ads into academic sites.

Orion: Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Orion conference Powering Research and Innovation: A National Summit on a panel on Cyberinfrastructure on “Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Back to Supercomputing.” Alas Michael Macy from Cornell, who was supposed to also talk didn’t make it. (It is always more interesting to hear others than yourself.) I was asked to try to summarize the humanities needs/perspectives on cyberinfrastructure for research which I did by pointing people to the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure report “Our Cultural Commonwealth.” One of the points worth making over an over is that we have a pretty good idea now what researchers in the humanities need as a base level of infrastructure (labs, servers and support). The interesting question is how our needs are evolving and I think that is what the Bamboo project is trying to document. Another way to put it is that research computing support units need strategies for handling the evolution of cyberinfrastructure. They need ways of knowing what infrastructure should be treated like a utility (and therefore be free, always on and funded by the institution) and what infrastructure should be funded through competitions, requests or not at all. We would all love to have everything before we thought of it, but institutions can’t afford expensive stuff no one needs. My hope for Bamboo is that it will develop a baseline of what researchers can be shown to need (and use) and then develop strategies for consensually evolving that baseline in ways that help support units. High Performance Computing access is a case in point as it is very expensive and what is available is usually structured for science research. How can we explore HPC in the humanities and how would we know when it is time to provide general access?

Conference Report: Tools For Data-Driven Scholarship

I just got back from the Tools For Data-Driven Scholarship meeting organized by MITH and the Centre for New Media and History. This meeting was funded by the NEH, NSF, and the IMLS and brought together tool developers, content providers (like museums and public libraries), and funders (NEH, JISC, Mellon, NSF and IMLS.) The goal was to imagine initiative(s) that could advance humanities tool development and connect tools better with audiences. I have written a Conference Report with my notes on the meeting. One of the interesting questions asked by a funder was “What do the developers really want?” It was unclear that developers really wanted some of the proposed solutions like a directory of tools or code repository. Three things the breakout group I was in came up with was:

  • Recognition, credit and rewards for tool development – mechanisms to get academic credit for tool development. This could take the form of tool review, competitions, prizes or just citation when our tool is used. In other words we want attention.
  • Long-term Funding so that tool development can be maintained. A lot of tool development takes place in grants that run out before the tool can really be tested and promoted to the community. In other words we want funding to continue tool development without constantly writing grants.
  • Methods, Recipes, and Training that are documented that bring together tools in the context of humanities research practices. We want others with the outreach and writing skills to weave stories about their use to help introduce tools to others. In other words we want others to do the marketing of our tools.

A bunch of us sitting around after the meeting waiting for a plane had the usual debriefing about such meetings. What do they achieve even if they don’t lead to initiatives. From my perspective these meeting are useful in unexpected ways:

  • You meet unexpected people and hear about tools that you didn’t know about. The social dimension is important to meetings organized by others that bring people together from different walks. I, for example, finally met William Turkle of Digital History Hacks.
  • Reports are generated that can be used to argue for support without quoting yourself. There should be a report from this meeting.
  • Ideas for initiatives are generated that can get started in unexpected ways. Questions emerge that you hadn’t thought of. For example, the question of audience (both for tools and for initiatives) came up over and over.

CRKN and Cyberinfrastructure

Last week I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure: Reflections from TAPoR to Tools at the Canadian Research Knowledge Network Annual General Meeting 2008 (they have a PDF of the slides.) I was part of a panel on cyberinfrastructure that included an interesting presentation by Walter Stewart of CANARIE who made the point that the big issue is people. While many still don’t have access to the technical infrastructure that would facilitate their research, the big challenge is professional staff/collegial support for digital research. If one looks at the life span of a typical project one can see where people are needed:

  • Conception: when colleagues in the humanities are imagining a project that might have a digital component they need good advice.
  • Application: if they go forward with a grant application they need help articulating the digital component so that it is clear and technically accurate.
  • Modeling: if they get a grant they need help training the students who do the work, they need help making the technical decisions that affect downstream research, and they need help managing the implementation. Most colleagues don’t have the experience needed to bring a digital project to completion within budget and on time.
  • Virtualization: most digital humanities projects go out to the web and projects need help delivering them to the web and virtualizing the service so that it can be maintained as a stable machine. Typically a project will get funding to pay for the programming needed, but not for ongoing maintenance. We have found that one way to stabilize a project so it doesn’t need constant updating is to create a virtual server with all the layers of applications (lets say a certain version of Ruby and MySQL) frozen so that updating something on the server doesn’t break the service. This takes professional server support that is ongoing so these projects can be migrated from machine to machine over time.
  • Maintenance: even virtualized projects need occaisional maintenance if bugs are found or if new data needs to be added. If the programming was done by a graduate student who has long since gone, as is usually the case with grant funded projects, then the cost of maintenance can be exorbitant. The solution is not to use only professional programmers as work on projects is one of the best forms of apprenticeship in the digital humanities for graduate students. What we need is permanent programming staff who oversee digital projects, guiding the graduate students, and making sure that code is documented so it can be maintained. These project manager level programmers then provide the long term knowledge so that a new student could be hired to fix something and guided around the project.

In short I think we can begin to articulate a baseline of cyberinfrastructure and support needed at research-intensive universities to support a culture of digital humanities projects:

  • Servers: Research-intensive universities (RIU) need to run flexible servers capable of hosting the development and deliver of projects. These need to flexible in the sense that service models that limit service to specific applications (we only support PHP) almost always fail to evolve at the speed of projects leading projects to spin-off their own servers outside the support umbrella.
  • Labs: RIUs tend to see a proliferation of labs “owned” by particular projects. Given how most of us and our students have laptops we no longer need labs specifically for work. Instead labs are becoming places for access to specialized tools (large format scanners, special software, and visualization displays) and places for social research. Labs, in my experience, are becoming places where people work together whether meeting over an interface or testing a project. I would argue that labs should be “socialized” and brought together so that projects share space so they can learn from each other. That said, labs are still needed.
  • Project Managers and Technical Staff: Most important, following the outline of how knowledgable people are needed I would argue that RIUs need to have a mix of technical staff with project management experience to guide projects through from conception to long-term stability. Such staff can be in the library, faculty or computing center, but they should be coordinated. These staff do not replace the grant funded people brought on to work on projects, but they provide the advice to get the grant and oversight to manage contract staff.

A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States

Diane M. Zorich prepared A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States for the Council on Library and Information Resources that is critical of the lack of collaboration between DHCs in the United States. The Executive Summary (pages 4-5) noted three “features of the current landscape of centers that may inadvertently hinder wider research and scholarship:”

  1. The silo-like nature of current centers is creating untethered digital production that is detrimental to the needs of humanities scholarship. Today’s centers favor individual projects that address specialized research interests. These projects are rarely integrated into larger digital resources that would make them more widely known and available for the research community. As a result, they receive little exposure outside their center, and are at greater risk of being orphaned over time.
  2. The independent nature of existing centers does not effectively leverage resources community-wide. Centers have overlapping agendas and activities, particularly in training, digitization of collections, and metadata development. Redundant activities across centers are an inefficient use of the scarce resources available to the humanities community.
  3. Large-scale, coordinated efforts to address the “big” issues in building humanities cyberinfrastructure (such as repositories that enable long-term access to the centers’ digital production) are missing from the current landscape. Collaborations among existing centers are small and focus on individual partner interests that do not scale up to address community-wide needs. (pages 4-5

It is worth noting that TAPoR is an example of a network of centers that avoids some of the problems, though not all. The report reads to me like a library view of how to support digital humanities. While centers have problems they are also excellent at supporting individual projects. Large scale services tend to not support any one innovative project as well.

The report has some interesting things to say about tools:

Of all the products DHCs offer, tools have received considerable interest of late among the digital humanities research community. As digital scholarship grows, centers are increasingly taking on a developer’s role, creating new tools (or expand existing ones) to meet their research requirements.

In the interests of furthering research and scholarship, DHC-developed tools are made freely available via various open source agreements. However, there is some concern that the efforts expended in DHC tool development are not being adequately leveraged across the humanities. A recent study commissioned by CLIR (and included in its entirety as Appendix F to this document) found that many of these tools are not easily accessible. They are “buried” deep within a DHC’s Web site, are not highlighted nor promoted among the center’s products, and lack the most basic descriptions such as function, intended users, and downloading instructions.

The reason for this state of affairs may be related to how tool development often takes place in DHCs. Centers frequently develop tools within the context of a larger project. It may be that, once the project has been completed, the center becomes involved in other activities and does not have the resources available to address usability issues that would make the tool more accessible for others. The unfortunate end result is that significant energy is expended developing a tool that may receive little use beyond a particular center. Funding agencies who support tool development among centers, and who make it a requirement of their grants that the tools be open source, may wish to develop guidelines and provide support for mechanisms that will help enhance the usability of existing tools and expose them more prominently to the humanities community. It may be that funding tool development as a piece of a larger center project is not in the best interest of the humanities community, as individual centers seem unable to maintain these tools beyond the life of the project. (page 42)

Included as Appendix F is a report, “Tools for Humanists Project; Final Report” by Lilly Nguyen and Katie Shilton.

What are the digital humanities? DHSI video clips

Screen capture of two video boxes

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute this summer took a number of us aside and asked us to answer four questions about the digital humanities on video. The collection of streaming video clips makes interesting viewing as they chose a representative sample of people from myself to a software architect. You can stack the rows of video clips and compare different answers, which is nice.

Clemens: Virtual Wiiality Redux

Photo of me with Wiiality on

One of our students Joel Clemens gave a demonstration of his impressive fourth year project, Virtual Wiiality Redux. He used common consumer components like the Sony SIXAXIS controller, which has motion sensing, to create an virtual reality system. In the picture above you see me with the helmet (with the SIXAXIS velcroed above) experiencing the 3D space (a version of our lab with a gaping chasm below my feet.) The strange broom thing was Joel’s solution to tracking where I am in the space. It has a small bowling ball with rollers to capture movement. The broom “floor mouse” didn’t work as well as the head tracking set, which was very responsive. With hackers like Joel and cheap motion tracking controllers, DIY VR may be a real “wiiality”. Check out his extensive web site.

Henry Mintzberg and Beyond Selfishness

From Hugh McLeod’s blog gapingvoid.com I discovered McGill Management prof, Henry Mintzberg. Anyone who has a page dedicated to beaver sculptures deserves to be praised, but Mintzberg writes clear, wise, and critical essays like Beyond Selfishness (with Robert Simons and Kunal Basu for the Sloan Management Review, Fall, 2002). Beyond selfishness takes aim at the “greed is good”, heroic leadership, shareholders’ value ideology that seems to keep on surviving evidence that none of this is good for society. Mintzberg makes obvious that we want robust and friendly not lean (skinny) and mean companies, schools and governments. His Leadership Beyond the Bush MBA asks an interesting question, “Has there been much public discussion at the Harvard Business School about the possible effect of its education on the conduct of his presidency?” (Bush is the first president with an MBA.) The issue isn’t really Harvard so much as management education, and in Mintzberg’s view, the way management students are taught decisiveness over experience of the situation.