Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing is a conference being organized by the Humanities Computing graduate students at the University of Alberta on February 13th. Daniel O’Donnell from U of Lethbridge and Paul Youngman of U of North Carolina-Charlotte will be the keynote speakers. If you are grad student you might want to submit a proposal for a poster or paper. Either way you are welcome to attend the full day conference if in Edmonton that day.
My friend Domenico Fiormonte at l’Università di Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Italianistica, has a blog I just found out about with Paolo Sordi called, Infolet – Informatica e letteratura (Informatics and Litterature.) They write longer thoughtful entries (in Italian) rather than my short ones.
In an entry Dai margini dell’Impero (From the margins of the Empire) Domenico criticizes “anglonorthern” computing humanists at DH 2008 for excessive specialization and excessive focus on electronic texts (and a particularly narrow version of text at that.) He goes on to say that we have known there is an anglo-american hegemony (of two or three centres) in the management, both political and scientific of the digital. (See the paper, “The international debate on humanities computing: education, technology and the primacy of languages” PDF in English for a longer discussion of this). These are strong words that, at the very least, reflect a sense of marginalization of researchers working in the European South on Romance languages and coming from a philological tradition.
I am torn as to how to respond to Domenico, but respond we should because he is willing to say things that many feel. Whether we believe the colonialization rhetoric or not, we should be willing to talk about internationalization internationally (and in multiple languages.) My response to the entry and the subsequent comments can be read in the comment I left.
The issue of internationalization and marginalization resonates partly because I work in Canada and here we have a close, but not always equal, relationship with researchers in the US and the UK. To be fair, I think we feel in Canada that we are welcome in digital humanities societies and that US colleagues are more than willing to collaborate. We also are aware of our own fetish of the issue that can distract from meaningful collaboration. If anything we may have a greater role internationally than the size of the population would merit. Our problem is that we ourselves can get caught marginalizing our Québécois colleagues. We have our own two-nations version of this marginalization problem – how to foster a truly bilingual research community avoiding “two solitudes” of research silos, an English rest-of-Canada community and a francophone Québécois community? Our Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs is a real and sustained attempt to address bilingual research. Ray Siemens and Christian Vandendorpe deserve a lot of credit for their ongoing efforts in this regard, but we have a ways to go.
The Globe and Mail had a story today on Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites by Patrick White (Nov. 25, 2008) that reports on a MacArthur Foundation funded study on, Living and Learning with New Media. This study looked at how youth participate in “the new media ecology.” (p. 1 of the PDF Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.) The report describes the “always on” connectivity of youth and their “friendshi-driven” practices. I was intrigued by the description of a subset who “geek out.”
Some youth “geek out†and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. (p. 2 of the Two Page Summary)
The Digital Youth Project led by Mizuko Ito brought together researchers at USC and Berkeley. They have a book forthcoming from MIT Press called Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media that is online at the site.
University of Affairs has a story online about how Some graduates question thesis publication requirement. The article gives as examples, students in creative writing programs who obviously want to go on and publish their theses. They don’t mention the serious issue of the license that Theses Canada makes you sign. I wonder if it would be possible for a graduate student to edit the license before signing it?
Stan pointed me to the 2006 Council of Canadian Academies | Conseil des académies canadiennes report on The State of Science & Technology in Canada (Summary and Main Findings, PDF 2.6 mb). The report tries to identify Canada’s strengths and weaknesses in the Science & Technology field, though they have a broad understanding of S&T. There is good news for arts and technology.
The ICT field demonstrating the most promise in the view of respondents – i.e., with the highest net upward trend rating – is New Media, Multimedia, Animation and Gaming, where Canada is internationally recognized as a leader, with a number of successful companies as well as a reputation for superb skills training. (p. 9)
They also identify Humanities Computing as a transdisciplinary field of strength,
Survey respondents perceived significant strength in some emerging fields such as nanoscale materials and biotechnologies, quantum informatics and humanities computing. These latter transdisciplinary fields are specialities for which future prospects are seen to be more significant than currently established strength. (p. 10)
Here is a chart from page 39 showing the Humanities and the Arts:
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.
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:
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 OARÂ Projects” which systematically discusses direct and indirect ways of generating revenue including the much avoided approach of allowing ads into academic sites.
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?
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:
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:
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:
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: