Education and Administration – Page 9

Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm – Quants Answer

There has recently been a fair amount of discussion in venues like the New York Time (Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm) about how the liberal arts (and humanities) are endangered.

This discussion was triggered by a report by the Commission on the Humanities & Social Sciences of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic—a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support.

This report was requested by Senators from both parties and will be distributed back to Congress. It engages some of the current perceptions that the humanities are useless while STEM should promoted. Nationwide (in the USA) only 7.6 % of bachelor’s degrees are in the humanities (compared to 36% in 1954.)

Needless to say there are different views as to why the decline. Some have blamed the left-wing concern with race, class, and gender. Others blamed public rhetoric or emphasis on STEM. The New York Times now has an interesting article that references work by Ben Schmidt that shows the change might be due to women shifting from the humanities to business. See Ben Schmidt’s recent blog entry. The issues seem much more complex. Perhaps we should celebrate the success of newer professional disciplines in engaging segments of students that might not have attended college before.

What also stands out is how quantitative historians as providing answers to these questions that are at odds with the more theory driven answers.

The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform – The New Inquiry

Sam sent me a great and careful article about MOOCs,The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform. The article is a longer version of a paper given by Aaron Bady at UC Irvine as part of a panel on MOOCs and For Profit Universities. In his longer paper Bady makes a number of points:

We need to look closely at the rhetoric that is spinning this a “moment” of something new. Bady questions the sense of time and timing to the hype. What is really new? Why is this the moment?
There isn’t much new to MOOCs except that prestige universities are finally trying online education (which others have been trying since the 1980s) and branding their projects. MOOCs represent Harvard trying to catch up with the University of Phoenix by pretending they have leapfrogged decades of innovation.
The term MOOC was coined by in the context of an online course at the U of Manitoba. See the Wikipedia article on MOOCs. The Manitoba experiment, however was quite different. “[T]he goal of these original MOOCs was to foster an educational process that was something totally different: it would be as exploratory and creative as its participants chose to make it, it was about building a sense of community investment in a particular project, a fundamentally socially-driven enterprise, and its outcomes were to be fluid and open-ended.”
MOOCs are speculative bubble that will burst. The question is what will things look like when it does?
MOOCs are not necessarily open as many are being put on by for-profit companies. Perhaps they could be called MOCks.
The economics of MOOCs need to be watched. They look a lot like other dot com businesses.
MOOCs are the end of the change that happens when learning is in dialogue not the beginning of change. MOOCs could freeze innovation as they take so many resources to develop by so few.

Here is a quote:

If I have one overarching takeaway point in this talk, it’s this: there’s almost nothing new about the kind of online education that the word MOOC now describes. It’s been given a great deal of hype and publicity, but that aura of “innovation” poorly describes a technology—or set of technological practices, to be more precise—that is not that distinct from the longer story of online education, and which is designed to reinforce and re-establish the status quo, to make tenable a structure that is falling apart.

CIFAR: Renewing their vision

Today I went to a meeting about Canadian Institute For Advanced Knowledge (CIFAR) in the hopes that they might have programs in the humanities. They do and they don’t.

One new initiative they have that is open to humanists is their global call for ideas. The call is open to anyone:

Do you have a question with the potential to change the world?

A number of their programs like Successful Societies, Social Interactions, Identity & Well-Being, and Institutions, Organizations & Growth seem to have humanists and social scientists involved, even if they aren’t issues central to the humanities.

In recognition of the absence of humanities programs they started a Humanities Initiative in 2009. Alas, it hasn’t yet developed any programs we could participate in. Here is some history:

In their 2009-2010 Annual Performance Report they state:

CIFAR organized a discussion with senior humanities researchers drawn from institutions across North America in May 2009 about the role CIFAR could play in supporting advanced research in the humanities. The meeting participants recommended the creation of an ad hoc Steering Committee that would undertake the process of identifying in detail how CIFAR should approach and support advanced humanities research. This Steering Committee met in December 2009, and following a telephone conference in April 2010 recommended that the Institute proceed with several pilot projects in the next year. Work on refining these projects and identifying task force members was underway by June 2010.

In a 2010, Final Report CIFAR Performance Audit and Evaluation, the evaluators note:

CIFAR’s Strategic Plan notes that the growth of its programs in the social sciences and humanities has not kept pace with growth in the natural sciences. CIFAR is, consequently, examining how its research model might be adapted to research in these disciplines with a specific focus in this five-year period on the humanities.

It is now 2013 and it seems the steering group recommended two pilot projects, neither of which seem to have done more than meet.

Pekka Sinervo, who presented here, suggested that it is hard to find examples of sustained conversations around a single question in the humanities of the sort that CIFAR supports. He challenged me to find examples they could use as models. Perhaps there isn’t a tradition of think tanks in the humanities? Perhaps senior humanists, of the sort CIFAR has recruited, are more solitary scholars who just can’t get excited about getting together to talk about ideas? Perhaps the humanities has lapsed into Cartesian solipsism – we think, we are, but alone.

I personally think CIFAR should restart and rethink their Humanities Initiative. If they are finding it hard to get humanists engaged in the ways other fields are, then try something different. I would encourage them to look at some examples from the digital humanities that have demonstrated the capacity to initiate and sustain conversations in innovative ways:

The Humanities and Technology Camp (THATCamp) is an extremely successful example of an open and inclusive form of conversation. Mellon supports this initiative that supports inexpensive “unconferences” around the world.
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship Online (NINES) is a reinvented scholarly association that was formed to support old and new media research. This is not an elite exclusive community, but a reimagined association that is capable of recognizing enquiry through digital scholarship.
The Day of Digital Humanities is a sustained look at the question, “Just what do digital humanists really do?” Started at U of Alberta in 2009, the latest version was run by Michigan State University’s MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences. Other organizations have used this “Day of …” paradigm to get discussion going around issues like digital archaeology.
4Humanities is a loose group that looks at how to advocate for the humanities in the face of funding challenges. With minimal funding we support local chapters, international correspondents, and various activities.

In short, there are lots of examples of sustained conversations, especially if you don’t limit yourself to a particular model. Dialogue has been central to the humanities since Plato’s Academy; perhaps the humanities should be asked by CIFAR to imagine new forms of dialogue. Could CIFAR make a virtue of the problem they face around humanities conversations?

Can you start a dialogue with the potential to change the world?

The closing of American academia

Sarah Kendzior has two challenging articles in Al Jazeera about the plight of adjunct faculty, The closing of American academia and Academia’s indentured servants. She is right to draw attention to this and right to accuse those of us who have positions of being silent. But first, the situation:

On April 8, 2013, the New York Times reported that 76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors – an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.

Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the poverty line. Some are on welfare or homeless. Others depend on charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.

I suspect it isn’t quite as bad in Canada where we typically pay CAD $4000-$8000 a course and everyone has healthcare, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are depending increasingly on sessional instructors to teach our courses. If you don’t count the teaching done by graduate students I’m guessing that about 50% of the teaching (instructorships) in large universities is done by graduate students or sessionals. (This guess is based on limited and anecdotal experience. Here is one story I found.) The effects of the increased dependence on adjunct faculty are sobering:

We are now in a situation where most faculty are living from contract to contract and being paid little. They have little commitment to the universities that hire them because they aren’t treated well or given a chance to engage over the long term.
We have created a situation where highly-trained instructors are exploited to keep our cushy tenure-track faculty jobs.
We are developing a caste system where a small number of tenure-track faculty have significantly different working conditions and opportunities due to the labour of a large adjunct class.
Full-time faculty have to spend an inordinate amount of time hiring and supervising adjunct faculty.
Students don’t get taught by full-time faculty until the end of their programs, if then. They often don’t know any full-time faculty and they can’t ask for recommendations from any.

I frankly don’t know how we will get out of this mess. The Adjunct Project is making a start by collecting data so adjuncts can vote with their feet and move to where the conditions are better. Perhaps online courses and colleges like The Minerva Project will introduce competition for good instructors and set an example with fair contracts. Perhaps adjuncts will unionize and strike for better conditions as they did at York. Perhaps we should all try merge with the local high-schools where at least they don’t exploit teachers the way we do.

Humanities Unraveled – The Chronicle

Michael Bérubé has written an important essay in The Chronicle titled The Humanities, Unraveled. He revisits the question of accepting all these grad students for whom there aren’t jobs and, following an essay No More Plan B by Anthony Grafton, makes the case for graduate programmes designed for alternative careers.

[W]hen we look at the public reputation of the humanities; when we compare the dilapidated Humanities Cottage on campus with the new $225-million Millennium Science Complex thats a real example, from my home institution; when we look at the academic job market for humanists, we cant avoid the conclusion that the value of the work we do, and the way we theorize value, simply isnt valued by very many people, on campus or off.

The alt-ac community poses a timely and bracing challenge to that attitude. It asks us what graduate curricula might be most readily transferable to careers outside academe perhaps curricula that include semester-long internships and/or administrative experience?—and whether those careers will be honored and validated by deans and provosts, who remain likely to evaluate the success of graduate programs in the humanities by their placement rates, which are likely to continue to refer exclusively to placements in academic positions.

I think the time has come to stop talking about Alt-Ac careers as only an alternative and start seriously designing graduate programmes for Alt-Ac first. Why first? Because I think the academy would actually benefit from students prepared for Alt-Ac. So what should we be thinking about?

Despite what Grafton says, we should scale back the dissertation to something that can be written in a year or two. We have to scale it back or be open to alternative dissertations so that there is time/opportunity for other things. We should encourage project driven dissertations and funded dissertations where a Ph.D student is funded by a research team to do their research on the subject of the grant as part of the team. This is normal in the sciences and engineering and leads to faster completion times and healthier interaction between student and team. Imagine working on a thesis other people were actually interested in because it connected to what they were doing? Imagine being funded to complete in a timely fashion?
We should stop trying to protect graduate students from things like internships, other disciplines, computing, and yes … jobs. Instead we should encourage them to try the things they are interested in while they have time. While for many of us the time of writing the dissertation has become an idealized moment of peace and focus before the chaos of a job, that doesn’t mean that is the only way to be a graduate student. Lets encourage students to get breadth along with some depth.
Whether we leave the dissertation as is, we should change how they are supervised to make sure that students get more open and broad support. There are all sorts of healthy models out there that are less feudal. Even if we leave things as is we should expect of ourselves that read the literature (and university policies) about best practices in supervision. To my colleagues who supervise – RTFM!
The trend has been to get rid of Masters programmes and focus on the PhDs. Direct-entry PhDs generate more money, but they are creating a situation where students have no way to test the waters before entering immediately into a stick-it-out-for-years-or-fail programme. I think this is a mistake as a significant MA could be the Alt-Ac degree, freeing the PhD to be the academic extension. Our 2 year MA in Humanities Computing has a thesis that forces students to embark on a substantial project. The two years give them enough time to learn skills and then apply them. Most take a third year either because they are in the joint MA/MLIS programme that gives them the professional degree or because they involved in so many neat projects (for which they are paid.) Most of our students have no trouble getting work even before they finish and it is because the programme gives them real apprenticing opportunities.
We should break down the disciplinary barriers that make it difficult for students to take courses in other department or for students to apply to do an interdisciplinary PhD. Despite the best of intentions, students who want to cross boundaries find they have to do all the requirements for both units. There are all sorts of reasons for this and interdisciplinary escape hatches are expensive to maintain for the number of students that take them, but it should still possible and we should be vigilant to maintain those escape hatches. It would be interesting to imagine more radical approaches (as in accepting students into the humanities and helping them to develop their own programme.)
We should get away from the sacred 3 unit – one semester course. We should encourage shorter intense courses and longer languid ones. I learned Aristotle by taking two solid, but slow years of it with a prof who basically had us think about a page of Aristotle a week. We went so slow it began to make sense as a way of thinking. Likewise I’ve been at intense retreats like THATcamps where I learn a lot in four days. Such short courses can help students engage a breadth of Alt-Ac perspectives without making too much of a commitment.
Comprehensives and other forms of exams should be thrown out and replaced with internships, experiential applications, project apprenticeships or teaching apprenticeships. Lets give PhD students a choice of professional experiences instead of exams. Ask students to embark on 3 projects (from a teaching project to a community-based one) and then report back in different ways. That would give us a much better measure of whether a student was ready to write about a subject so as to make a career of it. Exams just relieve our fears of granting degrees to people who don’t know enough when the problem is we are granting degrees to people who can’t do much.
Make it easy to do a graduate degree part-time. Many of the people who would actually benefit from an MA or PhD already have careers. Why aren’t we helping them expand their horizons and acquire knowledge/skills within the context of a real career? Many of our students end up working almost full time anyway, why not recognize the realities of their lives. We no longer live in a world that can provide a 7 year retreat experience for any more than a handful of students. Part-time students should be our primary audience, not an add on.
Build graduate programs across universities. It is doubtful that universities will have the new resources to be able to start new graduate programs unless we collaborate. We have to find ways to build multi-university programs, as difficult as they are to administer. Properly done they provide students with access to a greater breadth of faculty and experiences. They also give us the capacity to innovate without having to make the case for 5 tenure-track positions in order to start a programme.

All of these may sound too radical, and none of this is original or easy. I certainly wouldn’t want all programmes to change just for the sake of a crisis (that has lasted a while so it may not count as a crisis). Rather, I would like to see a breath of experiments from the alternative to the purist that show that humanists value what they do enough to keep on adapting it for the next generation. Lets relax the reins and give some space to those who want to experiment (or not). It may be that the best approach is one of paying attention to the care of a programme however alternative or not it is.

I should add that I think the term “alternative” is misleading. There should be nothing alternative about careers beyond the academy. Extramural careers should be the norm not the alternative.

Tory 1908 Address to First Convocation of U of Alberta

Voyant Word Cloud of 1908 Address

Here at the University of Alberta we return for inspiration to the founding President’s words at the 1908 Address to the First Convocation. In particular we have taken to heart Henry Marshall Tory’s words about “uplifting the whole people.” Here is the relevant paragraph,

In many of the older universities men of merit were deprived of the privileges which they offered sometimes by creed or class legislation. The modern state university has sprung from a demand on the part of the people themselves for intellectual recognition, a recognition which only a century ago was denied them. The result is that such institutions must be conducted in such a way as to relate them as closely as possible to the life of the people. The people demand that knowledge shall not alone be the concern of scholars. The uplifting of the whole people shall be its final goal. This should be the concern of all educated men, it be never be forgotten.

The phrase “uplifting of the whole people” has become the promise of the University though I doubt many of us think about it more than casually. In Tory’s address it is connected with nation building and civilization. Every state in the USA has a university, now every province in Canada will get one. The state university has a special responsibility to the people. There is also a strong thread of praire populism to the address. He recognizes that universities have excluded people and been sites of privilege, something to be corrected in the “modern state university” that lists to the demands of the people and relates to them.

Tory touches on a number of other issues in his talk that we should also think through. He talks about the importance of pure intellect to the university. He connects this with “the highest ideals of life.”

[Universities] have arisen as a result of the demand of the intellect pure and simple. Quite apart from practical results, the restless energy of the human mind, slow to accomplish results, but never resting in its efforts, has demanded that a place should be found where men may be given an opportunity to fit themselves by rigid training to solve the problems of life. Thus it has become the task of the university to hold up the highest ideals of life; to help create in the hearts of men and to sustain in them a love for those things which are higher than food and raiment; to emphasize the teaching of the greatest of all teachers that man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesses. It has become a part of their recognized responsibility to instill a love of those things which really constitute greatness; to emphasize the things of the mind above those of the body; in relation national life to place patriotism above party; in our relations to others to place love above hate; in our relation to knowledge to choose truth and not error; in our relations to ourselves to be men not things.

He returns later to these high ideals which turn out to be echoed in the “moral and spiritual sense of the Christian world” which has triumphed over materialism. The university is to be a place that fosters ideals that are consistent with the Christian world and not a “materialistic philosophy.”

Did I say materialism was dead? I say it again! Man knows that he is greater than the clod and in that knowledge lies his supremacy. The age of thought has only begun. In spite of the practical and materialistic philosophy which expresses itself still [in] the commercial spirit of the age I assert the deepest conviction of my being that thought and mind are still supreme. We who teach may be called idealists. Let me say to you that the idealist still lives and lifts his head to the stars and declares the impossible can be accomplished. All the ages of progress have been his ages and when the spirit of a material age is dead and the philosophy of materialism is forgotten the idealist will still be conquering the world.

Tory touches on the importance of faculty and admonishes that faculty not be treated as “state officers.”

The members of the university staff must not be thought of in the ordinary way as state officers. They must rather be regarded in the light of independent thinkers and scholars who are to bring us into that appreciation of those higher things about which I was speaking a moment ago.

He then goes on to talk about teaching and giving faculty the freedom to teach well. He trusts us to handle this freedom with discretion.

Our professors are first of all teachers. To them the largest freedom must be given. It is their duty to push into the heart of things that the truth and nothing but the truth may be, discovered. I am sure they will temper freedom with discretion.

While on the whole the address is remarkably current there are two dated and distasteful aspects. First of all is the sexism of the language that talks only of men and manhood. There is no recognition that women might be part of the whole people. I hear the echo of muscular and rational Christianity in this address. Secondly there is a race consciousness or pride in Alberta’s youth and mingling of peoples that strikes me as vanity.

We are not a degenerate race, we are a race produced by the mingling of the best blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern and the grace to obey. We are rich in the inheritance of honour bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history and we may make it our daily thirst to increase it with splendid service, so that if it be a sin to covet honour, Canadians should be the most offending souls alive.

Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics

Open Book Publishers has just published Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics online. Stéfan Sinclair and I have two chapters in the collection, one on “Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community” and one on “Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis.”

The Acculturation chapter sets out the ways in which we try to train students by involving them in project teams rather than only through courses. This approach I learned watching Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker at the University of Virginia. My goal has always to be able to create the sort of project culture they did (and now the Scholar’s Lab continues.)

The editor Brett D. Hirsch deserves a lot of credit for gently seeing this through.

Clay Shirky: Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

Clay Shirky has a good essay on Napster, Udacity, and the Academy on his blog which considers who will be affected by MOOCs. He makes a number of interesting points:

A number of the changes that Internet has facilitated involved unbundling services that were bundled in other media. He gives the example of individual songs being unbundled from albums, but he could also have mentioned how classifieds have been unbundled from newspapers. Likewise MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), like the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence run by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, unbundle the course from the university and certification.
University lectures are inefficient, a poor way of teaching, and often not of the highest quality. Chances are there are better video lectures online for any established subject than what is offered locally. If universities fall into the trap of saving money by expanding class sizes until higher education is just a series of lectures and exams then we can hardly pretend to higher quality than MOOCs. Why would students in Alberta want to listen to me lecture when they could have someone from Harvard?
MOOCs are far more likely to threaten the B colleges than the elite liberal arts colleges. A MOOC is not a small seminar experience for a top student and doesn’t compete with the high end. MOOCs compete with lectures (why not have the best lecturer) and other passive learning approaches. MOOCs will threaten the University of Phoenix and other online programs that are not doing such a good job at retention anyway.
MOOCs are great marketing for the elite universities which is why they may thrive even if there is no financial model or evaluation.
The openness is important to MOOCs. Shirky gives the example of a Statistics 101 course that was improved by open criticism. By contrast most live courses aren’t open to peer evaluation. Instead they are treated like confidential instructor-patient interactions.

While I agree with much of what Shirky says and I welcome MOOCs I’m not convinced they will have the revolutionary effect some think they will. I remember seeing the empty television frames at Scarborough college from when they thought teleducation was going to be the next thing. When it comes to education we seem to forget over an over that there is a rich history of distance education experiments. Shirky writes, “In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn…” but I don’t see evidence that he has done any research into the history of education. Instead Shirky adopts a paradigm shift rhetoric comparing MOOCs to Napster in potential for disruption as if that were history. We could just as easily compare them to the explosion of radio experiments between the wars (that disappeared by 1940.) Just how would we learn from history? What history is relevant here? Shirky is unconvincing in his choice of Napster as the relevant lesson.

Another issue I have is epistemological – I just don’t think MOOCs are that different from a how-to book or learning video when it comes to the delivery of knowledge. Anyone who wants to learn something in the West has a wealth of choices and MOOCs, if well designed, are one more welcome choice, but revolutionary they are not. The difficult issues around education don’t have to do with quality resources, but with time (for people trying to learn while holding down a job), motivation (to keep at it), interaction (to learn from mistakes) and certification (to explain what you know to others).

Now its my turn to learn from history. I propose these possible lessons:

Unbundling will have an effect on the university, especially as costs escalate faster than inflation. We cannot expect society to pay at this escalating rate especially with the cost of health care eating into budgets. Right now what seems to be being unbundled is the professoriate from teaching as more and more teaching is done by sessionals. Do we really want to leave experiments in unbundling exclusively to others or are we willing to take responsibility for experimenting ourselves?
One form of unbundling that we should experiment with more is unbundling the course from the class. Universities are stuck in the course = 12/3 weeks of classes on campus. These are the easiest way for us to run courses as we have a massive investment in infrastructure, but they aren’t necessarily the most convenient for students or subject matter. For graduate programs especially we should be experimenting with hybrid delivery models.
Universities may very well end up not being the primary way people get their post-secondary education. Universities may continue as elite institutions leaving it to professional organizations, colleges and distance education institutions to handle the majority of students.
Someone is going to come up with a reputable certification process for students who want to learn using a mix of books, study groups, MOOCs, college courses and so on. Imagine if a professional organization like the Chartered Accountants of Canada started offering a robust certification process that was independent of any university degree. For a fee you could take a series of tests and practicums that, if passed, would get you provincial certification to practice.
The audience for MOOCs is global, not local. MOOCs may be a gift we in wealthier countires can give to the educationally limited around the world. Openly assessed MOOCs could supplement local learning and become a standard against which people could compare their own courses. On the other hand we could end up with an Amazon of education where one global entity drives out all but the elite educational institutions (which use it to stay elite.) Will we find ourselves talking about educational security (a national needing their own educational system) and learning local (not taking courses from people that live more than 100K away)?
We should strive for a wiki model for OOCs where they are not the marketing tools of elite institutions but maintained by the community.

In sum, we should welcome any new idea for learning, including MOOCs. We should welcome OOCs as another way of learning that may suit many. We should try developing OOCs (the M part we can leave to Stanford) and assess them. We should be open to different configurations of learning and not assume that how we do things now has any special privilege.

Using Zotero and TAPOR on the Old Bailey Proceedings

The Digging Into Data program commissioned CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) to study and report on the first round of the programme. The report includes case studies on the 8 initial projects including one on our Criminal Intent project that is titled Using Zotero and TAPOR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent (DMCI). More interesting are some of the reflections on big data and research in the humanities that the authors make:

1. One Culture. As the title hints, one of the conclusions is that in digital research the lines between disciplines and sectors have been blurred to the point where it is more accurate to say there is one culture of e-research. This is obviously a play on C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures. In big data that two cultures of the science and humanities, which have been alienated from each other for a century or two, are now coming back together around big data.

Rather than working in silos bounded by disciplinary methods, participants in this project have created a single culture of e-research that encompasses what have been called the e-sciences as well as the digital humanities: not a choice between the scientific and humanistic visions of the world, but a coherent amalgam of people and organizations embracing both. (p. 1)

2. Collaborate. A clear message of the report is that to do this sort of e-research people need to learn to collaborate and by that they don’t just mean learning to get along. They mean deliberate collaboration that is managed. I know our team had to consciously develop patterns of collaboration to get things done across 3 countries and many more universities. It also means collaborating across disciplines and this is where the “one culture” of the report is aspirational – something the report both announces and encourages. Without saying so, the report also serves as a warning that we could end up with a different polarization just as the separation of scientific and humanistic culture is healed. We could end up with polarization between those who work on big data (of any sort) using computational techniques and those who work with theory and criticism in the small. We could find humanists and scientists who use statistical and empirical methods in one culture while humanists and scientists who use theory and modelling gather as a different culture. One culture always spawns two and so on.

3. Expand Concepts. The recommendations push the idea that all sorts of people/stakeholders need to expand their ideas about research. We need to expand our ideas about what constitutes research evidence, what constitutes research activity, what constitutes research deliverables and who should be doing research in what configurations. The humanities and other interpretative fields should stop thinking of research as a process that turns the reading of books and articles into the writing of more books and articles. The new scale of data calls for a new scale of concepts and a new scale of organization.

It is interesting how this report follows the creation of the Digging Into Data program. It is a validation of the act of creating the programme and creating it as it was. The funding agencies, led by Brett Bobley, ran a consultation and then gambled on a programme designed to encourage and foreground certain types of research. By and large their design had the effect they wanted. To some extent CLIR reports that research is becoming what Digging encouraged us to think it should be. Digging took seriously Greg Crane’s question, “what can you do with a million books”, but they abstracted it to “what can you do with gigabytes of data?” and created incentives (funding) to get us to come up with compelling examples, which in turn legitimize the program’s hypothesis that this is important.

In other words we should acknowledge and respect the politics of granting. Digging set out to create the conditions where a certain type of research thrived and got attention. The first round of the programme was, for this reason, widely advertised, heavily promoted, and now carefully studied and reported on. All the teams had to participate in a small conference in Washington that got significant press coverage. Digging is an example of how granting councils can be creative and change the research culture.

The Digging into Data Challenge presents us with a new paradigm: a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research. The implications of these projects and their digital milieu for the economics and management of higher education, as well as for the practices of research, teaching, and learning, are profound, not only for researchers engaged in computationally intensive work but also for college and university administrations, scholarly societies, funding agencies, research libraries, academic publishers, and students. (p. 2)

The word “presents” can mean many things here. The new paradigm is both a creation of the programme and a result of changes in the research environment. The very presentation of research is changed by the scale of data. Visualizations replace quotations as the favored way into the data. And, of course, granting councils commission reports that re-present a heady mix of new paradigms and case studies.