The Exchange Online

Robert Townsend has a Review of the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure Report in the The Exchange Online of the Association of American Universtiy Presses. He is critical of the report, arguing,

To make its case, the commission simply ignores skeptics who ask whether the rush to mass digitization could hurt reading and scholarship, and whether there might be other casualties on this road to progress. This offers a rather narrow view of the “grand challenges” facing the humanities and social sciences, and limits the array of problems that might be remedied by a developed cyberinfrastructure. This seems part of a larger rhetorical strategy in the report, however, which positions potential problems and the costs of digitization as external to its vision of technological progress—limiting them to social, political, or financial failures that can be assigned to publishers and “conservative” academics.

He rightly points to the ongoing costs of maintaining digital projects, “Like Jacob Marley‚Äôs chains, link-by-link we forge these digital burdens that we can never seem to lay down.” (Great image.) He is worried about the place of non-profit publisher who might get left behind if there is massive investment in cyberinfrastructure that goes to the universities who then cut out the publishers. I’m tempted to say that this is an old refrain, but that doesn’t make the issue go away. Frankly I doubt cyberinfrastructure investment will endanger quality publishers, but it may change their relationship with the academy. More importantly I think the Report (see previous blog entry) was making the case for investment in humanities and arts cyberinfrastructure so we can do our research, including research around digital publications.