Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand is an essay I wrote last weekend and have been editing that tries to think about how to do humanities computing if you don’t have grants and don’t have lots of support. I ended up trying to imagine a Collaborative Research Commons that imagines crowdsourcing digital humanities work.
While research as a gift economy may seem idealistic, I’ve been surprised by the extraordinary collaboration you get when you set up a structured way for people to contribute to a project. The Suda On Line project first showed (me at least) the potential for social and volunteer research. I’ve had luck with the Dictionary of Words in the Wild and the upcoming Day of Digital Humanities. This last project has yet to happen, but we have close to 100 participants signed up. My point is that we can imagine ways to research that don’t start with how to get a grant before we can talk.
Geoffrey,
I read your draft and have a few points.
First, there is the inevitable claim that such a culture of sharing would devalue intellectual capital. Though I don’t find the argument compelling myself, how would you respond to those that would suggest crossing your arms and throwing a fit? In your premise, you establish a setting where the battle has been lost, and more so your paper outlines the compromise. It strikes me that some people won’t take this premise, arguing that a call to arms is more necessary to keep your scenario from becoming necessary.
To me, however, that’s exactly what’s compelling. You have a sort of post-battle call-to-arms, not “arms” for warring but “arms” in the human sense, for building. You’re suggesting how to build up and strengthen the community – a tasks that is invaluable at any time, but most achievable in a time of crisis.
The best part is your emphasis on the intrinsic value of thought. You don’t need a budget to think, and I believe in the coming years the successes of computing will not be based on marketing, business practices, or money. The tools of creation are becoming more accessible, and as a result, we are seeing shoddy products having their success usurped by better products. If there’s a tool or service or feature missing, we’re much more likely today to have somebody realize the void and fix it. Thus, in contrast to the argument that crowdsourcing devalues ideas, I would say that intellectual capital is only increasing. I doubt we can again have an incident like what happened in 2000 with Internet Explorer when, after clinching the top top of the browser world, Microsoft stopped innovating (or even keeping up) with Internet Explorer, and yet still remained the unchallenging kings of browsers. Anyway, this leads into my latest blog entry (http://www.porganized.com/blog/underestimating-the-ubiquity-of-data), so I cut my response short to avoid redundancy.
Good draft; given the time, there’s a lot more that I could say about it.
You are right that the business of how we deal with cuts is distracting. Perhaps I should just stick to discussing research models for everyone and avoid polemics about funding.
Interestingly crowdsourcing could be said to depend on good cyberinfrastructure (either through universities or from dot.coms) – thus it could be said that the issue is where funding should go. Special funding for projects or general funding for universal infrastructure. The library costs, but none of us apply for funding to get the books we need – it is universal.