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QuickTime TIFF (Uncompressed are needed to se Emerging Knowledge Environments Qu ickT ime™ an d a TIF F (U ncom pres sed) deco mpr esso r are nee ded t o se e this pict ure. The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences QuickTime™ and a T IFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see t his picture. The Nakata Lecture University of Illinois, Chicago April 28. 2006 John Unsworth Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Commission Members P aul Courant P rofessor ofEconomics and former P rovost University of Michigan Sarah Fraser Associate P rofessor and Chair Art History, Northwestern University Mike Goodchild Director, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science P rofessor,Geography University of California, Santa Barbara Margaret Hedstrom Associate P rofessor, School of Information University of Michigan Charles Henry Vice President and Chief Information Officer Rice University P eter B. Kaufman P resid ent, Intelligent Television Jerome McGann John Stewart Bryan P rofessor English , University of Virginia Roy Rosenzweig Mark and Barbara Fried P rofessor of History & New Media Director, Center for History & New Media GeorgeMason University John Unsworth(Chair) Dean and P rofessor Graduate Schoolof Library and Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Bruce Zuckerman P rofessor,Schoolof Religion Director, Archaeological Research Collection University of SouthernCalifornia • • • • • • Public Information-Gathering Sessions (2004) April 27th, Washington, DC. May 22nd, Chicago June 19th, New York August 21st, Berkeley September 18th, Los Angeles October 26th, Baltimore Domestic Advisors Dan Atkins Professor, School of Information Director, Alliance for Community Technology University of Michigan Christine L. Borgman Professor & Presidential Chair Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles James Herbert Senior NSF/NEH Advisor National Science Foundation Clifford Lynch, Director Coalition for Networked Information Deanna Marcum Associate Librarian for Library Services Library of Congress Abby Smith Director of Programs Council on Library and Information Resources Washington, DC Steve Wheatley, Vice President American Council of Learned Societies International Advisors Dr. Sigrun Eckelmann Programmdirektorin Organisationseinheit Bereich Wissenschaftliche Informationssysteme Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Muriel Foulonneau French Ministry of Culture, Minerva project, and European Commission Visiting Assistant Professor University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Dr. Stefan Gradmann / Stellvertretender Direktor Regionales Rechenzentrum der Universität Hamburg Hamburg, Germany Bjørn Henrichsen Adm.dir. / Exec. Director Norsk samfunnsvitenskapelig datatjeneste AS (NSD) Norwegian Social Science Data Services Ltd. Bergen, Norway Dr Michael Jubb Director of Policy and Programmes Arts and Humanities Research Board Bristol, United Kingdom Jaap Kloosterman International Institute of Social History Amsterdam - Netherlands International Advisors (cont.) David Moorman, Senior Policy Advisor / Conseiller principal des politiques Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada Professor David Robey, Programme Director ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Arts and Humanities Research Board School of Modern Languages University of Reading, England Harold Short, Director Centre for Computing in the Humanities King's College London Colin Steele Emeritus Fellow University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002) and Director, Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003) The Australian National University Canberra, Australia Table of Contents Ex ecutive Summary Introduction: De finitions 3 7 Who is the Intended Audience for the Report?................................ ............................. 7 What is Cyberinfrastructure?................................ ................................ .......................8 What are the Humanities and Social Sciences? ................................ ............................ 9 What are the Distinctive Needs and Contributions of the Humanities and Social Sciences, in Cyberinfrastructure?................................ ................................ ...............1 0 Chapter 1: Possibilities 13 A Grand Challenge for the Humanities and Social Sciences ................................ ......13 Decades of Accelerating Change ................................ ................................ ...............1 5 Cultural Infrastructure and the P ublic ................................ ................................ ........17 Seeing in New Ways ................................ ................................ ................................ . 19 Working in New Ways ................................ ................................ .............................. 20 Chapter 2: Challenges 23 Financing ................................ ................................ ................................ ..................2 3 Copyright ................................ ................................ ................................ ..................2 7 P rivacy................................ ................................ ................................ ......................29 The Nature of Humanities and Social Science Dat a................................ ...................3 1 Ephemerality................................ ................................ ................................ .............32 Current Institutional Models of Scholarly Communication ................................ ........33 The Conservative Culture of Scholarship................................ ................................ ...36 Chapter 3: Framework................................ ................................ ................................ ...39 Necessary Characteristics ................................ ................................ ..........................40 1. It will be accessible as a public good................................. ................................ . 40 2. It will be sustainable. ................................ ................................ .........................41 3. It will provide interoperability. ................................ ................................ ..........42 4. It will facilitate collaboration ................................ ................................ .............43 5. It will support experimentation. ................................ ................................ .........44 Required Actions................................ ................................ ................................ .......45 1. Recognize cyberinfrastructure as a strategic priority for the future of the humanities and social sciences................................ ................................ ...............4 5 Explication: ................................ ................................ ................................ ...........45 2. Coordinate stakeholders t o implement the recommendations in this report.....47 Explication: ................................ ................................ ................................ ...........47 3. Re-examine practices in light of this strategic priority................................ ....48 Explication: ................................ ................................ ................................ ...........48 4. Encourage digital scholarship ................................ ................................ ........52 5. Establish national centers t o support scholarship that contributes t o an exploits cyberinfrastructure................................ ................................ ................................ . 54 6. Create extensive and reusable digital collections. ................................ ...........56 Explication: ................................ ................................ ................................ ...........56 7. Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access. .....59 8. Develop and maintain open standards and the tools t o use them .....................6 1 Conclusion ................................ ................................ ................................ ................6 4 Appendix I: The Charge to the Commission ................................ ................................ .. 65 Testimony and Comment "The social sciences and humanities are different from the physical and biological sciences in the variety, complexity, incomprehensibility, and intractability of the entities that are studied. Consequently, the physical and biological science models in the National Science Foundation’s report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure do not directly apply” -- Henry Brady, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy; Director, Survey Research Center and UC Data, UC Berkeley Tools for Interpretation "human interpretation is the heart of the humanities. . . . devising computer-assisted ways for humans to interpret more effectively vast arrays of the human enterprise is the major challenge. Contextual issues are part of that: time/age/period, theoretical model(s), topics, themes, preconditions for comprehension, helpers for comprehension, applications which use them, datasets associated with them, and so forth.” Michael Jensen, Director of Publishing Technologies National Academies Press DC Meeting, April 27, 2004 Privacy "Social science data have generally been collected with an assurance to participants that their identities will be kept confidential. The more complex the integration of the data, the more individual the information (especially images, geographical locations, or potentially genetic identification), the greater the risk of disclosure. . . .” Privacy “. . . . We need to learn how to manage these forms of integrated content so that they can be used in the future without doing harm to the individuals who were generous enough to share their experiences or their behavior with researchers.” Myron Gutman Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Professor of History University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Chicago Meeting, May 22nd Copyright Democratic digital access to our cultural heritage currently ends in 1923: all of Hawthorne is up on the Web, but most of F. Scott Fitzgerald is not. Copyright restrictions will limit the Library of Congress’s planned World Digital Library: because the project intends to digitize only material in the public domain, it will have to exclude most of the cultural works of the twentieth century. [from the ACLS report] The Value of the Original "I would like to encourage the Commission to consider the value of the original and authentic sources--ink on vellum or pixels on a screen--as essential to the humanities and social sciences infrastructure.” Max Evans Executive Director National Historical Publications and Records Commission DC Meeting, April 27, 2004 Interdependence and Reusability "A fundamental lesson of digital libraries research is that advanced research and a rich information infrastructure are both mutually supportive and mutually dependent . . . [and] content must be usable and readily re-usable by multiple audiences." Cited by Joyce Ray, from "Knowledge Lost in Information: Report of the NSF Workshop on Research Directions for Digital Libraries” (2003). Online Resources Much of history of slavery is fragmentary, but [the] web helps to assemble small quotes and pieces into larger bodies of evidence that can be used, worked, interpreted, etc. [This] accretion and accumulation function is critical for turning hard-to-use bits into significant history. [Kathleen Hulser, New York Historical Society] The major barrier is that it is difficult to search across these resources. Every resource has its own protocols, its own limits, and its own set of sub-resources. [Lindsay F. Braun, Doctoral Student, History, Rutgers] Cyberspace serves, not as a space where digital resources and tools are changing or can change how other scholars are doing their research, but where the analysis of the past fifty years is perpetuated through selection of primary documents. These documents will, in turn, influence the next fifty years' scholarship--away from the material archive, which it claims to replace, and away from any ideas that may be within it that challenge the hegemony for comfortable, neo-liberal interpretation of the twentieth century. As one example, the [Cold War International History Project] perpetuates the U.S.'s cold war position, over Nonaligned states' negotiations with the USSR, and into cyberspace. [Elizabeth Bishop, lecturer, History, UT Austin] I am an independent scholar, so do not have the kind of access to facilities that academics do. A research associateship at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center allows me the access via Mount Holyoke College, only during the term of the association. So yes, there are problems for those of us not attached to a subscribing institution. [Sarah Doyle, independent scholar of history] The biggest difference is that now I can speak with assurance on the relative rarity of certain diction, allusions, themes and titles, etc. in the Song poet on whom I am completing a monograph. This is important because I need to know when he is being innovative and whether there is any precedent for some of the things he does. The fact that at the same time I can search thousands of poets to figure out how a word or phrase was used is simply a (significant) expansion of my use of Chinese and Japanese print concordances... [Stuart Sargent, Associate Professor of Chinese, Colorado State University] Executive Summary The Commission’s research, hearings, and consultations made it clear that as more personal, social, and professional time is spent online, it will become increasingly important to have an online environment that cultivates, rather than frustrates or distorts, the richness of human experience, the diversity of human languages and cultures, and the full range of human creativity. Such an environment will emerge only by design, and its design can benefit from the strengths of the humanities and social sciences—clarity of expression, the ability to uncover meaning even in scattered or garbled information, and centuries of experience in organizing knowledge. These strengths are especially important as the volume of digital resources grows, as complexity increases, and as we struggle to preserve and make sense of billions of sources of information. Constraints 1. the loss, fragility, and inaccessibility of the cultural record 2. the complexity of the cultural record 3. privacy restrictions on the use of data 4. intellectual property restrictions on the use of the cultural record 5. lack of incentives to experiment with cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences 6. uncertainty about the future mechanisms, forms, and economics of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication more generally 7. insufficient resources, will, and leadership to build cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences Necessary Characteristics A robust cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social science must: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. be accessible as a public good be sustainable provide interoperability facilitate collaboration support experimentation Requirements 1. recognition—from universities, scholarly societies, national academies, and funding agencies (public and private)—that cyberinfrastructure is a strategic priority for the future of the humanities and social sciences 2. coordination among representatives of universities, scholarly societies, national academies, and funding agencies to implement the recommendations in this report 3. commitment to re-examine practices in the light of this strategic priority Requirements (cont.) 4. allocation of resources into reward systems that encourage digital scholarship 5. creation of national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits cyberinfrastructure 6. cultivation of extensive and reusable digital collections 7. public and institutional policies that foster openness and access 8. open standards and the tools to use them Investment Finally, in light of these requirements, and in order to realize the promise of cyberinfrastructure for the cultural record, the Commission calls for specific investments—not just of money but also of leadership and opportunity—from scholars and scholarly societies, librarians and archivists, university provosts and university presses, the commercial sector, government, and private foundations. http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm