Cyberinfrastructure for Liberal Arts

Things to Do While Waiting for the Future to Happen: Building Cyberinfrastructure for the Liberal Arts (pdf), David Green & Michael Roy. Educause, July/August 2008.

Liberal arts scholarship is largely viewed as a solitary process, with the individual responsible for creating and managing their own content and tools to disseminate their research to a larger scholarly community. In this article, the authors raise the question of what will drive a shift toward collaboration. They summarize many of the issues we have discussed in recent weeks, from the issue of the publication process and the link to recognition, tenure, and promotion, the need to finance such initiatives, underuse by scholars, and the ever-present intellectual property concerns.

Early issues the authors explore include digitization happening piecemeal, with little in the way of standards and metadata. Resources were scanned as needed by an individual scholar, but without consideration of a broader collection (or infrastructure). The implication here is that large community or discipline-based steps are needed to create an infrastructure that will be useful and utilized by the community that contributes to it.

The authors identify two broad approaches for conceiving of cyber scholarship. The first is data-driven and focused on building and growing digital repositories, using the power of computers to store, sort, search, and analyze large amounts of data in disparate repositories. The second is concerned with harnessing the technological capabilities and developments, such as social networking, to grow a new genre of web activity for scholarship that is defined by the participants. In these two approaches, there is a tension between idea of computer as an instrument for manipulating and mining data or as a tool for making social and intellectual connections. The two approaches are not in opposition to one another however, and both can be developed to change the current state of scholarship, allowing for more shared data and collaboration, as well as the incorporation of more data formats into humanities research deliverables.

Predominantly, the authors present the idea that it comes down to getting people involved and finding a way to finance the growth and spread of resources to as large a community as possible. The development of tools and products, whether created for profit or using an open-source model, is integral to the success of a humanities cyberinfrastructure. One goal the authors offer up is to stop thinking about issues within an institution and to shift to considering connections between institutions, which opens the idea of a community working to create a collaborative research and teaching environment. To this end, they offer up eight recommendations for institutions, which were published in Our Cultural Commonwealth (one of our readings for this week). The overarching message to liberal arts schools is to get involved with the development of cyber scholarship in the humanities: invest, encourage, develop polices, cooperate, cultivate leaders, establish centers, create standards, and produce digital collections.

This article does a nice job of laying out the key issues for any cyberinfrastructure efforts. I think it functions as a reminder for the liberal arts community to engage themselves, in ways that perhaps the scientific community is already advancing. I am interested in the distinctions between liberal arts and other scholarly groups, particularly in the types of data, formats, and collaborative possibilities for researchers in this community.