Keeping up with the Sciences: Humanities and Cyberinfrastructure

Crane, Gregory, Alison Babeu, and David Bamman. "eScience and the Humanities." International Journal on Digital Libraries 7, no. 1 (2007): 117-122.

In this article, Crane, Babeu, and Bamman suggest that though those in the humanities are increasingly working with large digital datasets, they are lagging behind their scientific peers in developing the cyberinfrastructures necessary to support and maintain digital resources. As with the sciences, the humanities need cyberinfrastructure to help address both the massive scale of digital data and the fact that managing this data requires specialized knowledge beyond the capacity of any single researcher. Unfortunately, the humanities have been slow to develop such infrastructures due, in part, to disparities in funding between the sciences and the humanities. The authors note, for example, that the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF) is 39 times larger than that of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). However funding is not the only culprit. Crane et al. also suggest that a failure of imagination has impeded the humanities: that is, they have been slow to recognize the types of intellectual activity that emerging cyberinfrastructures might support.

In order to grow cyberinfrastructure, the article recommends that the humanities systematically develop alliances with the sciences and other better-funded disciplines, as well as collaborate with them on shared technological interests. International collaboration must also be encouraged. To this end, the authors enumerate five core services that they assert reflect "a convergence of interests that extends beyond the humanities" (120). These services include: 1) Conversion of page images to digital text (including handwritten documents that pre-date the advent of printing), 2) conversion from raw text to structured data (including semantic classification, indentifications, and morphological and syntactic analysis) 3)support of multiple languages (including cross-language information retrieval), 4)customization and personalization of data retrieval, and 5) the support of continuous user contributions (such as corrections of OCR errors). Crane et al. close by recommending that the humanities strive to develop larger, more stable organizational structures (as opposed to constantly re-inventing the wheel in numerous small-scale projects) in order to ensure the maintenance of digital data services. They also hold out hope for the emergence of disciplinary centers--such as one for classicists--to attend to the specialized needs of their constituents.

Though one imagines that the article is meant to rally the humanities and provide real-world strategies for confronting difficult funding situations, the effect is still somewhat depressing. Identifying overlapping interests makes good financial sense, but it seems important too to recognize and investigate significant areas of divergence between the sciences and the humanities. For example, how do humanities "datasets" differ from those in the field of science and social science and what type of functionality would humanities data benefit from most? What constitutes pre-publication "raw data" in the humanities? How does the data life cycle for humanities materials compare with that which Anna Gold outlines for the sciences in "Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1?" Where significant differences exist, what are the cyberinfrastructure implications of these differences? As this week's article by Inge Angevaare notes, a vital part of any digital curation plan is identifying and attending to the needs of one's designated community.

Collaboration with the sciences is undoubtedly key to developing a more robust cyberinfrastructure for the humanities, but, at the same time, humanities agendas should not be unduly shaped by the interests of the sciences. Sharing resources only works in so far as the end product serves the needs of both parties.