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The Report of the ACLS Commission on
Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences
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Emerging Knowledge Environments
The Nakata Lecture
University of Illinois, Chicago
April 28. 2006
John UnsworthGraduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Commission MembersPaul Courant Professor of Economics and former Provost University of Michigan Sarah Fraser Associate Professor and Chair Art History, Northwestern University Mike Goodchild Director, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science Professor, Geography University of California, Santa Barbara Margaret Hedstrom Associate Professor, School of Information University of Michigan Charles Henry Vice President and Chief Information Officer Rice University
Peter B. Kaufman President, Intelligent Television Jerome McGann John Stewart Bryan Professor English, University of Virginia Roy Rosenzweig Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History & New Media Director, Center for History & New Media George Mason University John Unsworth (Chair) Dean and Professor Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Bruce Zuckerman Professor, School of Religion Director, Archaeological Research Collection University of Southern California
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 AdvisorsClifford Lynch, DirectorCoalition for Networked Information
Deanna MarcumAssociate Librarian for Library
ServicesLibrary of Congress
Abby SmithDirector of ProgramsCouncil on Library and Information
ResourcesWashington, DC
Steve Wheatley, Vice PresidentAmerican Council of Learned
Societies
Dan AtkinsProfessor, School of InformationDirector, Alliance for Community
TechnologyUniversity of Michigan
Christine L. BorgmanProfessor & Presidential ChairDepartment of Information StudiesUniversity of California, Los
Angeles
James HerbertSenior NSF/NEH AdvisorNational Science Foundation
International AdvisorsDr. Sigrun EckelmannProgrammdirektorinOrganisationseinheitBereich Wissenschaftliche
InformationssystemeDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Muriel FoulonneauFrench Ministry of Culture, Minerva
project, and European Commission Visiting Assistant ProfessorUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dr. Stefan Gradmann / Stellvertretender Direktor
Regionales Rechenzentrum der Universität Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany
Bjørn HenrichsenAdm.dir. / Exec. DirectorNorsk samfunnsvitenskapelig
datatjeneste AS (NSD)Norwegian Social Science Data Services
Ltd.Bergen, Norway
Dr Michael JubbDirector of Policy and ProgrammesArts and Humanities Research BoardBristol, United Kingdom
Jaap Kloosterman International Institute of Social HistoryAmsterdam - 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
Executive Summary 3 Introduction: Definitions 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?................................ ................................ ............... 10
Ch a p ter 1 : Pos s ib ilities 13 A Grand Challenge for the Humanities and Social Sciences ................................ ...... 13 Decades of Accelerating Change ................................ ................................ ............... 15 Cultural Infrastructure and the Public ................................ ................................ ........ 17 Seeing in New Ways ................................ ................................ ................................ . 19 Working in New Ways ................................ ................................ .............................. 20
Ch a p ter 2 : Ch a llenges 23 Financing ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 23 Copyright ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 27 Privacy................................ ................................ ................................ ...................... 29 The Nature of Humanities and Social Science Data ................................ ................... 31 Ephemerality ................................ ................................ ................................ ............. 32 Current Institutional Models of Scholarly Communication ................................ ........ 33 The Conservative Culture of Scholarship................................ ................................ ... 36
Table of Contents
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................................ ................................ ............... 45 Explication: ................................ ................................ ................................ ........... 45 2. Coordinate stakeholders to 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 to support scholarship that contributes to 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 to use them..................... 61
Conclusion ................................ ................................ ................................ ................ 64 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 TechnologiesNational Academies PressDC 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 GutmanDirector of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Professor of History University of Michigan, Ann ArborChicago 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 EvansExecutive DirectorNational Historical Publications and Records CommissionDC 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]
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.
Executive Summary
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. be accessible as a public good
2. be sustainable3. provide interoperability4. facilitate collaboration 5. 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
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
Requirements (cont.)
InvestmentFinally, 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
