Tue 5 Jun, 11:00-12:30
Session 2: Roundtable: Coalition of Digital Humanities Centers
Neil Fraistat, John Unsworth, Katherine L. Walter, Julia Flanders, Matthew Kirschenbaum
N. Fraistat began with a summary of the NEH-hosted summit of digital humanities centers and funders, 12-13 Apr 2007. The point was “to take seriously” the ACLS call for such centers in their Cyberinfrastructure Report. The representatives who met sought common ground. Overall, they favor increased collaboration (advantages outweigh disadvantages); funders generally thought collaboration would yield benefits, too.
The group would like to build a network from smaller groups. Three mandates: make it international; make it broad and inclusive (social sciences, digital arts, etc.) (N.B. a center should be larger than a single project and should have some history / promise of persistence); make it free (members should consider contributing time/resources, however).
Five were elected to serve as a startup committee. They’ve put out a call for participation and set up a discussion list as well as a wiki. The next meeting is in Washington, DC, 12-13 December 2007. They’re also talking with Google about humanities-based initiatives, and with the Department of Energy (?) about opportunities for humanities scholars to use supercomputers for relevant research.
[This talk was very difficult to take notes on.]
J. Unsworth said that it’s easy to take on more than anyone can handle; he would prefer this group not to be very organized so that it doesn’t become stuck. He walked through parts of the wikis.
A shared rationale for why such centers are important (to take back to one’s home institution) is laid out in Unsworth’s own talk at the summit. The centers themselves are part of the infrastructure, of course. . . . Here Unsworth highlighted “Recommendation 5: Encourage digital scholarship”— We hear about tools and interface issues, but relatively little about the human aspect of that, namely people who’re trained to deal with the tools and interface: the director of the San Deigo Supercomputing Center said that such people “provide the critical human network required to prototype, integrate, harden, and nurture ideas from concept to maturity”; Unsworth made the point that the same could be said of the digital humanities.
K. Walter talked of useful connections that could be made: grant collaborations, an exchange of ideas on how individual centers conduct their concerns (share what works), and so on. She also noted that it’d be helpful to compare U.S. funding models with what goes on in Canada, the UK, and elsewhere.
J. Flanders commented that as a field matures, it becomes interesting to see how various monads have developed. Until recently, the idea of centers for digital humanities didn’t really exist. The summit, then, was one of a number of events expressing a Zeitgeist of a field’s coming of age, and we have lots of proof-of-concept things now. Where we’re weaker is sustaining shiny ideas; one can get funding to start an interesting project, but carrying it to its final conclusions or enabling it to have a continuing existence is much more difficult and complex. [Cf. the Imagining History project as presented at Kalamazoo, to be written up soon here.]
Where this initiative could help is not to provide a portal with lots of tools or doc, but to build a portal that encourages people who have created things to finish and publish their work so that they can contribute them to such a portal. Many things are incomplete due to a lack of a venue where they can be shared, Flanders thinks.
Two other issues: one is advocacy for the specific needs/concerns of digital humanities. It helps to know where the leverage points are in this social infrastructure—bootstrapping problem, perhaps. (An example is the MLA exhortation to consider digital projects for tenure review, and the much slower pace at which MLA members have adopted it in their home institutions when actually conducting reviews.) How does one create the next generation of experts, and which experiences or types of training do they need? (E.g., CLIR postdoctoral fellowships. [Consider timing, though: I wanted to apply two years ago but wasn’t yet finished; last year, either the offerings were not suitable for what I could offer and would like to gain, or they were less attractive than the job I already hold.])
We need to create an infrastructure that doesn’t sink under its own weight.
M. Kirschenbaum announced that CLIR will contribute to the strengthening of digital centers’ infrastructure by studying existing U.S. research centers, convening meetings to explore current challenges, and co-host symposia to figure out (e.g.) what sorts of research scholars can conduct using only digital resources. From these activities CLIR hopes to have built up much more awareness by June 2008.
Discussion was opened.
D. Robey (U Reading) talked a bit about the UK position: whereas the US hopes to have increased funding come out of this activity, the UK has had funding which is now tapering off [see also AHDS petition]. [I missed a bit here] A number of seminars occurred to encourage people to recognize that their peers in other disciplines are sometimes doing similar kinds of research; funding for those seminars ends March 2008. To ensure that a community is kept going, they’re trying to collect resources in one place for others to consult, including information about projects and with an organizing taxonomy applied: not only what’s being done but who’s doing it. Obviously, that needs funding to maintain as well, but less. . . .
Unsworth responded that the reduction of national funding is difficult to deal with as an individual, but when one’s part of a larger group one’s peers can speak up about the importance of one’s work.
[Missed most of the second comment; his second point is that it’d be useful to make the humanities cool in a way that’d catch the news media’s attention]
S. Ramsay noted that the panelists had nearly convinced him that each of them decides what they do. 😉 Faculty, staff, departments, and so on are bound in various ways; in some ways it’s “better” to develop a clever prototype, or to work alone and keep all the credit.
H. Short added that if centers are too inward-looking, we might just fall in. In the phrase “digital humanities,” “digital” comes first. . . . At King’s College things succeeded largely because they reached across the humanities faculty, such that many now have a stake in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities’s own continued success. Also, we mustn’t lose sight of how important we are to straight humanities research—part of a bridge to what looks outdated, etc.
L. Lancaster said that libraries are missing from the current conversation and should be in.
Unsworth added to Ramsay that it’s partly a principal investigator issue: a researcher in medieval history who collaborates with digitally savvy colleagues doesn’t want a prototype, they want something they can get on with.
M. Wilkins suggested re: upcoming Google meeting that he wants access to their corpus! [So say we all.]
Kirschenbaum added that “we’re” quite conscious of the importance of libraries. Also, not all centers are the same, given variance in reporting and funding structures, and thus can’t necessarily draw on local resources in the same way (or those resources may not be present). Is a particular center research-oriented or service-oriented?
[missed next comment, but I think it asked what “the humanities” are, contextually]
Flanders replied that the definitions are loose—the common goals are more significant.
L. Hunyadi talked about having established a dh center at the University of Debrecen a year ago without financial support. They work on applications and R&D. He supports the idea of showing relevance and viability to increase momentum.
D. Porter commented on activities that she’s helped to organize to publicize so that people will find TEI et al. less foreign.
Unsworth quipped that perhaps we should be talking about the “humanities digit.”
J. Smith said it’s difficult to get things done as a sole scholar in math/sci. He thought he was introducing us to the idea of the principal investigator.
Fraistat asked whether anyone would be willing to comment on Canadian or general E.U. infrastructure.
T. ? commented on Framework 7, which has a relatively small humanities component. [Someone whispered in front of me that unfortunately, the money isn’t 100% in place yet.]
M. Eberle-Sinatra spoke a bit about Canadian funding sources, [something] and SSHRC.
Fraistat noted that it can be difficult to encourage nationally based funding sources to fuel international projects.
Walter asked whether any of the funding org reps present would like to speak. 🙂 [missed name] from the NEH said that five new programs target specific types of activities, e.g., the first stage when it’s difficult to snag funding or challenge grants that support long-term endeavors. She admitted that one does need to have an established presence to apply for such things.
Fraistat emphasized that it’d be great to have completion grants, not only startup grants. 🙂
The NEH rep = H. Aguera.