Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
John H. D'Arms, President
American Council of Learned Societies
How does--and how will--the network, now and in the future, transform learning and scholarship in the Humanities? Any attempt to answer that question requires that we ask a prior one: How do we map the intellectual territory that falls under the broad rubric of the Humanities? The organizers of this panel, naturally and understandably, had one definition in mind, a definition congenial to the universe of collection development specialists within research libraries, libraries which, in turn, are themselves overwhelmingly embedded in research universities, and these, in their turn, have their own working system of academic taxonomy. The taxonomy is reflected in the composition of this ARL panel. The Humanities are not social sciences, the health sciences, behavioral science, or physical science. For the purposes of this discussion let us start by accepting this definition, and spell it out: The Humanities are all fields of study that are normally grouped together within colleges of arts and sciences, identified as departments and programs in humanities, and in which the Ph.D. is the highest earned degree: Classics; languages and literatures ancient, modern, and comparative; American culture; history of art; linguistics; the theory, composition, and history of music; philosophy; and religion. We must further include all or parts of four fields usually classified as social sciences: All periods of history; within anthropology, the subfields of ethnology and archaeology; and the more historical and philosophical areas of political science and sociology.
But we would also need, on this definition, to find room for emerging interdisciplinary fields and groupings that have to date only intermittently begun to offer the Ph.D.--fields like cultural, ethnic, and gender studies; or literature and law. And a further interdisciplinary trend within the humanities can not be emphasized too strongly. Since 1950, the visual arts have emerged as the dominant set of aesthetic forms in our society, and now have established secure beach-heads in humanistic territory that was once primarily, sometimes exclusively, text-based. I have discussed this trend elsewhere; 2 it is most notable in literature, history, anthropology, musicology, religion, and cultural studies.
You will have noticed that a certain porousness and blurring of boundaries has already crept into this working definition of the Humanities. So be it; research librarians ought to be comfortable with destabilized boundaries--they are a fact of professional life. But I should also point out that this definition is considerably more precise, and restricted, than that offered by the authors of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Occasional Paper Computing and the Humanities;3 those authors seem to have had in mind something more like what the French understand as "sciences humaines."
Accepting the definition of this panel's organizers, then, albeit in the modified form suggested above, we can point to a number of current projects and achievements that enable us to glimpse exciting possible futures--and also problematic issues--for Humanities research. I start with my own field of Classics. The immensely pressing questions surrounding literacy in modern society have their counterparts in the ancient world, where only a tiny percentage of elites could read or write--but exactly how many, or how few, and how were those few distributed across lines of class, rank, gender, and geography? Part of the answer to that research question lies in the evidence of documentary papyri preserved in Egypt. The Duke Data Bank, an electronic archive marked up for search and analysis, introduces us in an instant to the Egyptian world of scribes who signed legal documents on behalf of rich and powerful patrons who were themselves illiterates. But there are thousands more documentary papyri in the Michigan collection than there are at Duke, and repositories at Columbia, Berkeley, Yale, and Princeton add to the North American evidence. Scholarship will advance when the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS), a collaborative networked project among these institutions, equipped with common technical standards and search protocols, is fully operable by the year 2002.
At Tufts University, Gregory Crane's Perseus Project, a digital library of the classical Greek world, has been under continuous development since the spring of 1987. Crane and his colleagues, who presently include three postdoctorate students and two full-time graduate assistants, intend to expand their coverage of Greek culture to embrace not just the Roman world, but also the English Renaissance. What networking capabilities exist, and what priority does Perseus attach, to linking its library to the APIS project? (Perseus has already helped to place the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri online and its director expresses his eagerness to create links to APIS materials.) Or to the masses of digitized ancient cartographic information which next year will become available with the appearance of The Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, the first comprehensive publication of its kind in this century? Or, for that matter, to another major component of ancient material culture, that of ancient coins? The website of the American Numismatic Society (ANS), one of sixty-one learned societies under the ACLS umbrella, now presents its catalogue of 220,000 Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins online, but only a small part of this collection is digitized, and the ANS is struggling with the question of how to compare more than a few images at a time. No one to my knowledge is presently asking the next obvious question, how such an eventually digitized ANS collection--over which ANS will of course wish to assert its control of rights of reproduction--should relate to the expressed desire of the director of the Perseus digital library to be networked "as smoothly as possible" with other electronic collections. Nor is ANS yet pondering whether or how its collection of ancient coins, one of the five largest in the world, ought to be designed to be linked, for research purposes, to the others of the "big five": The 800,000 coins in the collection of the British Museum, the Bibliothñque Nationale in Paris, and the major Museums of Berlin and Vienna.
Gregory Crane was trained principally in ancient literature; the conception of the Greek world that drives the Perseus Project is one in which understanding and interpreting literature has always been primary (though Crane has also invested heavily in assembling a decently representative database of illustrations of Greek vases and other well-published museum objects). But the material evidence just discussed here--papyri, maps, coins, and one might have added inscriptions (the Greek and Latin documents inscribed on stone, bronze, lead, and ceramics)--is of greatest interest primarily to classical historians, not to literary scholars. This prompts the question: What collecting principles and networking capabilities ought to govern the assembly and structuring of a classical research library, a library embracing all of antiquity, in the digital age--an age of hugely enhanced technological capacity, but where personnel, time, and financial resources remain limited, never sufficient to our aspirations?
Since the ugly word "resources" has now surfaced in this discussion, how are we thinking about their prioritization? The APIS project alone, should it be successfully completed as planned, will cost $2 million, the Classical Atlas Project $3.5 million. But the entire field of Classics and Classical Archaeology produces fewer than 100 Ph.D.s per year in the United States, compared to 1000 in English and 850 in History. 4 Surely, figures like these confront all funders with a difficult dilemma. Let us take John Unsworth, the Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (UVA), as an example of such a funder. At UVA, John Dobbins, a Classical Archaeologist, needs resources to develop his imaginative CAD project, which is transforming our understanding of the chronology of the public buildings of Roman Pompeii. Also at UVA, Jerome McGann has created a hypermedia environment for studying the complete works of the British poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the ring leader of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. McGann's project (which will ultimately be published online, by the University of Michigan Press) is farsighted: Drawing upon computerized tools that deploy hypermedia networks and digitization, he is building a scholarly model especially applicable to all creative geniuses who explored and exploited the expressive potential of more than one medium, in this case, painting, poetry, and book design. The Rossetti Archive breaks through the constraints of earlier hypermedia projects like the Perseus Project because from the outset McGann squarely faced this problem: How to incorporate digitized images into the computerized field in a way that effectively opens them, as well as the textual materials, to searching and analysis, that is, to the full computational power of the hyper-editing environment. 5 McGann's approach highlights the critical need to understand the material conceptually, on as many levels as we can, before we digitize: Otherwise, as David Green has noted, it will remain imprisoned in its own electronic box. But, even despite McGann's conceptual clarity, his problems are only partially solved; he requires additional time and additional resources--an issue not just for McGann, but probably also for Unsworth.
Third, and still at UVA, Edward Ayers, an American historian, has worked for several years to create a hypermedia archive of thousands of sources that permit scholars and students to follow two communities, one Northern and one Southern, through their respective experiences of the Civil War. Three-dimensional maps, newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, church records, census data, and military records present a full multiplicity of evidence on which Ayers' own scholarly narrative is based, and permit visitors to the website to recognize, analyze, and construct alternative patterns. And not only this: Ayers has made fully accessible the complete record of the research on which his book-length narratives are based. This marks a new stage in users' ability not only to do their own scholarship, but to evaluate the scholarship of Ayers. Yet, thus far only one-third of the archive, on the coming of the war, is accessible; Ayers and his team continue to prepare the materials for the Civil War years and for Emancipation.
How does UVA prioritize among these worthy but competing claims--by Dobbins, McGann, Ayers--on its resources? To lift the funding question to a higher order of organizational magnitude, how does the Research Division of the NEH, confronted by increasing numbers of requests for support for these and other networked archival projects with proven results and high potential, sort out its funding priorities for such projects, given a 40% decline in its budget since 1995? And how will all of these and scores of other individual and collaborative digital projects become viably institutionalized; that is, how will--and how should--they relate to the ongoing library or other budgets of the academic institutions in which they were incubated? What will become of the projects when their entrepreneurial directors move on to new experiments, or to other universities?
But prioritizing resources, though critical, is only one of the issues. As we all prepare for the challenges and opportunities of the networked future, we should try to be clear about the special characteristics of the Humanities, the features which set them apart from other investigative territory. Keeping these features constantly in mind may give us a framework within which we may think more strategically about our future needs. I want to single out two of these special features.
The first is that the Humanities bear an enormous responsibility for the interpretation of the past: Piety towards the past and critique of the past, balanced in a continuous and dynamic tension. The tension lies in the fact that no humanities discipline can be fully understood except as part of a continuing historical tradition; but at the same time, the past has to be brought continuously to life--and that means constant interpretation and reinterpretation. Better and more accessible bibliographic cataloguing plays perhaps an obvious but essential part here--for example, the English Short Title Catalogue within the RLG's RLIN database, which not only provides access to a much wider array of English printed materials, but also permits new levels of questions to be asked and to be addressed in much more efficient ways (e.g., What was published immediately after the South Sea Bubble burst? What provincial printers dealt with the issue?).
Given these obligations to the past, I doubt whether the principal scholarly priorities of humanists are likely any time soon to resemble that of theoretical physicists, who every day are allegedly posting and perusing new research papers on the website maintained by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Humanists have greater need of multi-institutional, collaborative approaches to accessing the gateways to the past. Among the gateways, finding aids are crucial; the American Heritage Virtual Archive Project is making available hundreds of finding aids to primary source materials in American history and culture in the collections of the libraries at Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Virginia, and Duke. The great value of the Virtual Archive Project is as an experimental prototype: Its results will offer guides to approaching the much more complex task of assembling a national union repository of finding aids that, according to one estimate, could amount to 19 million pages of text, in 700,000 finding aids, in 20,000 repositories. 6
Humanists have obligations, of course, not just to America's past but to multiple pasts, of the cultures and civilizations throughout the world. In fact, a major issue for the Humanities community ought to be the development of a strategy for deciding what and how to digitize. This strategy will need to build in an international perspective, including active engagement with projects and initiatives in other countries. The strategy also needs to be realistic, and to recognize that the (laudable) democratic aspirations to make digitized collections generally accessible across and beyond educational sectors--the stated goal of the consortial AMICO (Art Museum Image Consortium) project, recently mounted by the Association of Art Museum Directors--may clash with the qualitative standards for metadata and contextualized coded search protocols that will be essential if networked collections are going to be seriously helpful to scholars. And how do AMICO's democratic intentions, and also their plans to include only a selection of art works from individual museums, square with standards of librarianship, particularly librarians' responsibility to establish a collection of record?
The second distinctive feature of most fields of the Humanities is that they quite curiously combine detachment with involvement, the search for impersonal objectivity with irrepressible elements of personal idiosyncrasy. Humanists of course interrogate their source materials for accuracy and bias; they evaluate alternative explanations; they connect their particular narratives, readings, or literary or aesthetic interpretations to principles that apply to broader ranges of human experience--in all these ways they seek objectivity. But the element of the personal pervades too; as the late Charles Frankel astutely noted: "[T]he humanities are that form of knowledge in which the knower is revealed. All knowledge becomes humanistic when this effect takes place, when we contemplate not only a proposition but (also) the proposer, when we hear the human voice behind what is being said." 7 Rhetoric, persuasion, the expressive use of language, and eloquence are integral to the humanities. Helen Vendler's magisterial interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnets is a humanistic triumph--and all the stronger for its accompanying CD, where we hear her voice, with its emphases and tone, reinforcing what she has written about the poet's meaning. 8
Given the power of the personal voice in humanistic scholarship, I will be surprised if more Humanists do not begin to think more adventurously about ways to exploit the audio possibilities that will be a part of the future technological environment. At Columbia, Stephen Murray's multimedia recreation of the building of the medieval French Cathedral of Amiens, where one can read texts, watch the process of construction through three dimensional CAD, and hear choral song in acoustical conditions appropriate to the period, offers a glimpse of the possibilities. The personal voice of great scholars and critics of past generations--Erwin Panofsky, Lily Ross Taylor, Meyer Shapiro, or Edmund Wilson, for example--may be lost to us, but that need never happen again; indeed, unprecedented opportunities for scholarly immortality beckon.
Who has been seriously modeling what a scholarly article in a Humanities journal will look and sound like by 2002? As Ekman and Quandt have pointed out, it is not difficult to imagine software for "Humanities learned journal article-writing" that has the "feel" of a Windows 95 application: A dropdown menu allows the user to select the journal in whose style the paper is to be written. The networked information displaying the full record of the evidence on which an argument is based will interconnect argument and underlying data in unprecedentedly helpful ways. Will the voice of the author--or the voices of different authors, if this is collaborative scholarship--also become an essential component of the scholarly product? And how will we judge its quality? How will such articles be assessed by journal editors, tenure and promotion committees, or the fellowship selection panels who conduct scholarly peer review?
To conclude: We can point to often superb performances of those leading our Humanities Computing Centers on the campuses--Unsworth and Duggan at UVA, Mark Taylor at Williams, Susan Hockey at the University of Alberta, Willard McCarty at Kings College, London, to name only five. Still, hard conceptual thought within the broader Humanities community--the community largely comprised by the sixty-one learned societies of the ACLS--needs to go on before we can speak with full confidence about how humanistic scholarship will be conducted in the brave new world sketched out by the more visionary of this meeting's speakers. Hard thought--discipline by discipline--about what, substantively and methodologically, is at the heart of what we do. Hard work in persistently rethinking traditional categories, in order to be confident when we reaffirm--as we should and must--their enduring value. Hard work, finally, to better inform the computer scientists and engineers--who have to date designed most of our technology--what the Humanities, in essence, are and how we Humanists conduct our scholarship.
American Numismatic Society (AMS). Online. Available: http://www.amnumsoc.org/
Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS). Online. University of Michigan University Library (Contributions). Available: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/projects/apis/documentation/neh.app.97.html
"Advanced Papyrological Information System." Narrative of the grant proposal submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Online. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. Available: http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu./papyrus/texts/APISgrant.html
The American Heritage Project. Online. Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE. Available: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/amher/
Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO). Online. Art Museum Network. Available: http://www.amico.org/
"Atlas of the Greek and Roman World." Classical Atlas Project. Online. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Available: http://www.unc.edu/depts/cl_atlas/
Ayers, Edward L. The Valley of the Shadow: Living the Civil War in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Online. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). Available: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow/vshadow.html
Dobbins, John. Pompeii Forum Project. Online. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). Available: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pompeii/
The Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP). Online. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. Available: http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/DDBDP.htm
Ginsparg, Paul. xxx.lanl.gov e-Print Archive. Online. Available: http://xxx.lanl.gov/
McGann, Jerome J. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive. Online. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). Available: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/rossetti.html
Murray, Stephen. Amiens Cathedral: A Multimedia Project for the Columbia University Core Curriculum. Online. Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Available: http://www.arch.columbia.edu/DDL/projects/amiens/index.html
Perseus Project. Online. Available: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/