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U. of I. intends to play key role in nationwide digital humanities effort
|
Andrea
Lynn, Humanities Editor
217-333-2177;
andreal@illinois.edu
Released
5/9/2007
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
The University of Illinois, home to one of the world’s biggest
libraries, the nation’s top-ranked library and information school,
a nascent Center for Computing
in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a supercomputing center
and key scholars, is poised to become a leader in the effort to “digitize
the humanities.”
The effort involves designing and constructing research environments
in which humanities scholars can use high-performance computing tools
in shared digital networks to conduct research across broad swaths of
literature.
In the last year, John Unsworth, the dean of Illinois’ Graduate
School of Library and Information Science, has secured two major
technology grants from the Mellon Foundation to lead multi-institutional
projects in the digital humanities.
He also chaired the national commission that produced the recently
released report, “Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and
Social Sciences,”
on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies. In mid-April,
Unsworth presented highlights of the report at a meeting of national
digital centers and their sponsors in Washington, D.C.
Since becoming dean four years ago, Unsworth also has published two
books on digital humanities, taught courses on humanities computing,
and won the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities
Center.
Why do scholars in the humanities need new digital technologies?
“Coordinating and optimizing the symbiosis between the computer’s
mania for detail and the human’s sense of the gestalt becomes
more important every day, as more and more of the cultural record becomes
digital, and yet our instruments for exploring that digital cultural
record remain the blunt instruments of searching and browsing,”
Unsworth said.
In January, to that end, the Mellon Foundation announced that Illinois
would receive a two-year $1 million grant for a text-mining collaboration
called “Metadata Offer New Knowledge” (MONK).
Unsworth serves as the Illinois lead for MONK’s international
and multi-institutional research team that includes participants from
five other universities and the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications, based at Illinois.
MONK brings together and extends two previous research projects: the
Nora Project, a multi-institutional Mellon-funded endeavor for which
Unsworth served as project director, and WordHoard, directed by Martin
Mueller at Northwestern.
Nora and WordHoard applied similar techniques to analyze and explore
digital humanities collections – 18th- and 19th-century British
and American literature in Nora, and earlier texts, including Shakespeare,
Chaucer and early Greek epic literature, in WordHoard. Merging Nora
and WordHoard in MONK will create “an inclusive and comprehensive
text-mining and text-analysis tool-kit of software for scholars in the
humanities,” Unsworth said.
MONK is “an unusually large collaboration for humanities computing
that brings together some of the best and the brightest in the field
across North America.”
In March, Michael Welge, of NCSA, won a $1.2 million grant from the
Mellon Foundation, for an infrastructure project, with Unsworth serving
as one of the co-principal investigators. SEASR, or Software Environment
for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, begins in June.
According to the project’s online report, SEASR seeks to deliver
“a means of addressing the challenges of transforming information
into knowledge by constructing the software bridges that are required
to move from the unstructured and semi-structured data world to the
structured data world.”
The aim is to make content collections more useful by integrating two
research and development frameworks – NCSA’s Data-to-Knowledge
(D2K) and IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture
– into an easily useable analytical platform that researchers
in any discipline, but particularly the humanities, can easily learn
and adapt for their own scholarly research.
Other key people in SEASR are Loretta Auvil, NCSA and U. of I., co-principal
investigator; Duane Searsmith, U. of I., technical lead; Tara Bazler,
Indiana University, usability evaluator; and Tim Cole, U. of I., community
adviser.
According to Unsworth, SEASR links with the MONK project and “has
the potential to bring MONK to bear on existing, real-world digital
library collections.”
Unsworth also is co-principal investigator, with the U. of I. Library’s
Beth Sandore, of a $2.6 million project, the ECHO DEPository, a digital
preservation research and development project at Illinois in partnership
with the Online Computer Library Center and funded by the Library of
Congress.
Project partners include NCSA and WILL-AM-FM in Urbana, Ill., two other universities and state libraries in five
states.
Unsworth’s interest in digital humanities preceded his move to
Illinois. From 1993 to 2003 he served as the first director of the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and as a professor in the
English department at the University of Virginia. Prior to that, he
taught at North Carolina State University.
What first got a scholar of contemporary American fiction so interested
in the uses of computers in the humanities?
“My interest in computers is directly traceable to procrastination,”
Unsworth said.
“Specifically, while word-processing my dissertation in the late
1980s, I discovered that writing macros, or simple programs, to sort
and format my bibliography, or reprogramming the splash screen in
Wordstar, was a great way to avoid writing chapters, or worse, to
avoid revising them.”
More seriously, he said his involvement with computing became a “sustained,”
rather than a “fugitive” engagement, when it “met
up with my interest in publishing and scholarly communication in 1990.”
At North Carolina State, Unsworth and some junior faculty colleagues
wanted to start a journal on postmodernism, but the school couldn’t
cover the printing and mailing costs, “so the director of the
library suggested that we visit the people in campus computing and explore
a new software package called ‘Listserv,’ which is how we
ended up publishing the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the
humanities, by e-mail, three years before the advent of the Web.”
Unsworth said that while there is a great deal of academic activity
in advancing digital humanities development, the movement is in its
infancy and barriers exist.
Funding is one problem, he said, since large-scale projects can be costly.
“But that problem is, happily, being mitigated,” Unsworth
said, “as private and government foundations are beginning to
coordinate their grant-making, partly in response to the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure
report.”
Another problem is the academic reward system.
“Although the field of digital humanities is respectable with
deans, provosts and funding agencies, it is often still regarded with
suspicion at the department level as somehow less than scholarly.”
That conclusion is supported by “The Book as the Gold Standard
for Tenure and Promotion in the Humanistic Disciplines,” a study
put together by Leigh Estabrook, a former dean of the library school.
Funding for the study was providing by the Mellon Foundation.
Unsworth said that even at Illinois, one of the most wired and digitally
active campuses in the world, “junior level faculty in the humanities
who have interesting ideas and good skills for mounting digital humanities
projects hold off until they are tenured.”
“That’s too bad – and it should underline the need
for department heads and senior faculty members to make digital humanities
safe for junior faculty.”
