Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities:
The Implications of Electronic Information
The Institutional Implications of Electronic Information
William Y. Arms
Vice President for Computing Services
Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
Electronic information is changing scholarship. Effective change requires
leadership. The allocation of resources and the enthusiasm with which senior
faculty embrace new forms of information will shape future universities.
Leaders must set ambitious but sensible expectations, recognizing that a
venture such as an electronic library may take a decade or more.
Major projects in electronic information resemble the experimental sciences,
with large interdisciplinary teams. Such projects require more money than
universities can provide, but the humanities cannot rely on crumbs from
government agencies whose mission is to support the sciences. Humanities
departments have not yet learned to reward these new forms of scholarship in
the tenure process. Peer review often encourages scholars to follow
well-established paths and penalizes bold innovation.
Electronic information is leading to open libraries to which many organizations
contribute jointly. This will require changes in the traditions and training of
librarians. Librarians will need support from their universities to reallocate
resources. Scholarly publishing is under economic pressure. Electronic
information both aggravates the problems and offers a glimmer of hope for a
solution.
This is an exciting time for the humanities. Universities that welcome the new
scholarship can make fundamental contributions in almost every discipline.
© William Y. Arms, 1993
Change
Introduction
Universities have difficulty in handling change, yet our age is above all a
time of change. Electronic information and computer tools are creating new
areas of scholarship and changing the possibilities in others. Word
processing, online library catalogs, fax, and electronic mail are well
established. Electronic texts, databases, digital libraries, and electronic
publications are making the computer part of the scholarship itself. Digital
audio and high-definition television are close behind.
Whether these developments are desirable is irrelevant. They appear
inevitable. New fields of study are opening up, new methods of study are
emerging, and new tools are taking the drudgery out of traditional academic
work. Universities must recognize this situation as an opportunity and make
the changes that will stimulate new developments, without sacrificing
traditional scholarship.
Effective change requires leadership. This is a time of financial stringency.
Growth in one area demands cuts in others. The allocation of resources made by
presidents, provosts, deans, and department heads will set the scene for
scholarship at a university. The enthusiasm with which senior faculty look
beyond the traditional methods in their disciplines to embrace the new will
decide the type of faculty appointed and the areas in which research is carried
out. Together they will shape their universities for the next generation.
This paper looks at some of these issues. Many of the examples come from three
universities where I have worked: the British Open University, Dartmouth
College, and Carnegie Mellon University. Each is a leader in using technology
for academic purposes. The universities are very different, yet their overall
experience is the same. The academic benefits of being a leader are great.
Each has gone through organizational stress to achieve leadership, but other
universities that tried to ignore technological change have suffered similar
stresses. It is surely better to be ambitious, accept the challenge, and
emerge as a leader than to reject the opportunities and be forced to play
"catch up."
Leadership
Both Dartmouth and Carnegie Mellon owe their success in campuswide computing to
presidents with a strategic vision and the determination to follow it through:
John Kemeny at Dartmouth and Richard Cyert at Carnegie Mellon. Both had to
wrestle with the tensions between tradition and innovation, the need to create
budgets for technical staff and equipment, and differing rewards for new forms
of scholarship. Both were fortunate to be president during times of
prosperity. The formation of the Open University was a personal project of the
prime minister, Harold Wilson. The support of his cabinet was vital for its
early success.
Lenin is quoted as saying that to stage a successful revolution requires only
that 5 percent of the population supports you. The number of faculty members
who supported the computing initiatives at Dartmouth and Carnegie Mellon was
certainly greater than 5 percent, but many faculty were reluctant fellow
travelers. In the 1970s, the department of mathematics at Dartmouth proclaimed
that all freshmen should pass a test in computer programming, but that the
faculty need not acquire even minimal proficiency.
As an example of the role of the president in setting priorities, during the
1980s Carnegie Mellon funded computing generously, but libraries and fine arts
were kept short of money. The type of research that a historian can carry out
at Carnegie Mellon today is heavily influenced by the good computing but
comparatively weak library collections that resulted from these priorities.
One historian, David Miller, has developed the Great American History Machine,
a computer system that combines census data from the nineteenth century with
algorithms for exploring history through those data. In a few seconds, it can
generate maps that show demographic, economic, or social characteristics of the
United States over the years. Each map would have required weeks of work by
traditional methods. The Great American History Machine contains no new data,
but it can turn obscure numbers into useful historical information.
Additional examples of how administrative decisions can influence the academic
program of a university come from Dartmouth. In the early 1970s, some of the
early work in handling classical Greek texts by computer was carried out at
Dartmouth. This expertise was lost because no department was prepared to use
its funds to support computing in the humanities. More recently, Dartmouth has
been building a computer collection of commentaries on Dante's The Divine
Comedy. The leader of the project, Robert Hollander of Princeton
University, has maintained a long-term commitment, but over the years all the
Dartmouth founders have left the university. The project has continued at
Dartmouth, however, because the university recognized its strategic importance.
The Allocation of Resources
The process by which resources are allocated at a research university is
arcane. In the United States there are two basic principles: this year's
allocation is the same as last year's, with very little reallocation; principal
investigators have almost total control over funds raised externally.
Moving resources from one area to build up another is fraught with
difficulties. The academic department dominated by tenured faculty is a
powerful force toward retaining the status quo. To close a department, however
moribund, is seen as an act of academic vandalism. When a corporation closes a
factory, its stock price usually goes up. When Columbia University closed its
library school, nobody's stock went up. There is little obvious incentive and
much vocal disincentive to change. That is why, in the 1960s, Oxford
University still had more professors of divinity than of mathematics.
In two years, 1969-1971, the founders of the Open University made hundreds of
basic decisions--more of them in those two years than most universities make in
a century. Most were superb, and the university has been a great success. A
few decisions were clearly wrong. Unfortunately, one of the mistakes was to
create an academic structure that blocks almost any suggestion for reallocating
resources. Decisions that were made in a few hours during the first two years
proved to be as immutable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians.
New initiatives require new funding. Resources can be found only by the
leaders of the university making hard choices. The director of the Ashmolean
Museum once mused that the best strategy for the museum was to sell part of its
collection to provide funds to look after the rest, but he doubted whether he
would retain his position if he carried out such a strategy. No dean of
humanities would advocate cutting faculty numbers to provide resources that
will make the remaining faculty more productive. Yet it is happening. Year by
year the portion of the budget that goes into computers and networks and
support staff increases, one per cent at a time. Meanwhile, in most
universities, the number of students per teaching faculty member creeps up.
The Management of Expectations
The term "management of expectations" was coined to describe some of the
difficulties faced by Athena, MIT's campuswide computing project. Every major
initiative begins with a vision. To create excitement and gather resources,
the leaders paint the vision to their university. Whatever the subsequent
achievements, they never equal the previous expectations. People ignore the
achievements and seize on the gaps to cry, "I told you so!" The superb
computing Carnegie Mellon enjoys today is very much the picture that Cyert
painted in 1980, yet few give him credit for it, preferring to lament the
failure to achieve all of his most more extreme objectives.
The same pattern can be seen in electronic libraries. Today's best, such as
the Mercury library at Carnegie Mellon, are but a small step toward a bold
vision. They are expensive, are difficult to use, and have tiny collections.
Those of us working in the field see computer systems improving rapidly,
electronic publishing blossoming, and equipment prices tumbling. We also see
steady progress in overcoming social, legal, and economic obstacles. We
believe that within ten years we can build electronic libraries that scholars
will love to use. We also know that before this is achieved, we will go down
blind alleys, slip schedules, and exceed budgets, but we are confident that the
results will be worthwhile. A university that wishes for the benefits must
embrace the vision, but must show patience while it is being realized.
The Humanities Faculty
Many of the organizational implications of electronic information are
particularly important for the humanities. Until quite recently, most
scholarship in the humanities could be carried out by a single individual, with
librarians and research assistants providing valuable support. Electronic
information is changing all of this.
Experimental and Interdisciplinary Scholarship
In some areas, humanities research is beginning to resemble the experimental
sciences, with interdisciplinary teams cooperating on long-term projects that
require substantial budgets for equipment and staff. Every humanities
department is acquiring an experimental component that requires permanent teams
of support staff, such as computer professionals, expensive equipment that must
be maintained, space for project teams, and administrative support. At the
very least, everybody would benefit from a personal computer connected to the
national networks.
Some of the leading projects in electronic information have been led by
established faculty in the humanities, but many have been maverick projects
with little institutional support. Sometimes junior faculty members have
pursued new ideas against the opposition of senior members in their
departments. On other occasions, scientists have applied their experience to
organize research projects that apply technology to topics in the humanities.
Some projects have been coordinated by publishers, librarians, or independent
scholars. The team that has built the Mercury electronic library at Carnegie
Mellon has been led by a group with backgrounds in libraries, computing,
economics, linguistics, operational research, and computer science.
The new Oxford English Dictionary is another such interdisciplinary
project. The first edition was created by James Morris and his colleagues over
four decades at the end of the nineteenth century. Photographs of Morris at
work in his grandly named "Scriptorium" in Oxford show a primitive shack filled
with slips of paper. The dictionary was a landmark in lexicography, but it
exists only as static printed pages. Keeping it up to date proved impossible.
The new dictionary is a computer database, encoded in the SGML mark-up
language. The ability to update it continually means that a wide variety of
publications can be created with minimal effort. This new Oxford English
Dictionary required cooperation between the world's largest team of
lexicographers, in Oxford, and a team of computational linguists at Waterloo
University in Ontario, with corporate support from IBM. Leadership of the new
edition was as much a question of administration--budgets, schedules,
personnel, and marketing--as of lexicography.
Many faculty members in the humanities have difficulty seeing themselves as
leaders of research teams and have difficulty accepting the constraints of
teamwork. A few fields, such as archaeology, have long had teams of people
with large budgets, but these are the exceptions. In contrast, a senior
scientist expects to be the leader of a team of people, supported by extensive
laboratories and computers. In high-energy physics, for example, projects have
become so large that published papers may have 100 names on them.
The central task at the Open University in the early days was to create course
materials. Some good faculty members proved incapable of working in course
teams. They could not accept that colleagues would suggest drastic changes to
drafts that they had worked hard to prepare, nor did they have the right skills
to present their own suggestions in ways that were constructive and helpful.
Several course teams collapsed in acrimony.
The key to interdisciplinary projects is personnel management. Universities
are plagued by caste distinctions that inhibit teamwork. Faculty treat
nonfaculty colleagues with disdain, professional librarians act like a medieval
guild, and computing professionals consider technical knowledge the only
measure of worth. The cultural divide between the humanities and the sciences
is well known, but an equally deep divide lies between scholars, librarians,
and computing professionals.
The wide difference in salaries is a further barrier. It is troubling to pay a
programmer more than a professor, or to see the dean of the medical school
earning twice as much as the president. Yet this disparity is necessary.
Top-class work requires top-class people, and top-class people in certain
essential fields have a high market value.
Cooperation between universities and industry can be important in major
projects, but brings its own cultural differences. The Andrew project that
developed the computing system at Carnegie Mellon brought IBM staff to work on
campus. At first, the IBM staff thought that the university people lacked
discipline because they worked erratic hours. The university staff considered
the IBM people uncommitted because they worked regular hours.
Rewards and Recognition
Academic reputations are made by peer review, through publication of journal
articles and academic monographs, and through committees of senior faculty who
determine promotions. Recent incidents in which ignorant politicians have
tinkered with the award of grants show the importance of peer review in
maintaining academic standards. However, peer review has one major
disadvantage: It encourages scholars to follow well-established paths and
penalizes bold innovation. Despite having John Kemeny as president, Dartmouth
denied tenure to one of the pioneers in natural language processing because his
work was realized in a computer program, not as papers in learned journals.
The most prominent hurdle in an academic career is the award of tenure. The
tenure process is one of the reasons that American universities have such
vigorous research programs, but it can also inhibit true innovation. Several
of the leaders who have applied technology in the humanities have been urged at
crucial times in their careers to concentrate on traditional research that was
likely to gain them tenure, rather than to continue with their more creative
work.
While a junior faculty member in classics at Harvard University, Gregory Crane
began work on the project known as Perseus, which uses the concept known as
"hypermedia" to link sources such as texts and maps with tools such as
dictionaries. In particular, Crane has aimed to give the general student an
appreciation of the poems of the Greek poet Pindar. The importance of Perseus
does not lie in its sources. The scholarship lies in the approach and in the
organization of existing materials by highlighting links between them. Some
traditional scholars refuse to call this scholarship.
Preston Covey, a philosopher at Carnegie Mellon, is a pioneer in using
multimedia videodiscs to explore issues in applied ethics. To carry out this
work he left his tenure track position and accepted an administrative
appointment.
To an outsider, Crane and Covey appear as pioneers carrying out true research.
Yet each of them jeopardized a conventional career by not following the
well-trodden track of previous generations. Covey's story has a happy outcome.
An enlightened department went outside the university's usual procedures and
awarded him tenure, but his case may be unique in American higher education.
Harvard is less flexible than Carnegie Mellon. With no prospect of tenure at
Harvard, Crane is moving to Tufts University.
Money
Interdisciplinary work with a large experimental component needs money. In the
sciences, research teams and their equipment are so expensive that universities
long ago abandoned any attempt to support them from their own resources.
Success in scientific research is highly dependent on raising money from the
government or industry. Universities use their own money to recruit new
science faculty and to provide them with laboratories that they can use as a
base to raise further funding.
The science community has a well-organized lobbying effort to raise government
money. The humanities make few such efforts. As a result, direct government
support for the humanities in the United States is a tiny proportion of all
research funding, about 2 percent, compared with 10 percent in many European
countries. Perhaps because of this dearth of funding support, researchers and
funding agencies in the humanities are generally reluctant to recognize the
size of budget that is needed to tackle large interdisciplinary projects. The
success of the Commission on Preservation and Access in raising money to
preserve brittle books is a rare demonstration of a concerted effort to seek
major government support for the humanities. A central part of this effort was
the production of the "Slow Fires" video-recording that showed the destructive
effects of acidic paper. Such creative use of lobbying techniques is rare in
the humanities.
A current trend is for traditional supporters of scientific research to support
general projects in electronic information. A notable example was the National
Science Foundation's creation of the backbone of the national network. The
immediate need was to support scientific research, but the benefits have
accrued to the entire academic community. Program officers in the Department
of Defense have also taken a broad view and have supported widely applicable
research.
The humanities, however, cannot rely on picking up crumbs from agencies whose
primary mission is elsewhere. Although a few private foundations generously
support the humanities, lack of funding for large humanities projects is a
problem that should not be minimized. More money is needed, and our
universities are not rich enough to raise it internally.
Libraries
In the past, universities provided the humanities scholar with a library,
perhaps a museum, but few other resources. A university with a large library
has had an advantage in attracting faculty. In the future, we can expect a
university that provides its faculty with good electronic information to have a
similar advantage.
The vision of the electronic library is at least 25 years old, but, until
recently, developments were extremely slow. This is changing. The new
research library will no longer be a passive repository, but will provide
instantaneous and interactive access to information, with the ability to sift,
sort, rearrange, and reformat that information.
A key question is whether existing library organizations have the flexibility
to fulfill this role and whether the electronic library will develop within or
outside traditional libraries. The signals are mixed. It is clear, however,
that the training of librarians must change dramatically. The University of
Michigan recently fired a shot that should be heard around the world. Dan
Atkins, an engineer with no formal library background, was appointed dean of
the library school. The new libraries will have to draw talent and expertise
from a great range of disciplines. Yet, today, almost every library needlessly
restricts its choices by requiring an MLS degree from candidates for
professional positions.
Open Libraries
By a strange paradox, good information has never been more important than it is
today, yet the university library is declining in importance relative to other
information sources. Personal computing, electronic networks, and desktop
publishing allow an individual to create materials and distribute them in ways
that bypass the traditional publisher and the library. To follow progress in
library automation, for example, the best source of information is not a
published journal but an electronic bulletin board known as PAC-L. No journal
can rival the relevance, timeliness, and frankness of the information that is
posted on this bulletin board.
The Wide Area Information Server (usually called WAIS) was developed by
Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer at Thinking Machines. WAIS allows people
anywhere on the national networks to mount information on their own computers
and make it available to everybody. In a short space of time a huge open
library has sprung up through the initiative of thousands of such
individuals.
Currently, the most advanced software for an electronic library is the Mercury
system from Carnegie Mellon University. Mercury also encourages open libraries
to emerge. Any college, department, or individual can mount its own
information on its own computers, thus becoming part of a national electronic
library service. The university libraries will be just one of many
contributors to this open library.
Librarians
This movement toward open libraries is foreign to the traditions and training
of librarians. During the 1980s many computing centers fought the emancipation
that personal computers brought. During the decade, the director of computing
at almost every major university left under strained circumstances. Often the
director was made a scapegoat for the university administration's inability to
set expectations and support them, but frequently the director failed to accept
the fundamental changes that were taking place.
To be director of a major research library used to be a job for life. It
provided pleasant work, prestige, and a good salary. The prestige and salary
remain, but the work has changed dramatically. Ann Woodsworth, formerly
director of libraries at the University of Pittsburgh, has written extensively
on this topic. She is one of several prominent directors who have decided that
they do not wish to spend their working life being buffeted by administrative
confusion and have resigned to find areas in which they have more control over
their own destiny.
Resources
Few universities make an honest effort to estimate the costs of their
libraries, but a true accounting of a typical research library would show that
about 25 percent of the cost is in acquisitions, 25 percent is in buildings,
and 50 percent is in staff. Discussions of library budgets usually focus on
the rising cost of materials, the overcrowding in the buildings, and the cost
of computing. Yet, if universities are to respond to the opportunities brought
by electronic information, these ratios must change, and the proportion within
each category that is assigned to computing must rise dramatically.
No university is rich enough to run conventional and electronic services that
duplicate each other. Soon after electronic services are introduced, the
conventional should be withdrawn. These are tough decisions. Suppose that a
work of reference is available on paper and on CD-ROM. An example might be the
MLA Bibliography. It is extravagant for a library to purchase both,
but, whichever is chosen, some scholars will be made unhappy. Many university
libraries retain a card catalog in elegant oak cabinets, to satisfy the demands
of a few faculty members. Even Carnegie Mellon had a five-year gap after
retrospective conversion of the catalog before the libraries dared to remove
the old cards.
Traditionally, libraries have put only a tiny fraction of their resources into
new developments. At a time of rapid change, they need to devote a substantial
portion of their resources to innovation. This needs to be new money. They
cannot fund long-term change by transferring funds from the library's
collection budget or its services to the community.
Collection Development
Perhaps the most difficult decision for libraries, particularly in the
humanities, is how collection policies for printed materials should change
because of electronic information. Although at present most items in a library
are printed texts, many source materials have always been in other formats,
such as maps, manuscripts, artifacts, and so on. The printed texts themselves
are often a substitute for sources that were ephemeral or no longer exist. No
television crew was in the Globe Theatre to record Shakespeare's plays:
Therefore we rely on the early printed texts, notably the First Folios. We
live in a society where, for better or worse, print is losing its importance as
a primary source. To study election politics in twentieth-century America,
future scholars will need the libraries to have collected sound bites and
television advertising at least as much as the printed record.
Much of the raw material of humanities is difficult to use because it is in a
remote location, in poor physical condition, poorly cataloged, or restricted by
political barriers. (The disgraceful manner in which access to the Dead Sea
Scrolls has been denied is a sad example.) Facsimile editions and photographic
archives have long had a role in the humanities by making items available to a
wide audience and bringing diverse materials to a common location. Digital
reproductions could become a central part of collection development. The CLASS
project at Cornell University is making digital copies of selected older books,
including Cornell's collection of books in the history of mathematics. After
digitization the images are enhanced, with the result that in almost all
aspects, the newly printed copies are superior to the original and almost
indistinguishable from newly typeset print. The master copy is stored on the
computer; other copies can be printed when required. Once this project is
completed, Cornell's collection in the history of mathematics will be available
wherever there is a computer network.
Versions of information in different media are never exact substitutes. Any
member of Harvard University is able to use the collections of any Harvard
library without charge. Over the past few years, Harvard Law Library has
decided not to subscribe to certain foreign law reports, knowing that they are
available through Lexis, but most members of the university do not have access
to Lexis.
An electronic text is not the same as a printed version of the same text. It
retains the content, but loses the appearance. The serious scholar often needs
to work from a print original, but for other purposes, the electronic version
may be superior. An electronic text is much more convenient than a printed one
for creating a concordance or for textual analysis; the text can be tagged to
indicate its linguistic structure or its historical antecedents.
Libraries and the University
Libraries are so fundamental to the academic mission, especially in the
humanities, that no director of libraries can make bold decisions unless the
academic administration shows leadership in setting expectations and supporting
change. Both Kemeny at Dartmouth (a mathematician) and Cyert at Carnegie
Mellon (an economist) saw electronic libraries as a fundamental part of their
vision. At other universities it is hard to find a senior administrator who is
even aware of the issues.
Scholarly Publishing
Two years ago, at the Society for Scholarly Publishing's annual executive
roundtable, all participants were asked to write down their most vivid
impression of the meeting. Everybody wrote down essentially the same answer:
Scholarly publishing is in an economic crisis. Two root causes lie behind this
crisis: the publish-or-perish attitude of universities and the tendency to put
the entire cost of publication onto the libraries' budgets. Electronic
information both aggravates the problems and offers a glimmer of hope for a
solution.
Consider, for example, the humanities monograph. Many monographs are so
specialized that very few copies are purchased except by libraries. As library
budgets get tighter year by year, purchases of monographs have declined to such
low levels that many now sell only a few hundred copies. The various steps in
editing, publication, acquiring, and cataloging generate delays of years before
the book reaches the shelves. If a scholar's library does not buy the
monograph, the scholar has two options, travel or interlibrary lending. Both
are awkward, expensive, and time-consuming.
If the humanities monograph and its cousin the journal article are in so much
trouble, why do they remain so important? Part of the answer is that the
alternatives also have problems. Video-recordings and audiotapes have
overtaken books in popular culture, but they are expensive to create and
distribute. Electronic journals are in their infancy. Currently many people
are experimenting with new formats for academic communication. Some of these
experiments use networks to replace printed works with electronic equivalents.
Others use electronic information in fundamentally new ways. One can hope that
a balance will emerge between the old and the new formats in the humanities,
just as newspapers and television combine to deliver the news.
Universities must recognize that printed publications are not the only measure
of academic output and may not be the best. In several of the examples that
were given earlier, such as Perseus and the Great American History Machine, the
scholarship is expressed in a form that does not lend itself to a printed
publication. It is absurd that faculty are compelled to write papers about
their research, rather than publish the work itself. It is equally absurd that
libraries are expected to collect these papers, but are not expected to collect
the videotapes, databases, and computer systems that form the basis of the
research. It is unsurprising that in some technical disciplines, formal
publication and libraries have become almost irrelevant to the active
researcher and are used primarily to create a historical record of results.
Electronic publishing cannot succeed unless it is as prestigious as print
publishing. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, in
conjunction with OCLC, is tackling this issue in its new medical publication,
The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. The editorial team for
this journal is drawn heavily from Science, a highly prestigious
journal. Their processes for reviewing and selecting material are set to the
same high standards.
A group at Johns Hopkins University has developed a technique called "knowledge
management." Researchers, publishers, and librarians maintain an ever-changing
database that records the state of knowledge in an area, in this case genetic
coding. The database supplants both publication and library. Unfortunately,
the state of academic life is such that even this team feels compelled to write
traditional papers to describe their work to their colleagues.
Disciplines that accept scholarship expressed in many forms and formats provide
opportunities for creativity and innovation that an overemphasis on print can
stifle.
Conclusion
I am an enthusiast about electronic information, and enthusiasts must be
treated with caution. Before electronic information becomes a core part of
humanities scholarship, electronic publication takes its place alongside print,
and electronic libraries are the equal of the traditional, they must prove
themselves. Today much is potential, but universities are blind if they ignore
the potential. This is an exciting time for the humanities. Technology is
providing vast opportunities for creative scholarship. Those universities that
welcome the new, while not abandoning the old, have the chance to make
fundamental contributions in almost every field.
