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Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities:
The Implications of Electronic Information
Themes Common to the Five Working Groups
- Initiate a national collaborative effort to pursue an active
advocacy role for the humanities in today's rapidly expanding
electronic environment. Working with existing advocacy
organizations, enter the current dialogue, both inside and
outside the academy, on the development and direction of new
information technologies to serve the humanities.
- Promote, as a national priority, the creation of a 10-million
volume digital library, broadly conceived to encompass the full
spectrum of humanities research collections.
- Ensure that humanities scholars participate in decisions
affecting the creation and selection of electronic research
resources and in the development of policies to facilitate access
to those resources.
- Identify and develop exemplary collaborative programs, projects,
and individuals that demonstrate the effective creation, sharing,
and distribution of electronic information among institutions,
organizations, and individuals in the humanities.
- On the individual, disciplinary, and institutional levels,
collaborate within and outside the humanities in the
development of standards for the exchange of, access to, and
description and preservation of electronic research.
- Investigate how the humanities can use information technology
to increase, reallocate, examine, and generate resources in new ways.
- Adjust the current definition of scholarly research and
instruction to reward innovative uses of electronic information
and media.
- Enlist humanities scholars to interpret the impact of
information technology on society, and promote critical
understanding of the role that information technology can play
in both research and teaching.
- Sponsor initiatives--workshops, fellowships, and summer
institutes--that provide opportunities for training and that
enrich the mixture of information technology and the humanities.
Working Group Reports (Summaries)
Group I: The Intellectual Implications of Electronic Information
Rapporteur: Werner Gundersheimer
Director
Folger Shakespeare Library
Washington, D.C.
In an effort to grapple with the profound and overarching topic it had been
assigned, Group I focused on a number of specific issues that they considered
integral to it:
- In the course of this long-term process, the humanities will need to
speak in a coherent voice. They should form an ongoing, interdisciplinary
group to identify the most compelling problems and possibilities that
the humanities/technology nexus offers and to formulate an emerging
agenda for research and future efforts. This group would also create and
supervise demonstration projects as possible prototypes.
- As part of that structure, or as a parallel organization, the humanities
should catalog and assess the effectiveness of current and future
software resources for humanities scholars and research projects.
- Because technology changes so rapidly, one institution should host
periodic meetings at which creative users of information technology
could envision future technological developments.
- Funding for technologically based research and its relation to current
government funding for the arts and humanities need examination. The
humanities should enlist an appropriate agency to advocate support for
technologically based research, either through the National Endowments
or through other governmental sources.
- There are too many idiosyncratic local and ad hoc initiatives for
electronic information in the humanities in the United States,
exacerbating the inaccessibility of databases. International cooperation
on technical initiatives will be as crucial for the humanities as for
any other field. The growing globalization of technology should dovetail
with a cosmopolitan openness to non-Western cultural materials in
electronic form.
- The question of who shall control the process and development of
technological research generated considerable anxiety in the group.
Although humanists want to participate in this process as fully as
scientists and engineers, it will require a change of roles and a much
stronger investment in the outcomes of technologically based research.
Group II: The Professional Implications of Electronic Information
Rapporteur: Roger Bagnall
Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences and Professor of History and Classics
Columbia University
New York
The deliberations of Group II were profoundly shaped by Carolyn Lougee's
paper. As Lougee argued, electronic contributions to instructional materials
continue to suffer from the lack of recognition afforded excellence in
traditional teaching. Moreover, electronic processes will exacerbate the
tendency to value professional autonomy over connections to the university
community and even threaten the university as a physical congregation of
teachers and students.
If teaching is to gain a central place in our institutions and if technology
in the service of instruction is to flourish, we must change the value system
of higher education. Group II's recommendations were made in light of the
following observations: that technology can as easily intensify existing
problems as solve them, that the humanities must address the issue of
technology soon to avoid further marginalization, and that we should recommend
measures that can be realized within existing institutions' structures.
The recommendations of Group II's were as follows:
- The university must provide humanists with an environment favorable to
the use of technology by giving them access to electronic mail accounts,
online resources, Internet, and electronic journals. The larger goal of
a national electronic library, with millions of volumes on-line, should
be a national priority.
- Just as much as their academic counterparts, nonacademic scholars need
access to the academic network and information about successful uses of
technology via newsletters, annual meetings, and electronic bulletin
boards and journals.
- Academic officers should offer incentives to younger tenured faculty to
take account of electronic research when they become members of tenure
committees.
- Institutions should use foundation and National Endowment support to
offer students and faculty summer workshops and graduate fellowships in
technology and teaching. Collaborative ventures among undergraduate
programmers, graduate researchers, and faculty advisers could produce
valuable educational programs and bring students into the enterprise.
- Conference organizers should disseminate the results of this conference
widely, and continue its agenda beyond this meeting. They should advocate
the humanities' causes in national deliberations on the future of
technology.
Group III: The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology
of Knowledge
Rapporteur: Gillian Lindt
Professor of Religion
Columbia University
New York
Group III dealt with broad, abstract cultural and historical issues. It
recommends establishing a continuing forum to analyze and interpret the
implications of new technology for the humanities, including the changing
categories of human knowledge and the shifting bases of its production and
dissemination. This interdisciplinary forum could take the form of
conferences, seminars, and computer networks involving representatives from
the arts, architecture, history, literature, publishing, libraries, museums,
technology, psychology, neural sciences, and other relevant fields. Among
other problems, the forum would develop a common language for analyzing
technology issues, re-evaluate traditional models of education and training,
develop an agenda for using technology to increase public access to materials
in the humanities, and analyze the changing character of educational
institutions and their methods. The forum would develop proposals for
humanistic projects using new technologies and synthesize the broad cultural
and social ramifications of new technologies.
Group III also recommended the following:
- The humanities need to alter existing educational practices by
integrating computers into instruction as tools for critical thinking,
by exploring hypertext and multimedia, and by training faculty to use
electronic information technology.
- The humanities need to play a key role in shaping new technologies and
in extending the humanities disciplines beyond universities to the rest
of the world. Democratizing access will be essential to the viability of
the humanities and to the character of this society as a democratic
nation. Libraries and museums will be leading partners in disseminating
and using interactive educational technologies.
Group IV: The Institutional Implications of Electronic Information
Rapporteur: M. Stuart Lynn
Vice President, Information Technologies
Cornell University
Ithaca
Group IV agreed that the institutions nurturing the humanities, such as
universities and research and professional institutes, must actively influence
the development of digital information technologies to maintain the vitality
of the humanities. However, not institutions but scholars and their particular
needs and values must drive this initiative.
As the gradual acceptance of word processing and online catalogs indicates,
strategies for change can be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Introducing technology, however, requires resources, and the humanities must
attract new communities of support, including those in the private sector,
especially as federal and state funding decreases.
The group addressed the institution's relationship to the scholarly community,
to itself, to other institutions, and to society. It proposed five
recommendations to institutions:
- Work with the scholarly community to set standards and define norms of
access to information, removing barriers that inhibit humanists' use of
electronic information. Institutional support of education and training
programs is essential if humanists are to take full advantage of
electronic resources and initiate model projects.
- Individually and in collaboration, consider the use of technologies in
the humanities as central to their own institutional mission; that is,
make low-cost, universal access for all scholars a strategic priority,
and foster scholarly innovation in electronic learning.
- Form collaborations and coalitions as a means of sharing resources,
developing new sources of financial support, and using electronic
information technology to preserve the existing record of our heritage.
- Join forces to advance the cause of the humanities in society as a
whole to ensure democratic, widespread access to digital networks and
libraries. Only by developing a broad public consensus can the humanities
garner national support.
- Examine opportunities to finance infrastructural change via the sale of
information to those who will use it for commercial gain.
Group V: The Implications of Electronic Information for National
Institutions
Rapporteur: James Noblitt
Humanities Chair
Institute for Academic Technology
Research Triangle Park
North Carolina
Group V identified certain challenges and opportunities as the humanities
engage electronic information technology. First, the humanities must reject
the "zero-sum" approach to resource allocation currently practiced by public
funders, who increase support for information technology at the expense of
humanities research. Second, as the use of information technology in research
and education changes our institutions, we can rethink the way museums,
libraries, and educational institutions work together. Third, the
democratization of knowledge will surely have an impact on the fundamental
assumptions of humanistic scholarship.
To address these challenges and opportunities, the humanities should
inaugurate an open-ended forum, possibly under the aegis of the Coalition for
Networked Information, with the following goals: to commission a position
paper to study the implications of electronic information for the humanities
and to identify exemplary projects and "heroic" accounts of individuals using
new technology in their scholarship.
Long-term goals that may lie outside the purview of the forum include the
following:
- The need to address the uses of information technology in integrating
data from different sources, taking into account questions of
intellectual property rights.
- The possibility that the ACLS or the National Endowment for the
Humanities could sponsor institutes devoted to educating students,
faculty, and other humanists in both the new media and new scholarly
practices.
- The establishment of a conceptual framework for the humanities that uses
the new media in a self-conscious and critical way.
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