Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways:
Working Group Reports
The Technical Challenge for the Humanities and Arts
Summary
This report articulates the technical requirements for networking humanities
and arts information. The needs of the humanities and arts often overlap those
of the sciences, but their priorities and emphases are for the most part
different. The needs of the humanities and arts must also not be confused with
the demands of entertainment and commerce. Although these needs may overlap
(indeed may be synergistic in certain areas), the latter largely consist of
broadcast transmissions requiring only passive involvement from the viewer,
while the former require active participation and two-way and multi-way
collaboration.
The recommendations of the Technical Requirements Working Group focus on the
needs for specific items of technical support to serve creators and users of
humanities and arts data, including artists and authors; students of the
humanities and arts, from scholars to schoolchildren; and the general public.
If these requirements are not addressed at the outset of NII planning, the
NII's full potential will not be realized. In the humanities and arts, it will
be necessary to:
- Guide standards as they evolve to ensure that humanities and arts
information will retain its quality and remain viable over time.
- Encourage the development of appropriate new tools and methods of knowledge
representation, as well as shareable libraries of software tools.
- Establish ways to connect holders and creators of the cultural heritage with
those seeking access to it, through interactive, multivalent, collaborative
communication and protection of intellectual property, so that creators can be
consumers and consumers can become providers.
- Foster international cooperation, particularly with respect to access to
cultural heritage information across international boundaries.
Report of the Working Group on Technical Requirements
As has often been quoted, John Adams wrote that he studied war and diplomacy so
that his children could study commerce and agriculture, and their children
could study art and poetry. It is now time for the evolving Internet to move
from its military, scientific and commercial stages to become a means for
individuals throughout the country to create, communicate and participate in
their culture. Choices being made today regarding the NII will affect the
representation, storage, distribution and use of humanities information as it
applies to nearly all areas of life, including university teaching and
scholarship, K-12 education and life enrichment for the general public.
The humanities and arts depend on representations of texts, artifacts and
performances. In the future, it will be possible to store and transmit
reproductions of all texts and forms of expression as digital data. Subsequent
digital reproductions, made from digital data, could be accomplished without
degradation, provided the proper compression algorithms are used. (Some
compression algorithms that are commonly used in the entertainment and
communications industries would not be acceptable for humanities and arts
data.) Electronic media and tools will make it possible to create new forms of
art in electronic modes. Given the ability to access and manipulate remote
archives of digital materials, passive viewers can be turned into active
participants and creators.
Knowledge in the humanities depends on access to a huge range of cultural
evidence distributed around the world, and on the communication of ideas and
the expression of opinions. Specialists and the general public may make
different uses of this knowledge and engage in different discussions, but both
need to be able to retrieve relevant texts, images, and sound, to link them
meaningfully, and to append their own views. A distributed cultural heritage
knowledge-base is essential if the humanities and arts are to flourish in the
networked environment.
The humanities and arts have particular characteristics that impose special
technical requirements, or particular priorities for general technical
requirements. These can be classified into three main categories. First, the
character of the NII will be inescapably shaped by how cultural materials are
represented, how they can be viewed, and the ways in which they can be
manipulated. Because in the humanities and arts texts and artifacts are often
the object of study in themselves, representations must retain the essential
qualities of the original: for example, high fidelity in sound and image, and
original layouts and typography in text. Representations must enable scholars
to endow objects with logical structures, analyze linguistic characteristics,
and identify shifts in perspectives or views. For a universe of objects as old
and as widespread as human civilization, layered representations of original
objects and their interpretation are required to gain new access from a variety
of intellectual perspectives. Humanists and artists require access at a fine
grain of detail (whether in a single frame of film or a stanza of poetry) and
from many points of entry. They need to view a work in multiple versions and
to contextualize, index and present it in new ways.
Second, the humanities and arts are deeply concerned with the contextual
significance of the objects under study. A researcher needs, along with the
object, the context in which it was created, used, traded or worshipped. Past
commentary and analysis, in many languages (and therefore character sets), is
vital to understanding. Humanities scholars demand of the information they use
a simultaneous precision of reference and preservation of context that cannot
be satisfied by retrieving items of information in isolation.
Third, the humanities and arts user is an active shaper of objects of study,
creating new objects in the process of transformation. The artist, musician or
writer fashions from the cultural fabric new works that draw on a vast cultural
memory. To craft works from and responses to our cultural heritage, one needs
open systems, widely accepted standards, access to collaborative workspaces and
tools, and new methods of knowledge representation.
Recommendations of the Working Group
The humanities and arts give high priority to the following specific technical
issues:
1) Guide evolving standards
One of the barriers to the creation and use of essential electronic archives is
the absence of standards for capturing, documenting and preserving humanities
and arts information. Standards in the digital world are continuously
evolving: archives must survive in an environment that mingles working with
evolving standards. Nevertheless, it is vital that such de facto and de jure
standards are able to:
- Enable the highest fidelity of representation of originals so that distant
users and future generations have access to resources that are worthy of
study.
- Preserve integrity through technical methods such as color matching and
compensation, preservation of special character sets, and document
authentication (all of which require further development).
- Ensure survival over time. Encoding, representation and compression
standards, when developed, must be maintained; and material will need to
migrate through future standards as these evolve.
- Support rich documentation of object provenance, history of versions and
modifications, and history of use of documents and artifacts. The provision of
multiple representations and versions is especially crucial. For example, a
play is both text and performance: the Zeffirelli film and videotaped Royal
Shakespeare Company performance of a Shakespeare play are as importantly
different as are the many editions of the play.
- Support rich description of and commentary on objects and documents, their
logical structure, and their components and relationships. This parallel
"layer of text" must accommodate any kind of annotations, including commentary,
results of tests, linkages between representations in several languages, and
multimedia.
2) Encourage the development of new tools
Some of the major categories of new tools needed in humanities and arts
computing are:
- Authoring tools and compositional environments that exploit networked
resources and are suited to production, presentation and exploration of
content.
- Collaboration tools and systems for sharing workspace and creative
environments.
- Tools for archiving objects, versions and derivations.
The tools required for creating, representing, storing, retrieving and
comparing cultural information should be able to:
- Capture text, image and sound and its editing and mark-up while capturing the
history of different versions.
- Annotate videoclips, images, oral interviews, music, dance and other cultural
heritage information.
- Support annotation systems that allow not only for personal commentary, but
also for additions to the cumulative scholarly record.
- Modify documents and object representations by addition, deletion and
revision while creating/preserving credit for creation or authorship, and
preserving an historic audit trail for reasons of provenance.
- Link versions, editions in foreign languages, and commentaries with the
objects of commentary.
- Navigate through vast amounts of diverse and complex verbal, visual and aural
information.
- Retrieve using a variety of intellectual perspectives by means of tools that
go beyond keyword/Boolean searches to exploit image and voice recognition, or
natural language processing.
At present very little funding supports the development of tools that meet the
particular needs of the humanities and the arts. We strongly urge
organizations in the public and private sectors to develop such tools, maintain
shared libraries of software tools, and train as many people as possible in
their use.
3) Support open and equitable access
Because culture is universal and cultural heritage is therefore of general
interest, knowledge of the achievements of our culture should be widely
accessible to people not only in museums, libraries, and schools, but also in
offices and homes.
To satisfy this requirement, the NII must be an open system with full access to
all citizens. Culture is not an abstraction; it essential to the quality of
life. The NII will be the 21st century's primary medium for disseminating our
culture. The goal of the humanities and the arts on the NII is to create
dialogue among individuals and communities employing original texts,
high-resolution images, video, music and speech. This requires multivalent
access in which everyone may be a creator and consumer, and many individuals
may collaborate or debate simultaneously. A successful NII would allow
students to read source texts and incorporate them into new documents, view
representations of art and directly create or disseminate derivative or new
works, hear a debate and comment directly on the various points of view. A
successful NII could enable interested citizens to explore their cultural
heritage through searching genealogical databases, seeing images of ancestral
home towns, hearing music their grandparents enjoyed or even composed, and
entering into discussions with others who share their interests. To satisfy
these requirements the NII must be truly multidimensional and fully
interactive.
Content needs to be accessible. Institutions holding public collections of
source materials in the arts and humanities or dedicated to the documentation
of our cultural heritage must be connected to the NII and be helped to provide
access to the knowledge stored in their holdings. Substantial funds will be
required to enable archives, performing arts centers, libraries, galleries and
museums to mount servers on the networks and maintain systems and quality
controls required for a "logical archive" of distributed cultural resources.
Even if content is captured and connected to the networks, mechanisms for
assuring protection of intellectual property and enabling potential users to
easily license parts of intellectual property for re-use are essential. A
variety of mechanisms which provide for appropriate protection of intellectual
property rights, and for ease of access to resources and their subsequent use,
need to be tested in the near future. In each case, the needs of humanities and
arts for the use of very small portions of larger works, as well as works in
their entirety, must be recognized.
4) Foster international cooperation
The development of technology and tools to support access to, and use of,
cultural heritage information for the humanities and arts cannot be pursued by
nations in isolation. From the outset cooperation in both standards and
technology development must be international. Not only are the primary
resources required by arts and humanities international in scope and
distribution, but the dialogue in which humanists and artists are engaged is
necessarily multinational. Government will be required to ensure that no
restrictions are imposed on the flow of cultural data across borders. The
establishment of sizable, international, public-domain test databases to
encourage the development, testing and evaluation of tools would contribute
greatly to demonstrating the desirability of humanities and arts information on
the NII and to the evolution of standards and tools.
Conclusion
The humanities and arts require investment in the technologies that will permit
consistent, reliable and widespread digital representation of our cultural
heritage and enable that resource to be exploited with ease. This in turn
requires understanding of the special characteristics of humanities and arts
information (which demands precision of reference, preservation of context, and
multiplicity of viewpoints) and appreciation of the barriers to its access
(including connectivity of institutions holding such information, methods for
protecting intellectual property, and open systems).
Technological research and development is required to resolve some of these
issues. Many of these needs can be addressed if funding is forthcoming from
public and private sources to develop appropriate standards and tools.
Additional support will be required to capture the vast cultural heritage
resources and provide the public with mediated access.
Appropriate policy frameworks will also assist in satisfying some of these
objectives. The NII should foster the production, transmission and
manipulation of cultural heritage resources provided by diverse communities.
It must not foreclose future options. It must use the standards process to
ensure that it will be extensible and open. It must proceed with international
cooperation, and it must strive to provide global access.
Investing in Humanities and Arts Information Resources
Summary
The humanities and the arts must be represented on the nation's electronic
highways not only because they serve as the repository of our civilized values,
but also - from a more pragmatic perspective - because they are the producers
of the intellectual property that will be one of the nation's most valuable
economic resources in the new information economy.
These recommendations of the Electronic Resources Working Group concern the
development of critical capabilities and resources that are necessary for the
humanities and the arts to participate fully in the electronic environment.
They focus on the policies, intellectual commitments and financial support
necessary to amass comprehensive electronic data resources. This information
content is crucial for the humanities and the arts to serve the highly diverse
members of their potential public.
The group's recommendations state that it will be necessary to:
- Build a critical mass of digitized and networked information in the
humanities and the arts.
- Encourage a public/private partnership to encourage the humanities and the
arts' unique potential for developing collaborative space in the networked
environment.
- Attract enough public and private funds to build the resources needed.
- Secure representation in strategic national decision-making forums.
Report of the Working Group on Electronic Resources
Although the scientific, technological and economic value of the information
revolution has become increasingly apparent to the public, so far the equally
significant contributions of the humanities and the arts to this revolution
have remained less well known. But far from being merely the documenters,
commentators and decorators of our existence, historians, humanities scholars
and artists are among the essential guardians of civilization and the human
spirit. To quote John Ruskin, "Art represents a social necessity that no
nation can neglect without endangering its intellectual existence."
In fact, the humanities and the arts constitute significant intellectual
property interests in the new information economy, where information and
intellectual property will be one of the nation's most valuable economic
resources. The Clinton administration has recognized that the information
highway can "empower citizens and help reinvigorate [our] public institutions,"
and "will create unprecedented opportunities and new challenges for our arts
and cultural industries." (National Institute for Standards and Technology,
Putting the Information Infrastructure to Work, Vol. 1, May 1993; and
Vice President Gore's statement to the International Artist's Rights Symposium,
April, 28 1994).
The initial phases of the establishment of a national information
infrastructure have largely focused on technology: equipment,
interconnectivity and access. Great strides have been made in these areas, and
further refinements and advances will continue as we build upon this foundation
and learn from experience. Now, the focus must turn to content. It is in this
growing concern for content, and the technical challenges it entails, that the
humanities and the arts present new opportunities to the future course of the
information revolution.
Recommendations of the Working Group
The Working Group on Electronic Resources established that, to meet those
challenges, it will be necessary to:
1) Build a significant mass of digitized and networked information in the
humanities and the arts
A rich variety of projects developing electronic databases, publications,
software tools, services and communication systems in the humanities and the
arts has begun, some of them through substantial private-sector initiative and
effort. Nevertheless, these projects merely hint at the range and scope of
what needs to be done to accumulate the comprehensive data necessary if the
nation is to realize the potential contribution of the humanities and the arts
in the information age.
Achieving such a critical mass of digitized information will require a
significant expansion of the number and type of data conversion and data
creation projects undertaken so far. Greater investment in the development of
additional and more powerful tools would encourage collaborative work, improve
the ability to retrieve data, and make possible the creative manipulation of
complex multimedia information. Agreement must be reached on standards for
describing and encoding images and text, on extending the protocols of peer
review and validation to the networked environment, and on issues of copyright,
privacy and access.
If the current litter of autonomous projects is to evolve into the building
blocks of national data sets in the humanities and the arts, the federal
government must work with representatives of the humanities and the arts to
clarify priorities and articulate a plan of action. The federal government has
given impetus and focus to complex scientific ventures; it should now join with
humanities scholars and artists to develop equally ambitious goals for the
electronic conservation of and access to our cultural heritage.
2) Encourage a public/private partnership for developing the potential of
collaborative space in the networked environment
A networked environment can help bridge the gap between the knowledge of
experts and that of ordinary individuals, which will ultimately result in a
better-informed and more engaged citizenry. It can help mobilize specialized
knowledge to solve public problems. In a networked environment there is room
for many voices and viewpoints, many different types of publication and
attribution, and different levels of privacy and control. Unique information
resources can be shared simultaneously, repeatedly and quickly, at low cost.
The scope, complexity and contextually sensitive character of much activity in
the humanities and the arts require a public/private commitment to further
research and development aimed at achieving the interactive potential of
networked space. More sophisticated electronic tools and communication methods
will help the humanities and the arts to re-invent a networked commons for
public debate in our modern, multicultural society.
3) Attract the necessary public and private funding
As mentioned above, the humanities and the arts face the formidable task of
accumulating the critical mass of electronic information that will allow them
to participate fully in the networked environment in meaningful and creative
ways. The process of converting extensive and historic information resources
from other media and formats into digitized form has only just begun, and the
process of developing adequate storage, retrieval and manipulation tools for
complex multimedia information is still in its infancy. The marketplace is
unlikely to provide the financial resources required for these tasks; instead,
the combined investment of public and private funds will be necessary.
It is time for the federal government to provide financial support for building
electronic information capacity in the humanities and arts that is comparable
to what is now devoted to projects in the sciences. Currently, the Human
Genome Project and the Global Climate Change and Biological Diversity
initiatives receive substantial support from the federal government for the
creation of national data sets in the sciences. Our cultural heritage needs
similar support to function effectively in the coming age of networked
information.
In addition to federal support earmarked for developing the networked
infrastructure for cultural heritage, the humanities and the arts should be not
only eligible but also motivated to compete for support for other projects
concerned with information technology. For example, software development
projects sponsored by the National Institute for Standards and Technology
(NIST), Department of Commerce programs like the National Information
Infrastructure Applied Projects, as well as the Digital Library Initiative
jointly supported by the NSF, Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), should encourage
representatives from the humanities and the arts to submit applications and
include appropriate authorities in their awards committees.
4) Secure representation in strategic national decision-making forums
The humanities and the arts constitute significant intellectual property
interests in the new information economy. Their educational, social, and
cultural resources merit a voice in government forums. As information
technology initiatives spread through government and society, representatives
of the humanities and the arts should be included at strategic policy
discussions. Not only is this the democratically appropriate course of action,
but it is in the public's interest to include humanistic and artistic
perspectives in decisions that will affect all of our lives in the coming
century.
The federal government should invite representatives of the humanities and the
arts to participate in all advisory and decision-making bodies debating
information technology issues, such as the peer review panels of agencies as
diverse as the NIST, the High Performance Computing and Communications
Initiative, the NSF Computing and Engineering directorate, and joint ventures
such as the NSF/ARPA/NASA (as well as NEH and NEA) digital library initiatives.
Representatives from the humanities and the arts should also participate in the
deliberations of such entities as the NII Task Forces; the Office of Science
and Technology Policy; the Federal Coordinating Council for Science,
Engineering and Technology; the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in
the Office of Management and Budget; the Federal Communications Commission; the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA); and various
committees and working groups of the Commerce Department-headed Interagency
Information Task Force (IITF), especially the Advisory Council on the NII, the
Telecommunications Policy Committee and the Information Policy Committee,
specifically its Working Group on Intellectual Property.
Conclusion
The humanities and the arts can bring significant cultural capital and
informational assets to the networked environment. However, much must be done
if they are to continue to fulfill their historic missions in the new
electronic era. Certainly, the cultural heritage fields must enjoy approximate
parity with the financial and policy opportunities accorded the electronic
information capacities developing in other areas, such as the sciences, finance
and economics, law, media and public opinion, and medicine. Both public and
private funding and effort must be committed to incorporating our cultural
heritage into the National Information Infrastructure. Professional
associations in the humanities and the arts also have a critical role to play
in these efforts.
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