Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts

A Special Issue, edited by David L. Green

We dedicate this issue to the memory of Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007), an extraordinary historian who inspired a generation of fellow historians and others working at the intersection of the humanities and new technologies. 

INTRODUCTION
A Cyberinfrastructure for Us All
By David L. Green, Knowledge Culture
Made possible by dramatic advances in networking technologies, cyberinfrastructure promises to combine new computing capabilities, massive data resources and distributed human expertise to enable qualitatively different creative product from new generations of "knowledge environments." Introducing this timely collection of observations on how this will affect liberal arts disciplines and institutions, David Green reviews the distance we've come in the last 15 years and identifies the main themes of the essays, interviews and reviews that follow.

HUMANITIES CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
The (Uncommon) Challenge of the Cultural Commonwealth
By Gary Wells, Ithaca College
In reviewing Our Cultural Commonwealth, the report on cyberinfrastructure and the humanities commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Gary Wells notes "both the allure and anxiety of radical and disruptive change," and wonders if the academy and the broader public will be up to the cultural and financial challenges.

Beyond the ACLS Report: An Interview with John Unsworth
By Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka
John Unsworth chaired the ACLS Commission that authored Our Cultural Commonwealth. In a conversation with Kevin Guthrie, he offers his own well-developed definition of cyberinfrastructure, talks about why and how the needs of the humanities should be considered separately, and explains how the report's framework has been useful already in developing new implementation strategies.

BEYOND THE TWO CULTURES
Will the resources and the power of advanced networked computing affect the methodologies of the sciences and the humanities differently?

From Data to Wisdom: Humanities Research and Online Content
By Michael Lesk, Rutgers University
This computer-scientist champion of digital libraries and humanities computing provides an overview of paradigm changes in the sciences; a similar review of humanities achievements show that they still stop short of developing a new kind of scholarship.

The Virtual Observatory and the Roman de la Rose: Unexpected Relationships and the Collaborative Imperative
By Sayeed Choudhury and Timothy Stinson, Johns Hopkins University
Scientists were not always good collaborators. In pondering the "unprecedented convergence of interest across C.P. Snow's Two Cultures in the promise of cyberinfrastructure and of data-driven research," the computer scientist/digital librarian Sayeed Choudhury and medieval scholar Timothy Stinson propose a new relationship between humanities scholars, their resources and their colleagues.

CYBERSCHOLARSHIP
A review, an essay and a roundtable discussion on the new kinds of scholarship and teaching that cyberinfrastructure might bring.

Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship
By Gregory Crane, Tufts University
Greg Crane shares his insights in a review of an important report on data-driven scholarship and the supportive infrastructure it requires.

Cyberinfrastructure as Cognitive Scaffolding: The Role of Genre Creation in Knowledge Making
By Janet Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology
This gripping account describes what the process and products of a new cyberscholarship might look like in the age of the Semantic Web, in which cyberinfrastructure's potential as a "facilitator of a vast social process of meaning making" might be further developed.

Cyberinfrastructure and the Future of Art History
A Roundtable Discussion
By Amelia Carr, Allegheny College; Guy Hedreen, Williams College; and Dana Leibsohn, Smith College
Three art historians discuss how their most urgent needs might be addressed by cyberinfrastructure. While they hold themselves responsible for fostering new forms of scholarship as they appear, the bottom line, they agree, is that CI will be useless if it can not revolutionize image access and metadata management, and cannot help us think differently about vision and objects: "what kind of image work is the work that matters most?"

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: Colleges and Museums
Interviews with two key figures who hold out for radical change in university and museum settings--while grappling with institutional complexity and inertia--are followed by a proposal to extend the function of the college museum into the curriculum, locally and globally.

Leveraging Institutional Change: An Interview with James J. O'Donnell, Georgetown University
By David Green
Provost O'Donnell, author of Avatars of the Word, is fascinated by how "institutions full of creative, innovative, iconoclastic people" are paradoxically "bastions of conservatism." Guiding us through the texture of change since the Internet hit 15 years ago, O"Donnell posits that incremental change is perhaps the best we can do until the fundamental instruments of scholarly communication and the academic reward structure change: "until the problem we have to solve is defined persuasively enough that we get enough people interested in solving it."

Museums, Cataloging & Content Infrastructure: An Interview with Kenneth Hamma, The Getty Trust
By David Green, Knowledge Culture
The architect of digital policy at the Getty Trust shares his conviction that building the digital "content infrastructure" depends on the contributions of thousands of smaller institutions that individually lack human and technological resources necessary for the task. Cyberinfrastructure could facilitate distributed cataloging and much wider distribution of museum holdings that would have a major impact on scholarship and teaching. However, a significant challenge remains that of the muddying of museums' educational mission with notions of gatekeeping and income generation from the objects in their care.

College Museums in a Networked Era--Two Propositions
By John Weber, Skidmore College
The director of Skidmore College's Tang Museum proposes a dynamic new relevance for the college museum, whose tasks of addressing students' visual literacy and in more effectively deploying the multisensory exhibition in global curricula could be dramatically facilitated through cyberinfrastructure.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: Where the Rubber Hits the Road
Three essays that examine the details of building cyberinfrastructure at the campus level.

Deploying Cyberinfrastructure for the Sciences at Liberal Arts Colleges
By Francis Starr, Wesleyan University
Access to cyberinfrastructure will be provided through your campus computer infrastructure: working out from department to cross-department to campus-wide. Physics professor Francis Starr, experienced in deploying the latest "Beowulf clusters" in Wesleyan University's infrastructure, discusses the necessary balance between technical prowess and effective educational outreach to ensure best deployment of a college's computing assets.

Managed Cyber Services as a Cyberinfrastructure Strategy for Smaller Institutions of Higher Education
By Todd Kelley, NITLE
Todd Kelley takes Francis Starr's recommendations for pooling computing resources across campuses one step further by discussing the advantages of outsourcing managed cyber services: "Bringing institutions with common needs together in a shared organizational network and aggregating many of their common technology needs through cyber services [is] a powerful idea."

The Sciences, Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts: The Case of the Bates College Imaging Center
By Matthew Cote, Bates College
Many themes of this collection are encapsulated within this new facility in an old library at Bates College. Blending a 21^st-century codification of Liberal Arts Education, with cyberinfrastructure-ready facilities, the Bates Imaging Center, in Professor Cote's words, "presents the campus hub for collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, especially those that are computationally intensive, apply visualization techniques, or include graphical or image-based components."

PROFILES
Descriptions of some key organizations and networks whose missions include leveraging cyberinfrastructure.