Supercomputers are increasingly part of the cyberinfrastructure at campuses, big and small.

What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward? David Green and Michael Roy share some ideas in the July/August 2008 EDUCAUSE Review.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), an independent nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., supports higher education and advanced research primarily through programs in academic libraries and allied institutions. CLIR convenes meetings to articulate concerns shared across multiple communities; commissions and publishes reports on topics of interest to the library and information research communities; provides support for graduate students and recent graduates of doctoral programs in the humanities; and runs the annual Frye Institute in cooperation with Emory University to train future leaders of college and university libraries.  

CLIR's agenda for the next five years reflects past and ongoing transformations resulting from advances in information and communication technologies. It has six interdependent components: cyberinfrastructure, preservation, scholarly methodologies, future library, leadership and new models of research. Cyberinfrastructure establishes a foundation that enables modes of technology-mediated research and models of scholarship. Computationally-intensive research methods and associated models of scholarship occasion needs for new leadership as well as new institutional roles for libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions. These organizations will be key to managing the enormous quantities of data, which has resulted from technology-intensive investigations together with related forms of scholarly expression. CLIR's long-standing commitment to curation and preservation of analog and digital data positions the organization to take a leadership role in ongoing national discussions. CLIR is deeply committed to identifying strategic approaches and partnerships that leverage social, intellectual and organizational resources across institutional and disciplinary boundaries on behalf of the public good. 

The Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, working in collaboration with the Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP) between the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is leading an NSF-sponsored publication effort called Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch). The goal of CTWatch is to establish an online forum for ideas and opinions on topics of importance to the cyberinfrastructure community, providing a new source of information and analysis concerning the latest innovations in cyberinfrastructure technology.

To create the kind of productive mix of news, information and dialogue that rapid progress in shared cyberinfrastructure today requires, CTWatch developed CTWatch Quarterly, an on-line serial publication modeled on a more traditional academic journal. CTWatch Quarterly is designed to be published on-line and is made available in both HTML and in a high-quality PDF format intended for printing on demand. Each issue of revolves around a particular area of interest for the cyberinfrastructure community and is organized by a guest editor who is a leader in that field.

The focus topics (and corresponding guest editors) for 2006-7 included:

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers in which individuals contribute time and energy to help each other find opportunities and collaborators, and share tools and resources. The network serves to strengthen the position of centers in their own institutions as well as to advance digital humanities generally. centerNet developed from a meeting hosted by the NEH and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., and is a response to the ACLS report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

Since its inception in April, centerNet has added over a hundred members worldwide. A start-up committee elected at the NEH meeting, consisting of Julia Flanders, Neil Fraistat, Mark Kornbluh, Matt Kirschenbaum and John Unsworth, is currently adding international members to its ranks.

The centerNet website can be used to find information about jobs, grants, conferences and software. The centerNet email list can be asked for advice about everything from problems related to starting a center to problems in programming. The centerNet wiki provides a taxonomic listing of digital humanities centers through which international partners can be located--for a staff exchange or for a grant application, for example. Members of the network can post to the list or include an entry for their center on the wiki.

We invite all those who believe that their center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, to join the network. We intend the definition of "digital humanities" to be inclusive, with cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts and other related areas. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence. Those interested in finding out more about the network or in becoming a member should visit: http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.

We have recently launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI)--aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. DHI is particularly interested in helping the development of cyberinfrastructure for the humanities as described in Our Cultural Commonwealth, the ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure.

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR) is a software engineering project that is leveraging the latest informatics research to innovate essential technology for a cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. Under the direction of Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil and John Unsworth, the SEASR team is developing software that:

• enhances humanities researchers' ability to use digital humanities applications for knowledge discovery, and
• provides digital humanities developers with an improved environment for advancing and innovating applications.  

SEASR's software research and development environment will enable existing applications (e.g., Wordhoard; Nora; MONK: Metadata Offer New Knowledge; IMIRSEL: International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory) to more actively, precisely and comprehensively analyze information extracted from large collections in a variety of formats (i.e., digital libraries, databases, archives, mixed media, and even custom data). SEASR offers a range of data synthesis improvements, from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation.  

The folks at the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory aka HASTAC (http://hastac.org) have posted a draft of a paper entitled "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age."  The paper will evolve through online collaboration and conversations, and will be published in its final form as part of the Occasional Paper Series on Digital Media and Learning sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.