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Cyberinfrastructure For Us All: An Introduction to Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts

Posted December 16th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture
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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.

The (Uncommon) Challenge of the Cultural Commonwealth

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Gary Wells, Ithaca College
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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

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka
0 Comments | 1831 Page Views
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.

The Future of Art History: Roundtable

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Jennifer Curran, Academic Commons
3 Comments | 1619 Page Views
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?"

Museums, Cataloging & Content Infrastructure: An Interview with Kenneth Hamma

Posted December 16th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture
0 Comments | 1322 Page Views
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.

Cyberinfrastructure and the Sciences at Liberal Arts Colleges

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Francis Starr, Wesleyan.edu
0 Comments | 619 Page Views
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

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Todd Kelley, NITLE
0 Comments | 1239 Page Views
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 Bates College Imaging Center: A Model for Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Matthew J. Coté, Bates College
2 Comments | 1240 Page Views
Many themes of this collection are encapsulated within this new facility in an old library at Bates College. Blending a 21st-century codification of Liberal Arts Education, with cyberinfrastructure-ready facilities, the Bates Imaging Center, in Professor Coté’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 of Key Cyberinfrastructure Organizations

Posted December 16th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture
1 Comments | 802 Page Views
We present here a collection of short profiles, specially written for Academic Commons, on key service organizations and networks that will be poised to assist and lead others who are working to bring a rich cyberinfrastructure into play. Some are older humanities organizations for which cyberinfrastructure is a totally new environment, others have been created specifically around the provision of digital resources and support.
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