0.21 Recommendations  (Page 7/11)

How will younger scholars in the humanities and social sciences engage these new technologies and methods?Experience demonstrates that some will find a way of their own, but it also suggests that if more than a few are to pioneer new digitalpathways, more formal venues and opportunities for training and encouragement are needed. The Commission recommends the creation ofbrief (one- to three-week) workshops for younger scholars—perhaps located at some of the existing centers in the digital humanitiesand social sciences and organized in conjunction with scholarly societies—focusing on how to do research, how to present theproducts of scholarship, and how to teach in the digital era. One model could be the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil’s Image, Sound, Text and Technology Institute Program, which provides grants for such workshops.

It is also important to remember that students, and often their teachers, need help in making sense ofwhat they find. For example, a 1930s photograph of sharecroppers, with the imprimatur of the Library of Congress’s American Memorysite, may seem to be a transparent reflection of social and historical reality rather than a created and composed artifact witha larger political message. We recommend that resources be devoted to making students (and citizens) into sophisticated and criticalconsumers of the vast cultural heritage that has been placed at their fingertips. Some of this can be done electronically, butworkshops for K–12 teachers who use the Web in their classrooms are badly needed as well.

6.establish national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits cyberinfrastructure.

Addressed to: Universities; Congress; state legislatures; public funding agencies; private foundations

Implementation: Universities should develop national and international fellowships at existing humanities andsocial science computing centers, and develop new centers with such programs, with a combination of university, federal, and privatefunding.

A robust cyberinfrastructure should include centers that support collaborative work with specialized methods.When human, institutional, or technical resources become too expensive to replicate at every institution, it makes sense toprovide those resources through a more limited number of national centers. This is what has already been done in the sciences, and itis what should also be done in the humanities and social sciences. Public funds should be at the forefront of support to such nationalcenters of excellence in digital humanities and social science, as crucial seedbeds of further innovation.