0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 8/12)

Social software technologies have a wide-spreading but shallow root system. Their most impressive result to date, Wikipedia, illustrates both its capacities and its limits. The wiki initiative delivers an encyclopedia of information that can rapidly update the range of its entries and their content. How to enlist this technology for more substantial scholarship is often speculated about but not yet realized. That is to say, while we certainly have projects that implement collaborative scholarship—NINES is as good an example as any—none of these projects is adequately integrated into the scholarly community at large. NINES, Integrating Digital Papyrology , The Homer Multitext project: these and initiatives like them, while open and collaborative in various ways, are still fundamentally “standalone” works. In technical terms they are only weakly integrated into the World Library that digitization promises. In relation to scholarship’s institutional ethos, their relations are even less functional. Wikipedia and professional Listservs (our digital Notes and Queries ) are driven by a form of that “institutional will” Fitzpatrick hopes finally to see. Higher-level online research work—there is now a good deal of it—is not.

But “institutional will” is a figure of speech that should be used with caution. It’s unhelpful and untrue to imagine traditional scholars as a slacker community. The Long View of the scholar’s life was well established before the emergence of the Internet. Indeed, we all know that the volatile state of digital resources has made scholars hesitate to take them up. Their hesitance, like Ahab’s precipitance, has its humanities.

In that respect, here’s another personal anecdote that seems to me pertinent. I spent eighteen years designing The Rossetti Archive and filling out its content. This was a collaborative project involving some forty graduate students plus a dozen or more skilled technical experts, not to speak of the cooperation of funding agencies and scores of persons around the world in many libraries, museums, and other depositories. It comprises some 70,000 digital files and 42,000 hyperlinks organizing a critical space for the study of Rossetti’s complete poetry, prose, pictures, and designs in their immediate historical context. The Archive has high-resolution digital images of every known manuscript, proof, and print publication of his textual works, and every known or accessible painting, drawing, or art object he designed. It also has a substantial body of contextual materials that are related in important ways to Rossetti’s work. All of this is imbedded in a robust environment of editorial and critical commentary. See (External Link) . The Archive is a complete collection of all Rossetti’s textual, pictorial, and design works in all their known material forms and states. There are 845 textual works that exist in some 14,000 distinct documentary states and more than 2,000 pictorial and design works. Each document has an xml transcription as well as a high resolution image, and with a few exceptions each artistic work is represented by a high resolution image of both the original work and, in many cases, various later important reproductions of the original. In addition, the Archive has some 5,000 files of extensive scholarly commentaries and notes on its materials.