0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology  (Page 9/10)

This is, I think, exactly what Bagnall too would like, and (if I understand it) what the IDP project is heading towards. Further, we would all like this, for every scholarly domain. And there is nothing impossible about this. So, how can we make this happen? To answer, I’d like to follow Bagnall’s lead once more. In the last pages of his paper, after outlining what he thinks needs to happen within the papyrology community, he turns to address the wider community. He asserts, rightly, that what he wants to see happen among papyrologists depends on developments outside papyrology: on developments “transcending the limited scale of the discipline and its separateness.” He gives some precise instances of how these developments might work, in terms of shared infrastructure and cross-searching.

I think we can go further than this, on the basis of the three rules I have given above. For me, the best thing we could do in digital humanities over the next decades would be, first, to ensure that all new projects across the whole landscape conform to these rules and, second, to translate all existing projects so that they conform to these rules also. This need not cost very much money. Indeed, to the extent that it removes the need for projects to create and maintain elaborate interfaces (often one of the most expensive aspects of a project), it may lead to considerable savings. On the other hand, if we go on pouring money into creating data which then gets locked up into project interfaces, which then need yet more money to cycle through changes in computing technology, we will indeed be wasting money on a grand scale.

Who is to enforce these rules? No academic is ever going to have a problem with the first rule. We all agree that scholarly work must be rigorously credited and reviewed; we will do this without anyone requiring it of us. But this is not the case for the second and critical rule, that open to all really means open to all. Frankly, I don’t think we can trust individual academics, or even academic associations, to enforce this. The requirement for open access must be enforced by the funding agencies. In my own field, and I think Bagnall would agree in papyrology, it should be absolutely mandatory for any funded project creating digital images or text transcripts of original materials to make these available to others under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, or similar. Further, following our third rule: make available means make available the base materials and metadata to all, so that others can build their own interfaces. One could add a further rule: that this availability should be built on a credibly sustainable infrastructure, such as an institutionally maintained digital repository.

Up to now, funding agencies have been rather forgiving in their acceptance of assurances of open access and continued availability. Most of the time, they accept availability of some view of the data on some free-to-all website somewhere, together with an institutional declaration that the website will continue to be maintained, as sufficient. According to the rules I outline in this paper, this is not enough, nor even near enough. What I outline here for the humanities is already standard practice in some other disciplines. Here, for example, is the opening page of the NIH Public Access site: