0.12 Working in new ways

Working in new ways

In the last decade, users of the Web have gained unprecedented access to pre–twentieth-century culturalmaterials, but the real promise of our digital collections has yet to be realized. There is still a long way to go before we achieveeven basic access to primary sources that will allow scholars and public researchers to work in new ways. A survey of specialcollections that was conducted by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 found that the uncataloged backlog of manuscriptcollections represented one-third of repository holdings. A similar survey conducted in 2003–2004 showed that 34% of archives andmanuscript repositories have at least half of their holdings unprocessed; 60% have at least one-third of their collectionsunprocessed.

Users of these massive aggregations of text, image, video, sound, and metadata will want tools that support andenable discovery, visualization, and analysis of patterns; tools that facilitate collaboration; an infrastructure for authorshipthat supports remixing, recontextualization, and commentary—in sum, tools that turn access into insight and interpretation. Examplesmight include humanities text-mining (discussed more specifically below), as in the Nora project,

If the promise of cyberinfrastructure is to be realized, humanists and social scientists must take the lead indirecting the design and development of the tools their disciplines will use. We will require support systems for that development:research centers that are national repositories of expertise, postdoctoral programs that emphasize digital scholarship, andgraduate programs that train the rising generation in the methods of digital research and scholarship.

What will those tools, customized for the humanities and social sciences, do? A general answer to thatquestion was offered to the Commission in its first public hearing by Michael Jensen, electronic publisher for the National AcademiesPress: “Human interpretation is the heart of the humanities. . . . devising computer-assisted ways for humans to interpret moreeffectively vast arrays of the human enterprise is the major challenge.” In practice, this means that tools for use with digitallibraries will need to enable the user to find patterns of significance (heuristics) in very large collections of information,across many different types of data, and then interpret those patterns (hermeneutics). In the humanities and social sciences,heuristics and hermeneutics are core activities.

In the world at large, the activity of discovering and interpreting patterns in large collections ofdigital information is called data-mining (or sometimes, when it is confined to text, text-mining), but data-mining is only oneinvestigative method, or class of methods, that might become more useful in the humanities and the social sciences as we bringgreater computing power to bear on larger and larger collections and more complex research questions, often with outcomes in areasother than that for which the data was originally collected. Beyond data-mining, there are many other ways of animating and exploringthe integrated cultural record. They include simulations that reverse-engineer historical events to understand what caused themand how things might have turned out differently; game-play that allows us to tinker with the creation and reception of works ofart;

We can design the software tools, computer networks, digital libraries, archives, and museums that are neededto assemble, preserve, and examine the human record in all of its “variety, complexity, incomprehensibility, and intractability,” asHenry Brady, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of The Survey Research Center at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, described it during his August 2004 testimony to the Commission.