0.7 What are the distinctive needs and contributions of the humanities

What are the distinctive needs and contributions of the humanities and social sciences in cyberinfrastructure?

In the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965

(3) An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give fullvalue and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of thepast, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.

(4) Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form ofeducation, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters oftheir technology and not its unthinking servants.

Both of these arguments remain true as we enter into an “advanced civilization” that depends on technologyfor the daily business of the culture as well as for its education and its research. The humanities and the social sciences arecritical players in the development of cyberinfrastructure because they deal with the intractability, the rich ambiguity, and themagnificent complexity that is the human experience.

In the Atkins report, cyberinfrastructure consists of

• grids of computational centers;
• comprehensive libraries of digital objects;
• well-curated collections of scientific data;
• online instruments and vast sensor arrays;
• convenient software toolkits.

Humanities scholars and social scientists will require similar facilities but, obviously, not exactly thesame ones: “grids of computational centers” are needed in the humanities and social sciences, but they will have to be staffedwith different kinds of subject-area experts; comprehensive and well-curated libraries of digital objects will certainly be needed,but the objects themselves will be different from those used in the sciences; software toolkits for projects involving data-mining anddata-visualization could be shared across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, but only up to the point where the nature ofthe data begins to shape the nature of the tools. Science and engineering have made great strides in using information technologyto understand and shape the world around us. This report is focused on how these same technologies could help advance the study andinterpretation of the vastly more messy and idiosyncratic realm of human experience.

Building a cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences presents an opportunity to takeadvantage of prevailing economic, organizational, and technological forces. We have remarkable opportunities to bring new analytic andinterpretive power to bear on the materials and the methods of the humanities and the social sciences: by so doing, we can advance ourunderstanding of human cultures past, present, and future. In the process, however, scholars, librarians, publishers, anduniversities will also have to re-examine their own academic culture, rethinking its outward forms, its established practices,and its apparent assumptions.

The case for why and how to seize this opportunity is presented in the following chapters. Chapter 1articulates a vision for the future of the humanities and social sciences. Chapter 2 highlights some of the fundamental constraintsthat could limit our ability to achieve that vision. Chapter 3 presents a framework for making the changes needed to overcomethose constraints and for undertaking the online integration of the cultural record.