Introduction
Survey and audit of current e-Humanities research in Australia and internationally
Opportunities for e-Humanities research in Australia
December 2003 workshop
Structure of the proposed Network
Report of the Print Cultures Network
Print Cultures Network: Annotated hyperlinks
Database
List of annotated hyperlinks
Participants in Special Research Initiative Projects
INTRODUCTION |
This report has been created in conjunction with key participants in, and utilising seed funding provided under the ARC Special Research Initiatives scheme for the following 2003 Special Research Initiative Projects:
The report outlines the scope, aims, and structure of the proposed Australian e-Humanities Research Network, which will encompass the interests represented by each of The Print Cultures Network and Transforming Knowledge Spaces. It analyses the environment in which the development of a large-scale infrastructural resource of the order of this Network is imperative to support Australian e-humanities researchers. A survey and audit of current e-humanities research both in Australia and internationally is provided, organised according to four modes or formats of research which have a significant profile in this country: digital text and image creation; audiovisual (AV) e-humanities; spatio-temporal data; and 3D modelling and visualisation. Opportunities for striking out new research directions are identified. Commentary on a Network planning workshop is included, together with a set of annotated hyperlinks to websites relevant to e-humanities research, and a database of researchers and projects. |
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CONTEXT |
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(a) Mission and Aims |
Digital technologies are transforming humanities research. Not only have new tools and resources to assist with traditional research tasks in the humanities proliferated in recent years, but in the atmosphere of innovation and experiment brought about by the profound impact of digital technologies on our research cultures, and indeed on our cultural interactions in the broadest sense, the nature of certain forms of humanities research has entirely changed. A new arena of theoretical inquiry is emerging alongside the take-up of computer-enhanced research practices, and together these practical and conceptual advances are coming to be known as the "e-humanities". The Australian e-Humanities Research Network will respond to the growing support needs of the community of researchers, practitioners and scholars active in e-humanities research, in particular those involved in the creation and use of digital resources for the humanities in Australia. It is a humanities-specific contribution to the National Priority Area, Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries. The Network aims to:
The proposed Australian e-Humanities Research Network will generate a dynamic program over the five-year cycle of funding for ARC Research Networks, working through a sound business plan to achieve a significant measure of self-funding. Outcomes will include:
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(b) What is e-Humanities Research? |
Broadly, the e-humanities is a complex and dynamic application of the prodigious memory and processing power of the modern computer, actualised through computer science, to a collection of disciplines with a very long and proud tradition in the preservation, transmission, and examination of human culture (McCarty). It belongs with the vast project of the current era of defining the boundaries between the human and the mechanical, and has a special role in this as a meeting point between, on the one hand, disciplines attuned to the inexhaustible subtlety, variety, depth and complexity of the products of the human mind (especially as mediated through language), and on the other, machine-dependent procedures which (whatever their complex combinations and bewildering speeds of execution) must ultimately rest on implacably rigid rules. E-humanities research can be seen to fall into two distinct but related categories. The first encompasses the arena of individual scholars - or indeed teams of scholars - discovering at a practical level the advantages and pitfalls of harnessing the latest digital technologies to enhance their research practices, and about how best to integrate these discoveries into existing scholarly mechanisms for preservation of research data and communication of results. A typical activity in this category would be the preparation of scholarly and educational resources, from the editing of canonical texts in electronic form to multimedia knowledge representations. The major outcome is a set of resources which both make traditional scholarly discovery and learning easier for the target user, and also make possible new kinds of analysis. This category includes the design and implementation of digital research tools. The second is about exploring the new conceptual terrain opened up as a result of bringing established humanities disciplines into contact with the power of the digital, and consists of projects driven by specific research questions. For these the compilation of reusable digital resources is a secondary consideration. The prime motivation is to create new knowledge in the form of propositions about cultural objects and systems, propositions which for reasons of scale or falsifiability could only be arrived at through digital materials and methods. In its mature form the broad objective of the e-humanities has moderated from a naïve belief that given enough data and processing power the entire realm of the humanities could be brought under the sway of statistics and summary visualisations, and has become something more like the exploration of the boundary between the imaginative and the systematic. The process of representing and analysing cultural products by digital means brings with it a continual reassessment of just what can and cannot be made explicit in them (Unsworth, June 2003). As well as bringing new methods from computer science to its traditional activities, e-humanities has in turn driven advances in computer science through the challenges of representing and analysing materials of extreme complexity. The influence of the work of the humanities computing community's Text Encoding Initiative (a large-scale US-EU collaboration) on the very widely adopted XML protocols is a good example. The e-humanities, then, are fundamentally changing the way we do research. At a recent forum convened by the US-based Coalition for Networked Information, John Unsworth identified the following key changes observable in the way humanities research is practised under the influence of networked information technology (Unsworth, Dec 2003):
These increased expectations in terms of skill level and technical and human resources have placed new and pressing demands on individual scholars, as well as on the universities and research funding bodies that support them, demands to which a research network based on a distributed resource and advisory structure such as that outlined in the section of this report entitled "structure" would effectively and efficiently respond. |
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(c) Background to the Network Proposal |
This proposal for the Australian e-Humanities Research Network builds on initiatives which date back to Computing Arts 2001, Digital Resources for Research in the Humanities, the first international conference of its kind to take place in the southern hemisphere. Held at The University of Sydney in September 2001, Computing Arts was inspired by the United Kingdom's annual Digital Resources for the Humanities conferences, and was attended by over 150 people, including delegates from the United Kingdom and the United States as well as from Australasia. One goal of the conference was to initiate a regional forum for scholars and practitioners involved in the creation, use and support of digital research resources in the humanities. Progress towards this goal was made by setting up the Australian e-Humanities Network, a collaboration between the Academy of the Humanities, the University of Sydney (Library and Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS)), and the University of Newcastle (Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing), which was awarded an ARC Learned Academies Special Projects grant of $60,000 for 2002. Its achievements to date include:
These outcomes, achieved with limited resources, have amply demonstrated both demand for, and potential advantages of, the consolidation and extension of such activities. The original initiative proved timely, and we believe that the current ARC Research Networks scheme provides an extraordinary opportunity to articulate a wider vision. The proposed Australian e-Humanities Research Network will identify and service the infrastructure needs of humanities researchers in such disciplines as architecture and law, as well as in disciplines like history and literary studies. Experience since 2001 has highlighted needs ranging from the communication of information; training at all levels; development of best-practice protocols; the urgency of issues to do with preservation of data in digital formats; significant intellectual property and other legal considerations. The most significant change since 2001, however, has been brought about by major technological developments, particularly the emergence of high-speed research and education networks and datagrid technologies (Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing, GRANGENET, AARNET). The scope of such distributed systems that increasingly allow - and require - us to work in complex distributed environments is beyond the capacity of any one individual or institution to imagine or resource. Humanities researchers, traditionally individualistic and relatively frugal in demands for resource funding dollars, are responding to research challenges that can be met only by shaping shared goals and building cross-institutional teams and information flow. The immense resource requirements of these rapidly evolving technologies offer real prospects of immense intellectual and material rewards. There is the opportunity now to leverage the considerable existing investment in Australian e-humanities research that has been made by the ARC and various universities and other organisations by developing a network that brings together the experience, expertise and enthusiasm of individual researchers. Already since the announcement of seed-funding grants in mid-December 2003, the proposed Australian e-Humanities Research Network has been expanded by joining forces with two other network proposals, Transforming Knowledge Spaces: Open Technologies for Research Collaboration and Research Communication, led by Professor Andrew Christie from the University of Melbourne, and The Print Cultures Network: Print Culture and National Culture in a Global Economy, led by Associate Professor David Carter from the University of Queensland. This report is designed to fulfil the reporting requirements for all three proposals. It is likely that further expansion will occur before submission of an application for funding the Network in March 2004, and expansion is bound to continue if funding is awarded. The initiatives outlined in the seed-funding application for Transforming Knowledge Spaces mesh and merge with key aspects of the Australian e-Humanities proposal. Emphasis on transforming knowledge spaces to improve information use complements interests in developing technologies to support and advance transdisciplinary work; while the powerful commitment to intellectual property issues that is centred on the interdisciplinary Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia and the Centre for Media and Communications Law at The University of Melbourne, takes up ground marked out but not occupied by the original Australian e-Humanities Research Network proposal. The engagement of the Print Cultures Network with the proposed Australian e-Humanities Research Network is of a different order. All three of the amalgamating proposals build on a solid base in existing initiatives, in the case of Print Cultures on the internationally recognised AustLit Gateway, essentially a bibliographic and biographical facility for research on Australian literature. AustLit constitutes a major resource for the innovative research portfolio proposed in the emerging cross-disciplinary field of print culture. The Print Cultures Network, as indicated in its statement inset within this overall report, takes its place as a node of the larger Network, interacting collaboratively with other components. |
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(d) The Probable National Benefits From the Activities of the Proposed Network |
There is only one other comparable national network to the proposed Australian e-Humanities Research Network, namely the UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service (though its brief is not restricted to research). The opportunity exists now for two or three countries to be paramount in e-humanities: to be acknowledged research leaders, and the destination of first choice for study and employment. While greater breadth and (to some extent) depth must be recognised in e-humanities in the United Kingdom and the United States than in Australia, our work is prominent internationally to a degree out of all proportion to population and expenditure. At this time, Australia leads the way in particular e-humanities areas, notably digital audio research and spatio-temporal mapping; and is highly visible in others, like stylistics and textual editing. This point can be put another way: humanities researchers in Australia have been efficient users of funding. With modest leverage and the application of imaginative open source solutions, they have built substantial humanities research resources adapted to Australian conditions. It is notable however that much work in digital resource creation has been individualistic, small-scale, and essentially hand-crafted. Such achievements, including significant international collaborations, provide a platform for further innovation by e-humanities researchers based in Australia - though in the electronic environment, the distinction between national and international is far from clearcut. The current proposal is premised on the advantages of scale. The proposed network has the potential to build critical mass, consolidate and enhance existing strengths, and reduce duplication and inefficiency by better information flow and economies of scale. Leveraging of existing and new facilities, skills development, and regional, national and global partnerships will enhance the impact and competitiveness of Australian researchers. It must be emphasised that there is a huge opportunity cost if Australia does not respond to the present explosion of connectivity. Some potential benefits are economic, others, less readily quantifiable, are intellectual and social and build cultural capital. A specific instance is that one role of the Network will be to preserve and make accessible collections of our common cultural heritage. The Australian e-Humanities Research Network represents a necessary investment in the emerging generation of researchers, and in our national capacity to develop smart technologies in specifically humanities contexts. |
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References |
McCarty, Willard. "Poem and algorithm: humanities computing in the life and place of the mind." Keynote speech for humanITies: Information technology in the arts and humanities: Present applications and future perspectives, The Open University, Milton Keynes, 10 October 1998. Unsworth, John. "Knowledge Representation as a Core Activity of Humanities Computing," delivered as part of "A Practicable Future For Computing in the Humanities: An International Symposium," University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia, 2-5 July 2003. Unsworth, John. "Humanities and Cyberinfrastructure: Changes in Disciplinary Practice," report on closing plenary panel of a forum convened by the Coalition for Networked Information, Portland, Oregon, 9 December 2003. |
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