Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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221 Borgman def<strong>in</strong>ed the digital humanities as “a new set of practices, us<strong>in</strong>g new sets of technologies, to address research problems of the discipl<strong>in</strong>e.” The digital humanities as a new set of practices and technologies also requires a particular type of <strong>in</strong>frastructure, the requirements of which were first laid out concretely <strong>in</strong> 2006 by a report commissioned by the American <strong>Council</strong> of Learned Societies (ACLS): Cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure is more than the tangible network and the means of storage <strong>in</strong> digitized form. It is not only the discipl<strong>in</strong>e-specific software application and the project-specific data collections: it is also the more <strong>in</strong>tangible layer of expertise and best practices, standards and tools, collections and collaborative environments that can be broadly shared across communities of <strong>in</strong>quiry (ACLS 2006). The ACLS report also offered a list of characteristics that would be required of a humanities <strong>in</strong>frastructure: it will operate as a public good; be both susta<strong>in</strong>able and <strong>in</strong>teroperable; encourage collaborative work; and support experimentation. The def<strong>in</strong>ition and characteristics outl<strong>in</strong>ed above offer a number of major po<strong>in</strong>ts that this report considers <strong>in</strong> greater detail, particularly that <strong>in</strong>frastructure <strong>in</strong>cludes not only data collections and software for <strong>in</strong>dividual discipl<strong>in</strong>es but also best practices, standards, collections, and collaborations that can be shared across discipl<strong>in</strong>es. The importance of shar<strong>in</strong>g as key to the def<strong>in</strong>ition of <strong>in</strong>frastructure has also been expressed by Geoffrey Rockwell, who posited, “Anyth<strong>in</strong>g that is needed to connect more than one person, project, or entity is <strong>in</strong>frastructure. Anyth<strong>in</strong>g used exclusively by a project is not” (Rockwell 2010). In his own discussion of cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure, Rockwell seconded the po<strong>in</strong>t of the ACLS report that it should be broadly useful to the public, but also concluded that cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure needs to be “well understood enough” so that it can be broadly useful, be able to foster economic or research activity, be “funded by the public for the public,” be <strong>in</strong>visible so that its use becomes reliable and expected, and be ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed by a long-term organization. At the same time, Rockwell made a dist<strong>in</strong>ction between humanities research and research <strong>in</strong>frastructure or cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure, and emphasized the importance of support<strong>in</strong>g both. “Research, by contrast is not expected to be useful, necessarily, and certa<strong>in</strong>ly isn’t expected to be useful to a public,” Rockwell concluded, stat<strong>in</strong>g that “research is about that which we don’t understand, while <strong>in</strong>frastructure really shouldn’t be experimental” (Rockwell 2010). Rockwell’s larger po<strong>in</strong>t was that <strong>in</strong> def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g their cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure, humanists should remember that a “turn to <strong>in</strong>frastructure” <strong>in</strong>volves political and sociological decisions and a possible redef<strong>in</strong>ition of what is considered as “legitimate” research. Other major po<strong>in</strong>ts made by the ACLS report were that “extensive and reusable digital collections” were at the core of any cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure and that scholars should be engaged <strong>in</strong> the development of these collections, for, as the commission noted, almost all successful tool build<strong>in</strong>g is dependent on the existence of and access to digital collections. The concept of services, content, and tools as <strong>in</strong>frastructure was seen repeatedly not only throughout not just this report but also <strong>in</strong> the discussions by TextGrid and other humanities cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure research projects, and is explored further <strong>in</strong> the next section. Open Content, Services, and Tools as Infrastructure In 2007, a jo<strong>in</strong>t JISC-NSF report emphasized that content and the tools necessary to exploit it are two essential components of <strong>in</strong>frastructure. “In the cyber age, collections of digital content and the software to <strong>in</strong>terpret them have become the foundation for discovery,” Arms and Larsen (2007) <strong>in</strong>sisted, not<strong>in</strong>g that “they have entered the realm of <strong>in</strong>frastructure.” In their overview of the role of virtual research
222 environments <strong>in</strong> scholarly communication, Voss and Procter (2009) offered a similar conclusion. “The concept of ‘content as <strong>in</strong>frastructure’ emphasises the <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>g importance of collections of research data as a reusable <strong>in</strong>frastructure,” Voss and Procter expla<strong>in</strong>ed, “that builds on top of the physical research comput<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>frastructure and traditional <strong>in</strong>frastructures such as scientific <strong>in</strong>struments or libraries”(Voss and Procter 2009). At the same time, the authors of the JISC-NSF report stated that more cultural heritage and educational organizations needed to work together to produce and share their content, conclud<strong>in</strong>g that “the arduous goal of open access <strong>in</strong> the humanities can only be achieved when public <strong>in</strong>stitutions no longer <strong>in</strong>vest <strong>in</strong> endeavors with proprietary output.” S<strong>in</strong>ce openly licensed or content that is freely available for reuse is such a fundamental part of <strong>in</strong>frastructure, the ACLS offered a similar warn<strong>in</strong>g, suggest<strong>in</strong>g that more universities needed to work to create, digitize and preserve their own collections either locally or consortially, rather than rent<strong>in</strong>g access to materials. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has recently made a similar call for large-scale government fund<strong>in</strong>g to create a “universal, open library or digital data commons” (ARL 2009a). The creators of TextGrid have reached similar conclusions regard<strong>in</strong>g the primacy of both content and services <strong>in</strong> what they have labeled eHumanities ecosystems as an alternative to the term cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure. “However, at least for eHumanities ecosystems a model <strong>in</strong> which services reign supreme and content is exclusively seen as the matter on which the services operate is not satisfactory,” Ludwig and Küster articulate, “for eHumanities ecosystems need models <strong>in</strong> which both content and services are first-class citizens” (Ludwig and Küster 2008). To address the need to provide services on an <strong>in</strong>frastructural level for digital humanities research, the HiTHeR (e-Humanities High Throughput Comput<strong>in</strong>g) 674 project sought to embed a self-organiz<strong>in</strong>g text-m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g application/agent as a RESTful web service <strong>in</strong> an “e-Humanities ecosystem.” Blanke, Hedges, and Palmer (2009) provided an overview of this project that sought to explore what “digital services and value-creat<strong>in</strong>g activities” will particularly serve e-Humanities research. Although the particular tool described sought to create an “automatic cha<strong>in</strong> of read<strong>in</strong>gs” for the N<strong>in</strong>eteenth Century Serials Edition Project (NCSE), 675 the larger question considered was how such an agent could be <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>to a large humanities cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure. A “resourceful web service” approach was used to avoid creat<strong>in</strong>g yet another isolated tool or website solution. One of the greatest challenges for tool developers <strong>in</strong> the digital humanities, the authors thus declared, was determ<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g how to create tools that were appropriate for the traditional research scholars may wish to pursue while still allow<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>novative work. 676 The text-m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g service offered by the HiTHer project created a “semantic view,” or an automatically generated brows<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>terface to the NCSE text collection: HiTHeR will offer an <strong>in</strong>terface to primary resources by automatically generat<strong>in</strong>g a cha<strong>in</strong> of related documents for read<strong>in</strong>g. Users of HiTHeR are able to upload collections and retrieve lists of reference documents <strong>in</strong> their collections together with the N most similar documents to this reference document (Blanke, Hedges, and Palmer 2009). 674 http://hither.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/ 675 http://www.ncse.ac.uk/ 676 In a discussion of his annotation tool Pl<strong>in</strong>y, John Bradley made similar claims and reiterated a po<strong>in</strong>t he had made earlier (Bradley 2005), namely, “that tool builders <strong>in</strong> the digital humanities would have better success persuad<strong>in</strong>g their non-digital colleagues that computers could have a significant positive benefit on their research if the tools they built fit better <strong>in</strong>to how humanities scholarship is generally done, rather than if they developed new tools that were premised upon a radically different way to do th<strong>in</strong>gs” (Bradley 2008).
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"Rome Wasn
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ii ISBN 978-1-932326-38-3 CLIR Publ
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iv EpiDoc-Based Digital Epigraphy P
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vi ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alison Babeu ha
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viii PBW PCA PDB PDL PHI PLANETS PN
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x pursuit of knowledge about the an
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2 and intellectual
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4 associations to work together, an
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6 briefly explore issues that are n
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8 for English translations of Greek
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10 is created of the entire bibliog
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12 directory of more than 2,100 cat
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14 generated by the decision tree p
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16 The image-registration algorithm
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18 Schibel and Rydberg-Cox argued t
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20 information ret
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22 In ancient manuscripts, Sanskrit
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24 algorithms; ins
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26 Markov Models (MEMM) 82 and outp
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28 One major project to recently em
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30 developed a cuneiform sign reper
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32 and prayers), and edited texts a
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34 Digital critical editions, howev
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36 While these requirements may see
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38 many discrete texts, in<
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40 examine how l<s
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42 The second fact that Rob
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44 “multimedia scholarly editions
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46 different apparatuses. In Bosche
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48 individual text
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50 In these cases we must provide a
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52 First, it utilizes a nearest nei
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54 entirely pre-searched for each l
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56 As this research in</str
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58 the inscription
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60 Text Min<strong
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62 This manual analysis provided a
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64 As illustrated by this def<stron
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66 archaeology as a discipl
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68 funded with public money <strong
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70 for re-use is a simple slogan, b
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72 framework to in
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74 then mapped to the CRM-EH so tha
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76 tDAR also stores all resources <
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78 Many look to their in</s
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80 Although the multidiscipl<strong
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82 computer science can make it pos
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84 were created after this time. A
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86 transparency, accessibility, ava
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88 (Research Archive for Ancient Sc
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90 This challenge of not just digit
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92 Part of the research of the Plei
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94 After correctin
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96 Epigraphy Overview: Epigraphy Da
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98 step, because epigraphic texts s
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100 text and to previous annotation
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102 and squeezes as well as a selec
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104 original); typ
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106 To begin this
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108 better set the in</stro
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110 Another related project that ha
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112 used to point
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114 names in texts
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116 and Manuscripts (VRE-SDM) 378 s
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118 level of storage in</st
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120 simplicity, and sensible file n
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122 compliant DTD and schema. 393 I
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124 While the advanced document-rec
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126 Another significant manuscript
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128 compelled to operate in
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130 Cayless thus developed a method
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132 must consider commercial and en
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134 standard developed for the desc
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136 to standard catalogs, identific
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138 present an extension and comb<s
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140 scholars in th
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142 described as the amicitia papyr
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144 to a full text transcription wh
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146 The final majo
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148 One is toward openness; the oth
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150 this idea of personal ownership
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152 prototype 512 in</stron
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154 other assertions made about par
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156 The conclusion drawn from this
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158 and that “is main</st
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160 philology available at the webs
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162 descriptions that provides scho
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164 of multilingua
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166 Another major methodological is
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168 ancient historians. Network ana
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Page 193 and 194: 182 This work tends to focus on des
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Page 207 and 208: 196 computers by ancient historians
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Page 227 and 228: 216 the related MILARQ project, 649
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Page 241 and 242: 230 This lack of deeper understand<
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Page 247 and 248: 236 of architecture, tools and serv
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Page 253 and 254: 242 Sustainable Pr
Page 255 and 256: 244 A recent ARL report that explor
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Page 269 and 270: 258 Linguistic Com
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Page 275 and 276: 264 support the main</stron
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Page 281 and 282: 270 This architecture makes it easy
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272 [Aschenbrenner et al. 2008]. As
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274 Editions.” Advances i
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276 [Bodard et al. 2009]. Bodard, G
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278 [Bulger et al. 2011]. Bulger, M
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280 [Choudhury and Stin</st
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282 [Crane et al. 2009a]. Crane, Gr
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284 [Dué and Ebbott 2009]. Dué, C
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286 [Flaten 2009]. Flaten, Arne R.
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288 [Hardwick 2000]. Hardwick, Lorn
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290 Conference on E-Science Worksho
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292 [Lockyear 2007]. Lockyear, Kris
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294 Cambridge, MA: Association for
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296 [Ntzios et al. 2007]. Ntzios, K
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298 [Reddy and Crane 2006]. Reddy,
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300 [Rydberg-Cox 2009]. Rydberg-Cox
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302 [Smith 2010]. Smith, D. Neel.
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304 and the Canadian Academic Commu
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306 [Wallom et al. 2009]. Wallom, D
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