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

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the digital arts and humanities are now fac<strong>in</strong>g what might be termed a complexity deluge. This
can be def<strong>in</strong>ed as the presence of a range of opportunities aris<strong>in</strong>g from the rate of technological
change and the availability of e-<strong>in</strong>frastructure, that the ma<strong>in</strong>stream academic community is not
yet equipped to address its research questions with (Dunn 2009).
Dunn worried that this lack of read<strong>in</strong>ess on the part of academia meant that technology, rather than
“research questions,” would drive the development of <strong>in</strong>frastructure agendas.
The complex nature of humanities data and the challenges of build<strong>in</strong>g a cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for these
data have also been explored by Blanke et al. (2008, 2009), particularly <strong>in</strong> terms of the semantically
and structurally diverse data sets that are <strong>in</strong>volved and the highly contextual and qualitative nature of
much of the data. “The <strong>in</strong>tegration of data items <strong>in</strong>to arts and humanities research is non-trivial, as
complicated semantics underlie the archives of human reports,” they expla<strong>in</strong>ed, not<strong>in</strong>g how
“humanities data may be highly contextual, its <strong>in</strong>terpretation depend<strong>in</strong>g on relationships to other
resources and collections, which are not necessarily digital”(Blanke et al. 2009). This semantic,
structural, and contextual complexity led to a number of computational problems, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the lack of
formats or <strong>in</strong>terfaces to make data/systems <strong>in</strong>teroperable (Blanke et al. 2008). The difficulty of
design<strong>in</strong>g for the “fuzzy” and <strong>in</strong>consistent nature of data <strong>in</strong> the humanities was also acknowledged by
OKell et al. (2010) <strong>in</strong> their overview of creat<strong>in</strong>g a reusable digital learn<strong>in</strong>g object, and they
consequently labeled the humanities as an “ill structured knowledge doma<strong>in</strong>.”
Similar challenges <strong>in</strong> humanities data <strong>in</strong>tegration were reported by the LaQuAT project when they
evaluated the results of <strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g Projet Volterra and the HGV (Jackson et al. 2009), and they
acknowledged that there were still many limits to the automatic <strong>in</strong>tegration of humanities data sets.
They proposed build<strong>in</strong>g systems that made use of human annotations <strong>in</strong> help<strong>in</strong>g l<strong>in</strong>k diverse data sets
<strong>in</strong> a mean<strong>in</strong>gful way:
Our <strong>in</strong>vestigations led us to conclude that there is a need among at least some humanities
researchers for tools support<strong>in</strong>g collaborative processes that <strong>in</strong>volve access to and use of
complex, diverse and geographically distributed data resources, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g both automated
process<strong>in</strong>g and human manipulation, <strong>in</strong> environments where research groups (<strong>in</strong> the form of
"virtual organisations"), research data and research outputs may all cross <strong>in</strong>stitutional
boundaries and be subject to different, autonomous management regimes (Hedges 2009).
The need for <strong>in</strong>frastructural solutions that deal not just with the complexities of humanities data but
also with the fact that such data are often geographically distributed and can belong to different
organizations with different data-management practices is further explored <strong>in</strong> the next section.
“General” Humanities Infrastructures, Doma<strong>in</strong>-Specific Needs, and the Needs of
Humanists
To return to the idea of general requirements for a humanities cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure, the ACLS report
concluded that at a bare m<strong>in</strong>imum such an <strong>in</strong>frastructure will have to be a public good, susta<strong>in</strong>able,
collaborative, <strong>in</strong>teroperable, and support experimentation (ACLS 2006). These ideas have been
supported <strong>in</strong> a variety of other recent research on how to build a general humanities
cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure. Franciska de Jong, <strong>in</strong> a recent address to the European Chapter of the Association
for Computational L<strong>in</strong>guistics (EACL), del<strong>in</strong>eated similar requirements for an <strong>in</strong>frastructure that
would support new “knowledge-driven workflows.” This list <strong>in</strong>cluded the “coord<strong>in</strong>ation of coherent
platforms (both local and <strong>in</strong>ternational)” to support the <strong>in</strong>teraction of communities and the exchange of