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

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All l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g-up of research databases needs to be based on a detailed understand<strong>in</strong>g of what
researchers could do or would want to do with such l<strong>in</strong>ked databases. In the future, one would
need to <strong>in</strong>vestigate more realistic user scenarios and complex queries. More generally, there is a
need to study the workflows currently used by researchers and understand how an
<strong>in</strong>frastructure would contribute to or alter these (Jackson et al. 2009).
The risks of develop<strong>in</strong>g tools or services that are too discipl<strong>in</strong>e-specific must also be considered, as
illustrated by a recent discussion of e-science, the humanities, and digital classics:
We need discipl<strong>in</strong>ary centers: classicists, for example, have their own specialized needs that
<strong>in</strong>volve the languages on which they focus. At the same time, we cannot have a flat
organization, with each discipl<strong>in</strong>e manag<strong>in</strong>g its own <strong>in</strong>frastructure. A relatively large
humanities discipl<strong>in</strong>e such as classics might be able to support its own unique systems, but that
would only condemn us to an underfunded <strong>in</strong>frastructure that we could not susta<strong>in</strong> over time
(Crane, Babeu, and Bamman 2007).
These authors argue that while there will always be a need for specific discipl<strong>in</strong>ary centers and
projects, digital humanities developers must be careful not to only develop isolated tools or systems
that cannot “plug <strong>in</strong>” to a larger system or <strong>in</strong>frastructure.
Nonetheless, Geoffrey Rockwell has argued that highly specific tool development has a larger place
with<strong>in</strong> cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for the humanities, s<strong>in</strong>ce many digital tools are re<strong>in</strong>vented as sources <strong>in</strong> the
humanities are cont<strong>in</strong>uously re<strong>in</strong>terpreted:
Tools are not used to extract mean<strong>in</strong>g accord<strong>in</strong>g to objective pr<strong>in</strong>ciples. In the humanities we
re<strong>in</strong>vent ways of mak<strong>in</strong>g mean<strong>in</strong>g with<strong>in</strong> traditions. We are <strong>in</strong> the ma<strong>in</strong>tenance by re<strong>in</strong>vention
and re<strong>in</strong>terpretation bus<strong>in</strong>ess and we don’t want our methods and tools to become <strong>in</strong>visible as
they are part of the research. To shift tool development from researchers to <strong>in</strong>frastructure
providers is to direct the attention of humanities research away and to surrender some of the
research <strong>in</strong>dependence we value. To shift the boundary that def<strong>in</strong>es what is legitimate research
and what isn’t is someth<strong>in</strong>g humanists should care passionately about and resist where it
constra<strong>in</strong>s <strong>in</strong>quiry (Rockwell 2010).
While Rockwell understood the frustration of funders with the “plodd<strong>in</strong>g iterative ways of the
humanities,” he concluded that rather than suspend<strong>in</strong>g the development of new digital tools that
humanists (digital or otherwise) would need to do a better job at “expla<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the value of
<strong>in</strong>terpretation.”
Beyond the viability of common digital tools, Brown and Greengrass (2010) have argued that a s<strong>in</strong>gle
monolithic repository, VRE, or portal structure that is not designed to support customization is likely to
meet with failure:
The breadth of resources required to service the needs of such a heterogeneous community is
unlikely to be encompassed by any s<strong>in</strong>gle repository, or even a small cluster of major
repositories. An access portal therefore needs to be ‘customisable’ to create l<strong>in</strong>ks to and feeds
from valued and commonly used sources (Brown and Greengrass 2010)
As with <strong>in</strong>frastructure for digital classics, while there are certa<strong>in</strong>ly common problems to be solved and
tools to be developed that will work across humanities discipl<strong>in</strong>es, there will still likely always be
some need to customize tools and resources for different discipl<strong>in</strong>es. Indeed, a recently released report