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

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that the question of <strong>in</strong>teroperability exists on many levels and will present significant challenges for
any <strong>in</strong>frastructure design.
The Future of Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship
Christ<strong>in</strong>e Borgman started and ended her report on the future of digital humanities with five questions
the community will need to consider to move forward as a discipl<strong>in</strong>e: “What are data What are the
<strong>in</strong>frastructure requirements Where are the social studies of digital humanities What is the humanities
laboratory of the twenty-first century and What is the value proposition for digital humanities <strong>in</strong> an
era of decl<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g budgets” (Borgman 2009).
Similar questions <strong>in</strong> regard to the development of a research <strong>in</strong>frastructure for the humanities were
explored at a two-day workshop held <strong>in</strong> October 2010 that was funded by the European Science
Foundation (ESF). The topic was “Research Communities and Research Infrastructures <strong>in</strong> the
Humanities.” 715 The ESF had established a Stand<strong>in</strong>g Committee for the Humanities (SCH) <strong>in</strong> 2009,
and the SCH Work<strong>in</strong>g Group on Research Infrastructures organized the workshop to “gather different
research communities’ perspectives on scholarly-driven design and use of research <strong>in</strong>frastructures <strong>in</strong>
the humanities.” Scholars from all over Europe were <strong>in</strong>vited to present on their research, and the
workshop was divided <strong>in</strong>to five major themes: (1) the development of humanities research
communities and their vary<strong>in</strong>g levels of adoption of digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure; (2) the reuse and
repurpos<strong>in</strong>g of data; (3) the challenges for <strong>in</strong>frastructure <strong>in</strong> need<strong>in</strong>g to deal with both textual and
nontextual material; (4) how digital technologies both challenge traditional discipl<strong>in</strong>ary boundaries and
recognition patterns and created new <strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary resources; and (5) the difficulties of <strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g
already exist<strong>in</strong>g resources. The outcomes of this workshop will be used to guide the SCH Work<strong>in</strong>g
Group’s creation of a formal ESF policy publication on humanities research <strong>in</strong>frastructure.
The CSHE report similarly outl<strong>in</strong>ed a number of topics that deserve further attention <strong>in</strong> order to
promote digital scholarship and new forms of scholarly communication. It recommended that tenureand-promotion
practices needed to become more nuanced and be accompanied by a reexam<strong>in</strong>ation of
the processes of peer review. For scholarly communication to evolve, they concluded that bus<strong>in</strong>ess
models also need to be developed that can susta<strong>in</strong> high quality and affordable journals and
monographs. Additionally, they suggested that more sophisticated models of electronic publication are
needed that can “accommodate arguments of varied length, rich media, and embedded l<strong>in</strong>ks to data”
(Harley et al. 2010). F<strong>in</strong>ally, they addressed the importance of “support for manag<strong>in</strong>g and preserv<strong>in</strong>g
new research methods and products <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g components of natural language process<strong>in</strong>g,
visualization, complex distributed databases, and GIS, among many others” (Harley et al. 2010).
The future of the digital humanities was also addressed by a THATCamp 716 held <strong>in</strong> Paris, France, <strong>in</strong>
May 2010. 717 This group issued a “Digital Humanities Manifesto” that <strong>in</strong>cluded a def<strong>in</strong>ition of digital
humanities and general guidel<strong>in</strong>es for ensur<strong>in</strong>g a successful future for the digital humanities as a
whole. The guidel<strong>in</strong>es called for open access to data and metadata that must be both technically well
documented and <strong>in</strong>teroperable; for greater and more open dissem<strong>in</strong>ation of research data, code,
methods and f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs; for <strong>in</strong>tegration of digital humanities education with<strong>in</strong> the larger social science
and humanities curriculum (<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g formal degree programs <strong>in</strong> the digital humanities with
715 http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/strategic-activities/research-<strong>in</strong>frastructures-<strong>in</strong>-the-humanities.html
716 THATCamp is an acronym for “The Humanities and Technology Camp” (http://thatcamp.org/), a project that was started by the Center for History and
New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. THATCamps have been held <strong>in</strong> various cities and have been described as “unconferences” …“where
humanists and technologists meet to work together for the common good.” An unconference is one that is generally organized day-by-day by its
participants accord<strong>in</strong>g to their <strong>in</strong>terests and is typically small, <strong>in</strong>formal, short, <strong>in</strong>expensive, <strong>in</strong>formal, and nonhierarchical, accord<strong>in</strong>g to the project website.
717 http://www.digitalhumanities.cnrs.fr/wikis/tcp/<strong>in</strong>dex.phptitle=Anglais