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CHAMPAIGN -- The University of
Illinois, home to one of the world's biggest libraries, the nation's
top-ranked library and information school, a nascent
Center for Computing in
Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a supercomputing center
and key scholars, is poised to become a leader in the effort to
"digitize the humanities."
The effort involves designing and constructing research environments
in which humanities scholars can use high-performance computing
tools in shared digital networks to conduct research across broad
swaths of literature. In the
last year, John Unsworth, the dean of Illinois'
Graduate School of Library and
Information Science, has secured two major technology grants
from the Mellon Foundation to lead multi-institutional projects in
the digital humanities. He
also chaired the national commission that produced the recently
released report, "Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social
Sciences," on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies.
In mid-April, Unsworth presented highlights of the report at a
meeting of national digital centers and their sponsors in
Washington, D.C.
 Since
becoming dean four years ago, Unsworth also has published two books
on digital humanities, taught courses on humanities computing, and
won the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities
Center. Why do scholars in
the humanities need new digital technologies?
"Coordinating and optimizing the
symbiosis between the computer's mania for detail and the human's
sense of the gestalt becomes more important every day, as more and
more of the cultural record becomes digital, and yet our instruments
for exploring that digital cultural record remain the blunt
instruments of searching and browsing," Unsworth said.
In January, to that end, the Mellon
Foundation announced that Illinois would receive a two-year, $1
million grant for a text-mining collaboration called "Metadata Offer
New Knowledge" (MONK).
Unsworth serves as the Illinois lead for MONK's international and
multi-institutional research team that includes participants from
five other universities and the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, based at
Illinois. MONK brings
together and extends two previous research projects: the Nora
Project, a multi-institutional Mellon-funded endeavor for which
Unsworth served as project director, and WordHoard, directed by
Martin Mueller at Northwestern.
Nora and WordHoard applied similar
techniques to analyze and explore digital humanities collections --
18th- and 19th-century British and American literature in Nora, and
earlier texts, including Shakespeare, Chaucer and early Greek epic
literature, in WordHoard. Merging Nora and WordHoard in MONK will
create "an inclusive and comprehensive text-mining and text-analysis
tool-kit of software for scholars in the humanities," Unsworth said.
MONK is "an unusually large
collaboration for humanities computing that brings together some of
the best and the brightest in the field across North America."
In March, Michael Welge, of NCSA, won
a $1.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, for an
infrastructure project, with Unsworth serving as one of the
co-principal investigators. SEASR, or Software Environment for the
Advancement of Scholarly Research, begins in June.
According to the project's online
report, SEASR seeks to deliver "a means of addressing the challenges
of transforming information into knowledge by constructing the
software bridges that are required to move from the unstructured and
semi-structured data world to the structured data world."
The aim is to make content collections
more useful by integrating two research and development frameworks
--
NCSA's Data-to-Knowledge (D2K) and IBM's Unstructured Information
Management Architecture -- into an easily usable analytical platform
that researchers in any discipline, but particularly the humanities,
can easily learn and adapt for their own scholarly research.
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 |
 Other key people in SEASR are
Loretta Auvil, NCSA and U of I, co-principal investigator; Duane
Searsmith, U of I, technical lead; Tara Bazler, Indiana University,
usability evaluator; and Tim Cole, U of I, community adviser.
According to Unsworth, SEASR links
with the MONK project and "has the potential to bring MONK to bear
on existing, real-world digital library collections."
Unsworth also is co-principal
investigator, with the U of I Library's Beth Sandore, of a $2.6
million project, the ECHO DEPository, a digital preservation
research and development project at Illinois in partnership with the
Online Computer Library Center and funded by the Library of
Congress. Project partners
include NCSA and WILL-AM-FM
in Urbana, two other universities and state libraries in five
states. Unsworth's interest
in digital humanities preceded his move to Illinois. From 1993 to
2003 he served as the first director of the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities and as a professor in the English
department at the University of Virginia. Prior to that, he taught
at North Carolina State University.
What first got a scholar of
contemporary American fiction so interested in the uses of computers
in the humanities? "My
interest in computers is directly traceable to procrastination,"
Unsworth said. "Specifically,
while word-processing my dissertation in the late 1980s, I
discovered that writing macros, or simple programs, to sort and
format my bibliography, or reprogramming the splash screen in
Wordstar, was a great way to avoid writing chapters, or worse, to
avoid revising them." More
seriously, he said his involvement with computing became a
"sustained," rather than a "fugitive" engagement, when it "met up
with my interest in publishing and scholarly communication in 1990."
At North Carolina State, Unsworth and
some junior faculty colleagues wanted to start a journal on
postmodernism, but the school couldn't cover the printing and
mailing costs, "so the director of the library suggested that we
visit the people in campus computing and explore a new software
package called 'Listserv,' which is how we ended up publishing the
first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, by e-mail,
three years before the advent of the Web."
Unsworth said that while there is a
great deal of academic activity in advancing digital humanities
development, the movement is in its infancy and barriers exist.
Funding is one problem, he said, since
large-scale projects can be costly. "But that problem is, happily,
being mitigated," Unsworth said, "as private and government
foundations are beginning to coordinate their grant-making, partly
in response to the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report."
Another problem is the academic reward
system. "Although the field
of digital humanities is respectable with deans, provosts and
funding agencies, it is often still regarded with suspicion at the
department level as somehow less than scholarly." That conclusion is
supported by "The Book as the Gold Standard for Tenure and Promotion
in the Humanistic Disciplines," a study put together by Leigh
Estabrook, a former dean of the library school. Funding for the
study was providing by the Mellon Foundation.
Unsworth said that even at Illinois,
one of the most wired and digitally active campuses in the world,
"junior level faculty in the humanities who have interesting ideas
and good skills for mounting digital humanities projects hold off
until they are tenured."
"That's too bad -- and it should underline the need for department
heads and senior faculty members to make digital humanities safe for
junior faculty."
[Text copied from
University
of Illinois news release] |
