A Computer is Not a Typewriter, or
Getting Right with Information Technology in the
Humanities
Stanley N. Katz
Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University
Lecture in the Digital Directions Speakers Series, University
of Virginia
4 February 1999
(With special thanks for advice on revisions of this lecture from
David Green [NINCH], Charles Henry [Rice University
Library] and Willard McCarty [Centre for Computing in the
Humanities, King’s College, London])
My qualifications to give this talk are dubious at best. Perhaps
there is hope for me, however. I only learned to drive a car with a
standard transmission when I was in college, though that is an
instance of learning to prefer the old (but better) technology. But
how many of you in this audience can drive a shift car? I have been
using a computer for word processing since the introduction of the
IBM PC, I have been a regular user of e-mail since about 1986, and I
have been addicted to the World Wide Web since the University of
Illinois (followed by Netscape) made the Web accessible to morons. I
regularly consult digital archives and library catalogues through my
computer, I take research notes in my notebook computer, I have
finally mounted a personal web page and I am even learning how to
manipulate a large research database mounted for me by one of my
graduate assistants. In other words, I am an addict of digital
technology, but always scrambling to catch up to the trailing edge of
technology. For those of us enthusiasts who have seen the future and
decided that it works, there is much to be satisfied about. So why am
I worried? So why am I here talking to you this afternoon and (as you
will discover) calling for action?
Let me explain by means of a long excursus concerning my
experience as President of the American Council of Learned Societies.
I accepted the ACLS presidency 13 years pretty much to the day from
today, and remained on the job for 11 years. Since ACLS is, among
other things, a consortium of the major professional societies in the
humanities and social sciences, an important part of the
President’s job is to inform himself about the concerns of the
societies, and to explore courses of action and programs that address
those concerns. Although I was a long-time member of several
professional societies, and had been president of two of them, I was
quite new at the job of policy analysis and program formulation for
the humanities as a whole. But I was (and am) a scholar and teacher
of public policy, and the challenge was exciting.
My first and strongest impression of the mise en scene for
the fields of the humanities was that there was something terribly
important going on that the institutions of the humanities had not
organized themselves to reflect upon and respond to. That "something"
was the emergence of information technology as a significant factor
in the development of research and pedagogy, and the guilty
institutions ranged from ACLS and the learned societies to colleges
and universities, independent libraries, museums and the like.
There were of course individual scholars who were already
thoughtfully making use of new technologies, and there were even
whole fields that had seen exciting new possibilities. Of these,
surely one of the best examples was computational linguistics, a
field entirely made possible by the computer. The social scientists,
like all scholars who worked with large data bases, were also well
along in the use of mainframe technology and developing new
techniques for "number crunching." The geographers were beginning to
use GIS technology, and the dictionary makers were learning how to
revolutionize their techniques through the power and memory of
computers – the magnificent Dictionary of American Regional
English being the supreme local example of what could be
accomplished. And even the purely humanistic fields were taking
advantage of computer technology. Two of the best examples would be
the Thesaurus Linguae Gracae, originally a CD-ROM based fully
searchable electronic database of all Greek texts written between 600
and 1453 A.D., and the Dante database that contains the works of his
principal commentators. Other traditionally labor intensive
humanistic efforts such as concordance making were suddenly
transformed from a generations-long process to one that could be
accomplished in a reasonable number of years. Such electronic
resources made substantial bodies of knowledge accessible to any
scholar with an interest and the requisite language skills, rather
than the preserve of the few who had been able to devote the time to
read through them. Furthermore, by altering the means of knowledge,
electronic access transformed our perspective, as the new field of
corpus linguistics has demonstrated.
There was, then, much good news about the potential of IT for the
humanities when I began my tenure at ACLS in 1986. The bad news, as I
have already suggested, was that this activity was scattered, ill
coordinated and unevenly dispersed across the fields of the
humanities. There were few forums for discussion of IT and the
humanities on a national (or preferably international) basis. There
was little inter- or, more important, intra-university support for
humanities computing and access to digital technologies. The one
national organization that had emerged, the Association for Computing
in the Humanities, was until recently limited in its vision to
text-analysis (and especially text encoding), and did not yet focus
on the larger range of problems and possibilities for the humanities.
It seemed to me that ACLS, as the national humanities
organization, had a responsibility to address this set of challenges
to research and teaching. We had, in fact, taken an important step in
this direction in 1984 (in response to an earlier ACLS report on
scholarly communication in the humanities), by establishing an Office
of Scholarly Communication and Technology in Washington, D.C. Under
the able leadership of Herbert Morton, this office published a
newsletter that was the first national publication on IT and the
humanities and it also undertook a survey of the use of technology by
humanists. But the sad fact is that we were not able to determine how
best to employ the limited foundation funding available, and I
reluctantly closed the office in 1987 as we began to consider
alternative approaches.
The core of ALCS is a body called the Conference of Administrative
Officers that meets semi-annually to discuss matters of common
concern to the societies. Early in my dealings with the CAO I was
becoming aware of the potential for electronic document delivery, and
I began to wonder what impact the availability of electronic
article-level citation and transmission of full-text articles to
individual users might have for our societies. It seemed to me that
the development of these capabilities, and more generally the
electronic publication of journals, might have a devastating impact
upon society membership levels. Scholars join societies in their
fields primarily for two reasons (though of course grad students join
to have access to the job market function) – to receive
discounts for registration at society annual meetings, and to receive
the society’s journal. But the discount is small (and most
members do not attend the annual meeting), and if members or
potential members could access individual articles and book reviews
electronically, why should they pay for membership?
I therefore raised this specter with the Executive Directors at a
CAO meeting and was told in no uncertain terms that this was a
misplaced concern – traditional journal publication would
continue to be the core of society membership. But everyone is a
prophet at least once in his life, and it was not more than a few
years until the focus of discussion at CAO meetings was on how to
take advantage of technology, and on how to avoid its potentially
harmful consequences. The societies had already proved quite adept in
computerizing their membership operations, and in taking advantage of
computers to produce traditional analog journals in a more efficient
and effective way. Today they all make good use of web pages and
certain kinds of limited electronic publications, but few have thus
far been as visionary about the possibilities of electronic
publication as have their sister societies in science and
engineering. The problem, in my view, is that the societies have only
just begun to conceptualize the role of IT in their organization and
behavior.
The problem for the CAO, like the humanities generally, is not
simply to take advantage of particular technologies. Both the
societies and individual scholars have been remarkably adept in doing
just that. The problem is to step back and ask larger questions about
the implications of technology for how we think about the humanities;
how and what we research in the humanities; how, as a field, we
compete for the resources necessary to bring us fully into the
electronic environment; and how we organize ourselves to develop and
support public policies required for our success. I will devote the
remainder of this talk to ACLS efforts to address these problems, and
to the tremendous challenges that lie ahead of us.
The first project I initiated at ACLS was the replacement of our
flagship reference work, the Dictionary of American Biography.
This is a book, that ACLS had begun to produce in 1927, and that had
gone through 8 supplements (to the original 20 volumes) when I began
in 1986. My predecessor, John William Ward, had thought that we
needed a new book in order to bring the scholarship up to date, and
in order to make the book more inclusive of the sorts of people who
dominated the DAB – white, male political figures. As an
American historian, I agreed, but I also wanted a book that was
easier to use, and a book that would be useful in new ways. An
electronic book, of course. Even a new analytical index could not
make the 28 volumes of the DAB truly accessible, and
comprehensive searching is not possible in the analog environment.
Oxford University Press – New York, last month published the new
book we planned in 1987, the American National Biography. The
print version (for we have not abandoned print) contains 20 million
words and 17,000 biographies in 24 large volumes. When I signed the
contract with Oxford, we agreed upon the publication of a CD-ROM
edition to complement the print version. For commercial purposes,
however, the CD-ROM format is now virtually obsolete, so we will
begin on-line publication of the ANB this July. But we will
suffer from the uncertainties of commercial digital distribution at
this stage of development, and will probably begin by distributing
the ANB to site licensees (initially probably large academic
and public libraries). We want individual access to the work, but at
this time the technology of "pay by the drink" is not yet well enough
developed for us to do so. The most exciting part of the project, I
think, is its future. Both OUP and ACLS will return a portion of
their profits to a quasi-endowment that will support, hopefully in
perpetuity, an editorial office, the Center for American Biography,
to undertake the writing of new biographies, revise old articles, and
add image and sound to the existing database. The electronic book is,
of course, indefinitely expansible and infinitely revisable. This is
information technology at its scholarly best, and I consider it my
proudest accomplishment at ACLS.
Of course I had other electronic dreams, and I awoke from most of
them with nothing but headaches. In the late 1980s I began to talk
about a campaign for a congressional appropriation of $1 billion as a
digitization fund – to do on a huge (and international) scale
what David Seaman and his colleagues at your Electronic Text Center
have done at the Alderman Library. Reality, in the form of the budget
crunch and the Culture Wars, took hold very quickly. But another
dream, mostly attributable to Pat Battin of the Commission on
Preservation and Access did come true. This was the campaign to save
as many acidic books as possible by converting them to microfilm. A
coalition of humanities and library groups succeeded in convincing
the Congress to expand the NEH annual budget substantially in order
to undertake this work. The bad news is that we have lost and will
lose millions of volumes of artefactual books, but the good news is
that we have gained (through the capacity to digitize microfilm) a
huge international database of information.
The brittle books campaign introduced me to the technique I think
most crucial (and most unnatural) for the humanities in responding to
the digital age – cooperation and collaboration. The classic
image of the humanities scholar working alone with pencil and pad in
a library or archive is not so far from the truth, even if the
scholar now uses a computer and the Internet, for almost all
scholarship in the humanities is single-authored. How many humanists
in this audience have co-authored a book? An article? But how many of
you who have engaged in digital projects have worked with other
scholars and technologists? The same is true of the organizational
humanities. We have kept to ourselves, largely in ACLS and the many
learned societies. But this stance can no longer succeed if we are to
secure public policies and compete for the resources necessary for us
to do our work at a high level. Pencils and pads, and books in the
library, are no longer enough to do our everyday teaching and
research. We need equipment, programs, data and public policies that
will sustain us. And our activity cannot continue to be based on
individual campuses. We must work at a national and international
level simply to maintain the current quality of our work.
The work with the Commission on Preservation and Access was only
one of the collaborative experiences of the early years at ACLS. Jim
Haas, then the President of the Council on Library Resources,
approached me in about 1987 with a proposal to create a Research
Library Committee composed of representatives from CLR, ACLS and the
Association of American Universities. The idea was that an alliance
of provosts, librarians and scholars was necessary to move the
scholarly project ahead, since no one of these stakeholders could
succeed on its own. Needless to say, one of the recurrent discussions
in the Research Library Committee was about the impact of technology
on libraries and scholarship. It was a very good idea, but it did not
produce concrete projects or results, and the Committee melted away
over time. But we were developing other forums for cooperation, and
doubtless the most important of them was the National Humanities
Alliance, originally formed in response to the threat of Reagan
budget cuts in the early 1980s. The Alliance was the first attempt to
bring all of the elements of the national humanities community (state
councils, learned societies, libraries, museums) together to build
coalitions for the pursuit of public policy objectives, and it has
been quite successful under the leadership of John Hammer. Once we
secured the political survival of NEH, we were able to turn to more
constructive tasks. In the IT area, NHA has been most active on
questions of the revision of the laws of intellectual property, to
which I will turn in a moment.
Both the Research Libraries Committee and the NHA experiences made
clear to me the crucial nature of alliance with libraries and
librarians. Humanists frequently have close relations with
bibliographers and other specialized librarians, but the national
humanities community has seldom acted in support of libraries. IT has
transformed the "library" problem, since the library (whatever it is
called) is the usual portal through which information flows into the
university, especially now that the "information" we use is far more
than the books and journals and manuscripts that have formed the
historic basis for humanities scholarship. We need Internet access,
large databases mounted inside and outside the library, document
retrieval, and much more. Decisions about the acquisition and
maintenance of information, and expert advice on how to use
information now require humanists to have input into library
decisions and access to librarian expertise in ways that transcend
the traditional relationship of the humanities scholar to the library
and the librarian.
I began to educate myself about such matters by working closely
with the Association of Research Libraries (and especially its
Executive Director, Duane Webster) and by joining the Board of the
Research Libraries Group. I came to understand some of the problems
of the technological transformation of the library and of the uses of
electronic information. I became very aware of how little impact the
humanities community had in the library and information world. Part
of our problem was, of course, that much of the traditional community
was campus-based and thought of the library only as a local resource
– and even did little to try to influence on-campus library
policies. But another part of the problem was that as a dramatically
underfunded portion of the larger scholarly community, we humanists
had little leverage on larger decisions about expenditures,
technology or information policy. I realized that that would have to
change if we were to do our jobs as scholars and teachers.
The question was what the right range of problems was, and who the
proper allies might be. The larger problem no doubt, was simply how
IT would transform humanities scholarship, and we began to address
that problem by collaborating in two conferences. The first was a
conference on scholarship and technology in the humanities and
sponsored by the British Library, the British Academy, ACLS, the
Council on Library Resources and the Research Libraries Group, held
at Elvethem Hall, outside of London, England around 1990. A quite
diverse group of scholars, librarians, technologists and
administrators met to survey the terrain, and, in the end,
recommended a series of modest and sensible steps: international
cooperation in the retrospective conversion of catalogues of holdings
of printed texts, manuscripts and artifacts; online access to
bibliographic databases; conversion of printed texts to
machine-readable forms, standardization of formats for the electronic
storage of humanities data (with the scholarly community retaining
responsibility for selection of the data to be preserved); discussion
of international copyright issues; and other matters.
In the fall of 1992 ACLS joined with the Art History Information
Program of the Getty Trust, the Coalition for Networked Information,
the Council on Library Resources and the Research Libraries Group to
hold a follow-up to the Elvethem Hall conference in an attempt to
create an action plan for humanities and technology in this country.
The report of that conference (held at UC-Irvine) called for a number
of actions, and led to a series of meetings that produced, in 1994, a
large report entitled Humanities and Arts on the Information
Highway: A National Initiative. Our objective at this point was
to influence national policy on information, since the new Clinton
administration was the first to focus on this crucial problem.
Working with the Getty and CNI, in particular, our coalition began to
reach beyond universities and libraries to the museum community, and
we became concerned with a broader range of problems, including the
digitization, storage and use of electronic images. The circle was
growing larger, and "humanities" was being defined in a more catholic
manner.
These efforts culminated, in 1996, in the formation of the
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH),
currently based in Washington, D.C. and directed by David Green.
NINCH was originally a collaboration of ACLS, AHIP and CNI, and was
very much influenced by the charismatic librarian Paul Peters, the
head of CNI and a person of extraordinary personal and intellectual
range. The idea was to create a broad-based coalition of
non-for-profit arts and humanities organizations committed to the
preservation and use of the networked cultural heritage. The
organization now has 69 members, including the founders, the American
Association of Museums, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian
Institution, several learned societies and 38 member libraries of ARL
– and it includes the Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities of this University. The organization began as a meeting
ground for member organizations and their constituencies to exchange
information on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from standards for
interoperability of systems and principles of intellectual property,
to best practices in the electronic environment. NINCH was
particularly useful in hammering out common understandings in the
contentious period of revision of copyright law, and it has now
become more pro-active in areas such as "best practices" in
digitizing and networking material. But it is the question of
copyright to which I now want to turn.
By the early 1990s, as the question of revising the Berne
Convention on copyright, and therefore of revising domestic U.S. law,
moved to the forefront of public policy debate, I became alarmed that
the humanities community had little or no voice in the debate. The
major subject matter in dispute was, and is, the extent to which
property rights in digital information require different (and
arguably greater) protection than intellectual property rights in
analog information. To put the matter simply, if rightsholders felt
threatened by a technology such as xerography, how were they to
respond to the potential for reproduction in a purely electronic
environment? Digital information is, after all, "copied" into a
user’s RAM, even if no further copying or transmission takes
place – and digital copying requires only the flick of a finger.
So the concern was not, and is not, frivolous. Two questions
presented themselves. The first was what a sensible position on the
question of property rights in digital information might be. The
second was how a relatively powerless segment of the academic and
cultural community might promote what it took to be a responsible
position on the question. It is important to note, by the way, that
most of the major humanities organizations (ACLS, the learned
societies, historical societies, art museums and others) are
simultaneously rightsholders and users of digital information.
There were and are many important principles at stake. One of them
is the doctrine of First Sale, which is the principle whereby
libraries (and others) can lend their material. But, for librarians,
who of course exist on the basis of the First Sale doctrine, the most
important principle in the old regime (codified in the Copyright Act
of 1976) was that of "fair use," which says that users should have
the right to copy, without the permission of the rightsholder,
copyrighted information for certain purposes and in certain ways.
Even under the old statute, there were serious limitations on fair
use, but the basic compromise in this country was that there should
be a balance between the rights of creators and owners and those of
certain types of users, whose use was deemed to be in the public
interest.
The principle of fair use seemed to be the right one even in a
digital environment, and the librarians, ACLS and others attempted to
organize in its defense. This was no small challenge, though, since
it seemed as though both the Clinton administration (which viewed
intellectual property as the most important potential export
commodity of the United States) and big players in the commercial
world (Microsoft and Viacom, for starters) were proposing treaty and
statutory language that would strengthen property rights, and that
did not explicitly acknowledge fair use at all. For those of us who
saw digital information as potentially the most democratic
development in the history of the spread of knowledge, this seemed a
looming disaster. We were active on two fronts. The first was in the
process initiated by the Department of Commerce to bring together the
major parties with an interest in the question of fair use in order
to hammer out mutually agreeable guidelines – this was CONFU, or
the Conference on Fair Use. The second was the international
conference to revise the Berne treaties known by the name of the body
entrusted with supervision of the international intellectual property
rights system, WIPO (the World International Property Organization)
held in Geneva, Switzerland in December, 1996.
Ironically, things went better for us in Geneva two years ago than
in Washington, DC last year. ACLS was a member of the U.S. delegation
to the WIPO negotiations, as were a few other organizations
representing the non-profit and user communities. We were able to
make common cause with the underdeveloped countries of the world, who
feared being denied access to digital information, and with the major
digital pipeline companies of the developed world, who feared
information monopolies by rightsholders. We were odd bedfellows, but
managed to secure WIPO acceptance of two treaties that more or less
maintained the balance of rights that had existed previously. In
Washington, more recently, we again worked with commercial interests
opposed to digital information monopoly, and secured committee report
language favorable to Fair Use. However, but the American statute,
the Digital Millenium Copyright of 1998, fell far short of what we
had sought, though the jury is still out on how the DMCA will turn
out. The Act prohibits circumvention of technological protection
measures that encrypt copyrighted material. But it also states that
under Fair Use certain unauthorized uses are legal. To address this
apparent inconsistency, the prohibition on circumventing the
protection software is suspended for two years while the Library of
Congress and the Copyright Office examine the implications of these
protections on the exercise of Fair Use. I therefore consider the
principle of Fair Use, and other allied doctrines, very much at risk
in this country, and would urge anyone in the academic community who
cares about the broad accessibility of digital information to become
active in discussion of these questions. It is in fact only recently
that the university community has recognized its stake in this
struggle. This is an ongoing crisis little known to the humanities
community, but absolutely central to its intellectual health.
I think that each of the ACLS activities I have described is
characteristic of the dilemma of the humanities in the United States.
We are a dispersed community with little sense of our communal
interests, and with few mechanisms either to articulate or to
effectuate those interests. During my tenure at ACLS, I was
constantly engaged in the process of assisting coalition formation. A
different coalition was necessary for each issue, though many of the
players surfaced repeatedly – ARL, CNI, CLR (now CLIR), AAU,
AAUP (university presses, that is), the Getty Trust, the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation (which funded many of the activities I have
described) and many international partners, such as the British
Library and the British Academy.
Most recently my colleagues and I turned to the sciences, since it
seemed obvious to many of us interested in digital information that
we in the humanities fields suffered from the fact that the
technology we used had been designed by others for others. Working
with NINCH, CNI and the Two Ravens Project, ACLS turned to the
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National
Research Council, and developed a partnership with its sponsoring
body, the National Academy of Engineering. The NAE president, Bill
Wulf (from U. Va. and a person who cares deeply about the humanities)
and I chaired a meeting in Washington in the spring of 1997 to try to
begin a dialogue between computer scientists and humanists on the
potential for the use of digital technologies in humanities research
and teaching. The meeting issued a report calling for continuing
dialogue, further conferences, collaboration on the Digital Library
Initiative competitions and, especially, for further attention to the
problem of knowledge representation in the humanities. A steering
group has now been appointed, and a series of concrete projects are
being put into place. Perhaps the most interesting of these is called
Building Blocks, a field-based hard look at the humanities, designed
to articulate those intellectual and pedagogical needs – within
each discipline as well as across the humanities as a whole –
that can be met or transformed by computer science and information
technology. Field-based workshops will be the "building blocks" used
to create a platform and a vocabulary with which to construct
practical agendas for working with computer scientists.
Another very important, cognate, effort is the Two Ravens Project
that I have just mentioned. This is a fledging effort being
constructed by Charles Henry, the librarian of Rice University. Henry
was trained as a literary scholar, and has been one of our national
leaders in thinking about the relationship of technology to
humanities scholarship. Two Ravens is structured around two
interrelated goals. The first is to provide a forum to explore the
transformational changes of networked technology on the contemporary
social fabric from the perspective of the humanities in order to
better understand, integrate, and predict the effects of the emerging
digital phenomena. The second is to allow current practitioners in
the humanistic disciplines to manage the evolution of the humanities
in an increasingly pervasive digital environment. Participants
necessary to achieve both ends include scholars, teachers, and
students from a variety of disciplines, including the social
sciences, law, science and engineering, as well as representatives of
government, business and industry. I have been working with Henry on
the project, and we hope to convene the first steering committee
meeting early this summer in Princeton.
Let me now turn to my own discipline, history. Unskilled
technologically as I am, alas, I am probably not on the trailing edge
of technology in my own discipline. The American Historical
Association recently surveyed history departments in the United
States and Canada. The results have been better with each successive
survey, but last year only 75% of departments reported that their
entire faculty had access to the Internet. 78% reported that they
considered the use of e-mail "very important" for their faculty, but
a slightly lower percentage of departments reported that they had
access to the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, the departments reported
that 96% of U.S. faculty had access to e-mail and 92% to the World
Wide Web. But the use of the Web for research and teaching was only
judged "somewhat important" by most departments and nearly 10%
reported that Web access was "not important." (Robert Townsend, "AHA
Survey Indicates Growing Acceptance of Internet," AHA
Perspectives, [February, 1999], p.5)
A recent H-Net electronic survey of individual users of the
Internet among historians was more encouraging, although of course
the entire sample had access to the Internet. All respondents were
users of e-mail, and 93% used computers for research. 98% had
computers in their office, with 91% having an Internet connection.
But a sizeable minority reported that their students had inadequate
computer access. 80% reported that they used technology in teaching,
and 46% said they use e-mail in teaching courses. 44% require
students to use the Internet for course work, but 23% reported
concern about the reliability of such digital information. 54% devote
significant class time to technical instruction of their students,
and 47% have created web sites for their courses – though most
of these appear to be rudimentary postings of syllabi and listings of
e-links. About 20% of the respondents require their students to
produce their own web sites, and "many" use computer labs to enable
students to work with multimedia materials.
The author of an article about this survey says that 73% of
respondents "worry that their present use of technology is inadequate
or poorly conceived. They express concerns about out-dated
technology, insufficient training, lack of release time, student
resistance, negative impact upon tenure and promotion decisions, and
unforeseen or negative effects upon the quality of their teaching. A
number of faculty also reiterate deep concerns, already being widely
heard, about how technology is being implemented and used on their
campuses." (Dennis A. Trinkle, "Computers and the Practice of
History," AHA Perspectives [February, 1999], pp.
31-34). This high rate of uncertainty and dissatisfaction probably
reflects an as yet unarticulated frustration among historians that
arises from being removed from information policy making and, thus,
from not being in a position to better determine the use and
application of the technology. That is to say, in other words, that
access and reasonably functional technological applications are
simply not the most important questions for historians as scholars
and teachers.
Whatever disappointment one might have in the magnitudes and modes
of reported computer use among historians, there is no doubt that
both access and usage have increased dramatically over the past
decade. During the years I held a chair in the Princeton history
department, 1978-1986, I was never provided a computer by the
University and there was little university support for my computer
use. In the early 1980s, my colleague Alan Kulikoff and I attempted
to convince the University computing authorities to use a tiny amount
of a substantial IBM grant to Princeton for a history department
computer laboratory. We worked on the project for more than a year
and finally got an agreement to establish the lab, but when we both
left the University, the project vanished. There is still no history
computer lab at Princeton, more than ten years later. But the
overall-computing situation for historians at all American
universities is vastly improved and faculty, especially younger
faculty are using the technology. This is cause for optimism, but,
again, the point needs to be made that what the surveys of computer
usage show is little more than a concern with individual usage
of technology. What they do not reveal is information about the more
complex issue of technological change – how do we take charge of
the technology and explore its implications for the humanities more
deeply?
For myself, I have been permitted to return to my University, and
I am cheerfully continuing my teaching and research. My
"extracurricular" activities are mainly centered on the IT project
and the humanities. For the moment, most of my energy is focused on
the American Historical Association, which has sentenced me to three
years as its Vice President for Research. You will not be surprised
to hear that I have challenged the Research Division to consider the
impact of IT on history its major task under my administration. And
we are making some interesting progress. We have oversight
responsibility for the journal of the Association, the American
Historical Review, and we have been working with its editor,
Michael Grossberg, to bring the journal online. The AHR began
that project by co-hosting, in the summer of 1997, a conference on
electronic history journals. We are working our way through the
technical (not so hard) and financial (very hard) problems of
conversion to digital format, and we hope to begin the new format
(simultaneous with print) in 2001. Further, under the leadership of
our new president, Robert Darnton, we have just secured a major grant
from the Mellon Foundation for a project to publish prize
dissertations as electronic monographs. The AHA is also working with
ACLS and several other historical societies to establish a project
for the publication of electronic monographs in history. The AHA is
even about to publish its membership directory online for the first
time. These are all modest projects from the point of view of IT, but
the humanities fields may need to move with deliberate speed in an
environment that too frequently fears the loss of the codex more than
it anticipates the benefits of newer technologies.
I am aware, as you are, of the opposition to IT in the academic
world. I read with interest the Chronicle of Higher
Education’s May 8 article on a conference in California
organized by my friend David F. Noble, one of the finest historians
of technology. The article was headlined, "Skeptical Academics See
Perils in Information Technology," and I gather the conference
focused on the costs of technology, the possibility of professorial
job displacement, and the ineffective use of academic technology.
These are all real problems, and when it comes to the potential
abuses of distance education, I am on the side of the critics. The
budget questions are real ones, for despite the famously declining
cost of computer hardware, the cost of information technology is the
fastest growing part of university budgets. In libraries the cost of
technology frequently forces tradeoffs between machines and books
– Elsevier is not the only enemy of book acquisitions, after
all. Anyone who has read the wonderful book by Edward Tenner, Why
Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended
Consequences (NY, Knopf, 1996), knows that technology has its
dark underside.
The Chronicle actually ran an earlier article, on April 3,
1998, with another take on the problem. In this article the headline
told us that the "’Technorealists’ Hope to Enrich Debate
Over Policy Issues in Cyberspace," and the sub-head went on to say
that "They issue a set of principles for a middle ground between
techno-utopians and neo-Luddites." Well, I think that this sort of
Manicheanism does not help us in evaluating the prospects for IT in
the academy. I have already said that I think the future is here, and
that it (mostly) works. But I frequently cannot open attachments,
interoperability is still a dream, user rights to digital information
are insecure and I still prefer to read a codex – and so do all
of you. On the other hand, there are really very few Luddites out
there. I would be surprised if David Noble does not write his attacks
on technology on a computer, and I know that he uses e-mail.
The challenge to us, particularly in the humanities community, is
to determine how best we can use the technology to achieve our
traditional purposes. We must drive the technology, rather than the
other way around. In order to do so we must understand the
implications of the technology much better than we do at present; we
must organize ourselves to act on what we decide we need and we must
seek out appropriate collaborations. I think I have said enough to
indicate how dim I think the prospects for the humanities are if we
do not adopt proactive agendas and if we continue to go along a path
of relative isolation and individualistic research without
confronting the deeper, long term implications if IT.
Those of you in this audience who are humanists live in my dream
world. The University of Virginia is, so far as I can tell, the best
place for applying information technology to what humanists do. John
Unsworth and his Institute, and David Seaman and his Center, are the
units I know best. They are surely at the forefront of efforts to
apply technology to the humanities, and have attracted attention
internationally in the scholarly world of the humanities. But I have
also heard praise for Edward Gaynor’s Special Collections
Digital Center and for Rick Provine’s Digital Media Center. I
understand that Ed Ayers has established a new Virginia Center for
Digital History. I doubt that we would have the important digital
scholarship Jerry McGann and Ed Ayers have produced without the
remarkable and growing infrastructure built and maintained at this
University. It is, so far as I am concerned, the model for the rest
of us and I wish that something comparable existed at Princeton. But
now we need you at the University of Virginia help the rest of the
humanities community to enter the Promised Land. It will not be easy
or swift. But I think we do know generally where to go.
Thank you. |
