A colleague drew my attention to NicolaOsborne’s liveblog of the very interesting event at the University of Edinburgh
on 24 February 2012, Digital Scholarship:
A Day of Ideas. It is wonderful to see that Edinburgh University, which,
through EDINA and other activities, has made such important contributions to
the growth of digital scholarship over the years, is continuing to develop new
initiatives – the appointment by Edinburgh of a Dean for Digital Scholarship is
particularly noteworthy. Mind you, it must be admitted that the idea of
digital scholarship creates some problems. One worry that constantly
nags away at me is whether we should privilege the digital in the way that we
do. Other technologies have the capacity radically to transform humanities
scholarship – it is possible, for example, that nanotechnologies, by offering
new approaches to the conservation of cultural heritage, have just as much to
offer the humanities scholar and curator as the digital. Perhaps we should be
thinking as much about nano-scholarship as digital scholarship. Certainly, it
would be worrying if humanities scholars restrict their engagement with
technology to the digital.
My reflections on the day derive from
Nicola Osborne’s liveblogging, so apologies in advance if I consequently get
hold of the wrong end of the stick here and there. Melissa Terras in her
presentation evidently demonstrated very vividly the way in which digital
resources and tools have transformed the practice of humanities scholars over
the past twenty years. Yet, as Mel
pointed out, there is a fundamental dilemma here. The most important
developments have not been driven by scholars, but by libraries and commercial
publishers. The resources which have become indispensable to humanities
scholars are commercial packages such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online,
Early English Books Online or the British Library’s Newspapers Archive. As
Laura Mandell has emphasized, these resources are designed on the model of the
library microfilm surrogate, intended to enhance public access to library
collections. Their searchability is very limited, and they are often positively
misleading. The digital humanities, as formally constituted through centres
such as UCLDH and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College
London, have been largely irrelevant to this process, and have general not
produced any resources which have had the same impact on scholarship as these
commercial packages. If a scholar working on the early nineteenth century was
asked to choose whether funding should be used to secure access to The Times
Digital Archive or to continue a project like Transcribe Bentham, most would
unhesitatingly choose The Times.
One of the most urgent issues for digital
scholarship (as Laura Mandell has emphasized) is to develop closer links with
librarians and publishers to influence the creation of these commercial
packages. But it seems that, floating around the Edinburgh day, was the suggestion
that a far more critical issue is one of infrastructure. In particular, in both
Jane Ohlmeyer’s presentation and in some questions after Mel’s presentation,
seemed to be flickering the idea that in some the United Kingdom had taken a
step backwards by ending funding for the Arts and Humanities Data Service and
by not taking a sufficiently active role in the European Dariah initiative. The
way forward, it appears to be suggested, is to invest in infrastructure, and
the UK, it is also suggested, has characteristically thrown away an early lead
in this area.
I must admit instinctive nervousness about
infrastructure, which can only be explained in terms of my own engagement with
digital developments. The British Library, through its Initiatives for Access programme between 1994 and 1997, established a remarkable portfolio of pioneering
digital projects, including Portico, the first British Library website, the
Burney Newspapers digitisation, Turning the Pages and Electronic Beowulf.
Indeed, in many ways this programme explored almost all of the aspects of the
technology which have subsequently preoccupied us. There was clearly a need for
these activities to build closer links with work in other sectors, particularly
that of the JISC, but in many ways the British Library mapped out through Initiatives
for Access a remarkable template for future. But, at the conclusion of the
programme, the Library’s view was that the most pressing need was investment in
technical infrastructure, particularly given the Library’s ambition to embark
on legal deposit of electronic resources. So, a large and ultimately
unsuccessful programme to procure a major piece of new technical infrastructure
was put in place, and the British Library threw away the advances that it had
made in the 1990s. It is striking that the British Library has since failed to exercise
any decisive leadership on the development of wider digital scholarship in the
humanities. There have been some interesting developments, such as the UK Sound Map or the Codex Sinaiticus project, but the major British Library
developments have been through commercial partnerships, as with the newspapers.
Digital scholarship has been sacrificed for infrastructure.
For scholars working within British universities,
the three most important pieces of infrastructure provided by the universities
themselves are barely mentioned or discussed. These are: the network provision
through JANET; the collective licensing of commercial digital packages through JISC Collections; and the NESLI2 licensing of access to online journals which
(although extraordinarily complex and often fraught) provides access to the
enormously expensive journal packages of publishers such as Elsevier or
Wiley-Blackwell. Take any of these components away, and the digital revolution
described by Melissa would disappear overnight. These provisions are not cheap
– online journal provision for a publisher such as Wiley-Blackwell can still
easily cost a university library over a million pounds a year, even with the
discounts negotiated through the NESLI2 agreements. All British universities
libraries spend the bulk of their acquisition budgets on the provision of
online resources – a fact of which most academic users seem blissfully and
happily unaware. However, these pieces of infrastructure bring enormous
benefit, one of the most important of which is an equality of provision across
UK universities. I feel strongly about this, because while I was Librarian at the
small university in Lampeter, the excellent work of JISC Collections meant
that I could easily build up a portfolio of electronic resources which, in
those areas taught at Lampeter, bore comparison with much larger universities.
Contrast this with the appalling situation in the United States, where very
large and wealthy universities can afford a huge range of subscriptions to
electronic resources but smaller colleges have nothing at all. For example,
look at the library catalogue of St Vincent’s College in Pennsylvania, an
excellent Catholic liberal arts college very similar to Lampeter, which lists
just four very limited electronic resources. This is an immense digital divide,
which the work of the JISC has ensured does not occur to the same degree in
Britain (although there are exceptions, such as Parker on the Web, where the scandalous refusal of Stanford University Library to agree terms with JISC Collections mean that this important resopurce is unavailable in most British universities) .
At this level, Britain possesses an
infrastructure which has successfully fostered digital scholarship in the arts
and humanities. In this context, clearly the most important priority is to
protect this infrastructure, and it is an infrastructure which is under threat.
It is a constant struggle to negotiate affordable rates for journal
subscriptions. In this sense, the recent Elsevier boycott is beside the point –
many other publishers, such as most notably Wiley-Blackwell, are equally
culpable of what is really nothing more than exploiting monopoly advantages. In
the current financial situation, sooner or later, some British universities
will not be able to afford to continue subscriptions to journals or databases
which scholars have become dependent on. What happens to the digital revolution
then?
These seem to me more pressing structures
of infrastructure than refighting old battles about the Arts and Humanities
Data Service. The withdrawal of funding was very sad, and at King’s College
London we are enormously proud of the way in which Sheila Anderson and her
colleagues have created from the Arts and Humanities Data Service a tremendously
successful Centre for eResearch which in many ways is pushing forward new
methods of researching in even more remarkable ways than under the AHDS. The
Arts and Humanities Data Service was established in the mid 1990s at a time
when it was assumed that much of the creation of digital content would occur
within universities and that some kind of infrastructure was necessary to
facilitate this. AHDS was also intended to promote awareness of the need for
sustainable standards. AHDS was certainly successful in ensuring this attention
to appropriate standards, and some former components of the AHDS, such as the
History Data Service, Archaeology Data Service and the Oxford Text Archive,
have flourished notwithstanding the loss of central AHDS funding, and still
perform this function very successfully. But the question must be asked – is
the vision of large quantities of university-created digital content requiring
central curation still the most pressing issue? Isn't this a vision more appropriate to 1995? David Robey has consistently
stressed how the AHRC is still funding many research projects which have a
digital content. A list of some of these is available here.
So the loss of funding for the AHDS has not
inhibited the engagement of humanities scholars with digital methods – do we in
fact need that sort of function at all? Most of the projects funded by the AHRC
of this kind represent small-scale activities of the type which Andrew Green of
the National Library of Wales has called ‘boutique digitisation’. Andrew argues
that the major issues for both humanities scholars arise from the impact of
commercial initiatives such as Google Books, and I feel sure that, in thinking
about infrastructure, it is these wider more strategic concerns which are more
pressing than whether we have data repositories to support small-scale low
impacts projects such as Transcribe Bentham or the 1641 Depositions in Ireland
(and, yes, I would include projects like Electronic Beowulf in this category as
well). We need infrastructures which will instead address our dangerous dependence on
commercial initiatives by a range of companies from Gale to Google.
In this context, I think it could be argued
that the United Kingdom is in fact now pointing the way forward in terms of the
necessary infrastructure in a rapidly changing digital environment more effectively than through
models like the AHDS, which reflected the situation in the mid 1990s. Indeed
(and I’ve hesitated in case I am being unduly chauvinistic here, but I don’t
think I am) I think there is a danger in the UK being asked to turn the clock
back by those who are only just reaching the stage that Britain reached fifteen
or more years ago.
One important point to bear in mind is that
Britain today is very different to Britain fifteen years ago. Having worked in
Wales, Scotland and different parts of England, the impact of the creation of
an increasingly devolved country (or countries) is one of the most important
issues. It is indeed striking that an Irish scholar speaking in Scotland refers
to what Raymond Williams called ‘the Yookay’ as if it was a single entity,
which it is no longer. The AHDS reflected an assumption about the type of
infrastructure for Great Britain which was appropriate in London in 1995 but no
longer fits Great Britain today. Many of the most important recent initiatives
have stemmed from the devolved nations where national governments have been
undertaking interesting investment in digital infrastructure. For Wales, I have
described some of these in my recent article for Lorna Hughes’s book on Evaluating and Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections. An activity
like the Welsh Journals Online project, partly funded by the Welsh Assembly
Government and co-ordinated by the National Library of Wales, is, as Andrew
Green has described, consciously designed to seek to counter the baleful
cultural effects of a project like Google Books. Likewise, the People’s Collection, which was a manifesto commitment of the last Welsh government,
anticipates on a smaller scale many of the features on the major Digital Public Library of America which looks likely to be the single most transformative piece of infrastructural work for digital scholarship over the next few years. Catcymru, providing integrated access to all Welsh libraries, is
again a remarkable illustration of the way in which the evolved nations are
using digital infrastructures to create a new sense of national identity.
A similar story could be told in Scotland,
where for example Scottish universities have been pioneering new methods of securing joint access to on-line journals and databases, and the National Library of Scotland has been working with Scottish universities to develop
projects to provide (for example) on-line access to collections of maps. But where
it seems to me that in Britain we are engaging with more current issues of
concern than is evident from Jane Ohlmeyer’s description of the situation in
Ireland is our awareness of the issues posed by the commercialization of
digital scholarship, of which Ireland seems blissfully unaware. It is in the initiatives that are responding to this threat that Britain is still taking a lead. Open access is an obvious area, and the work of
the JISC is promoting awareness of the issues around open access has been
critical here. There are rumours (no more than that, sadly) that a ruling will
be made that only work available on open access may be submitted to the REF,
and no more important measure could be taken to support digital scholarship at
the moment than the implementation of such a ruling. Repositories remain a key
tool for tackling such issues, and again I think Britain has been leading the
way here – one of the most interesting projects with which I have ever been
involved was the Welsh Repositories Network, which ensured that every
university in Wales has an open access institutional repository – that’s an
amazing achievement, and needs to be trumpeted more. Other projects which I
think point the way forward more firmly than hankering after the AHDS include
the British Library’s Ethos project to make doctoral dissertations more easily
available. We might also point to recent work on research integrity which seeks
to link data curation more closely to the research process, and support for
these initiatives is perhaps more pressing than worrying about storage
services.
In short, the issues confronting digital
scholarship in the humanities are less to do with the storage and curation of
data and much more to with creating models which resist the commercialisation
and commodification of knowledge, and save us from the maw of companies like
Microsoft and IBM. Here, I believe Britain still continues to point the way. It
is very tempting to feel that digital issues an be resolved by the purchase of
a splendid piece of kit, and I worry that such an instinct too often pervades
our thinking about infrastructure. In the sciences, such large initiatives are
often tied to research questions which cannot be addressed without major
investment in equipment: think Hadron Collider, Square Kilometre Array, Diamond
Light Source. But in the humanities our thinking about infrastructure is too
often disconnected from research issues. We worry about creating services.
Maybe we shouldn’t.
