interview answers

1. Since I’ve worked with graduate students for the past four (actually six) years with two online projects (Women Writing and Reading and Canadian Women Writing and Reading from 1950) both originating in the Digital Humanities Research Studio (DHRS) at U of A, I am keenly interested in the sustainability and wide dissemination of these open-source products.

The first project, co-directed, was a series of digital and social experiments, involving different audiences and formats: interviews, video recorded panels and performances, sponsoring a hip-hop concert of poetry readings by street kids (ihuman), organizing an international conference on women’s writing, past and present, local and global, preparing different “skins” for the site to indicate different holdings–early modern, Victorian, contemporary. I wouldn’t want this site and all the work that went into it to simply evaporate and disappear from public view.

The second and current project consists of a massive database of Cdn women writers, mainly from 1950 to the present. The database considers women’s writing broadly; it includes the conventional genres of prose (short and long, fiction and non-fiction), drama, and poetry, as well as writing for children, journalism, letters, diaries, screen-writing, comics and graphic novels, popular romances, song-writing, musical composition), along with critical studies, time-lines, a catalogue of awards and prizes, selected interviews (with local and/or visiting writers). Such a resource needs to be maintained and updated. The current html format needs to be transferred to xml. And for inclusion in ORCA, bio-critical entries in Oxygen using an Orlando schema need to be completed. The continuation (maintenance, expansion, updating) of this project, which is one understanding of sustainability, is crucial.

2. Sustainability involves durability, relevance (yes, dreaded, contentious, and for some, archaic term!) and partnerships. I’ll start with the last one. I think it’s vital for Humanities and Computing Science people to communicate in mutually understood language, to collaborate in project design and implementation. What I’m talking about is much more than the meeting of “opposable minds” in an exercise of “integrative thinking,” as Roger Martin’s latest book (The Opposable Mind, 2009) is merchandising these concepts. I’m imagining a consortium or partnership or active collaboration possibly along the lines of Berkeley’s CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society). True, the Berkeley model is heavy on science, medicine, and engineering and light on the Arts, and their recent Sustainability Award was given to a Prof of Computational Linguistics. I notice that copyright reform and social media are topics in their Fall lecture series. Clearly there’s the value of networked projects and presentations. CITRIS also offers seed funding to colleagues at Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz. The funding page is worthwhile

Another feature of partnerships involves a range of funding opportunities. The Artmob project at York is partnered with Coach House Books, the Scream Literary Festival and the Cdn Writers in Person Lecture series; its funders include the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council, Canadian Heritage, and the Archival Community Digitization Program. They also issue quarterly email updates.

Durability and relevance are arguably interconnected notions. The announcement of an institutional repository ERA at the U of A is very welcome news. Like Cambridge’s DSpace it should provide maximum visibility and longevity. Relevance is, in a sense, distinct from safe storage. The topic of Canadian Writing embedded in CWRC should already argue for relevance as well as durability. It seems important to be able to update material or overlay with newer versions. The fact that the AHRC-funded Methods Network website will not be updated is a bit of a disappointment. However, the appearance of Hugh Brody, CRC in Aboriginal Studies, University of the Fraser Valley, as a researcher on their World Oral Lit project is intriguing.

3. It would be good if we could get a circulated transcript of Johann Drucker’s address in Edmonton in April, “Designing Humanities Tools in a Digital Context.”

The recommendations (pp. 29-40) of Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences are valuable benchmarks.

Canadian Journal of Higher Education 39, no. 3 (2009) Special Issue devoted to open access. Recommend Preface by Jean-Claude Guédon (i-v) and “Librarians and Libraries Supporting Open Access Publishing” (33-48) by Jennifer Richard, Denise Koufogiannakis, and Pam Ryan.

Metrics of success

If we are looking for ways to measure success, I think we need to emphasize the larger health of the culture as a whole. Susan rightly points to places where measurements are possible, such as open access, diversity of digital content, and linkages established and maintained in the community.

I think the note we may want to strike is one of enrichment. I believe that education and research share a common goal of enriching the lives of people. Economic measures can overlap in places with this larger agenda, but are widely used only because they are simpler, not because they carry more meaning or usefulness. "Enrichment" suggests economics without directly invoking it.

Alternative terms that have been used, particularly for research and education in the arts and humanities, include "ennobling" and "uplifting." I hesitate about these because they are metaphors with significant defining others. If there is a nobility then there are peasants. If there are uplifted people then there are people who are not uplifted. But if a culture is enriched then there is a benefit to everyone and not just to selected people.

HQP

I think one of the issues we should address is the education of humanities scholars in general and in particular of scholars in humanities computing and the digital humanities.

Willard McCarty distinguishes between researchers in humanities computing, who are involved in experimenting with tools and methods, and researchers in the digital humanities--a potentially much larger group who are using the tools and methods from the first group and applying them to their own scholarly activities.

For the purposes of creating highly qualified personnel who can help sustain digital scholarship, I believe we need plans for the education of all three groups. Note that I use the word "education" rather than "training."

Libraries one answer to sustainability challenges?

At NINES-sponsored meeting about collaborating across federated sites, sustainability has emerged early on as a major concern even from groups that are just getting going, as they find that some of their scholarly projects, once the initial funding runs out, are being forced to shift from open access to paid models in order to keep going.

People have also been talking about the high overhead (not just in terms of equipment, utilities, and space but also of drafting MOUs etc.) of hosting other projects. Institutional libraries are being characterized here as the best long-term hosting options for digital projects.

Certainly universities libraries are where a lot of long-running digital scholarship (e.g. Perseus, Brown) is hosted and are moving, and it seems a natural extension of the academic library's role as curator of academic publications.

What are the advantages of library hosting of academic projects, on both sides? What are the disadvantages? Does it work best for projects that are essentially done and need to be archived? How well does it work for projects that are still in devlopment?

Perils of scholarly publishing

The future of scholarly publishing has been debated extensively for years. There's no question that there is a crisis and that it's been building for complex reasons for decades now. The digital turn is a part, but not all, of the story.

The question of how to manage and finance the dissemination of scholarly work is a large one. The Open Access movement--here is one influential articulation of open access--argues that free availability of the results of scholarly inquiry is both an intellectual and a social good.

In societies such as Canada, where the cost of scholarly research is very largely borne by public funds, open access is increasingly perceived as a public right, for instance by Michael Geist. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for instance, has in principle an open access policy. Yet there are no teeth to it, because the implementation proved contentious.

Notwithstanding the observation that a very basic open-access requirement would not be hard to put in place at SSHRC, such a policy still begs the question of how universal open access scholarly publication could be achieved and sustained over the long haul, for we have yet to figure out precisely who is going to bear the considerable costs of keeping scholarly publishing going under this new model. There are of course institutional repositories, and Canadian universities libraries are really stepping up to the plate in this area, but my own sense is that right now, at least, IRs are working best as a supplement to more conventional modes of scholarly publication, and are not likely to replace them any time soon.

And in the meantime, university presses, which have for so long been the backbone of scholarly dissemination and credit in the humanities, are struggling to figure out new economic models.

What will be the future of the scholarly monograph? The University of Michigan Press announced last year that it would shift almost entirely to publishing digitally or through print-on-demand: "digital publishing is so much less expensive -- with savings both in printing and distribution -- the press expects to be able to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience." And yet that move seems not to have helped Rice University Press,which having failed at the traditional model in the mid-90s, was reborn as an all-digital imprint a few years ago, and is now being shut down again. This is not necessarily because there is no future in digital publishing, as a former board member argues, but it does seem more than a little ironic that this comes right on the heels of the press's impressive publication, only a few months after the event, of the Shape of Things to Come deliberations on online scholarship, many of which focused on challenges of sustainability. The speed of publication of a collection of essays on a timely topic seemed to embody the promise of a digital press. The Rotunda experiment at the University of Virginia Press is an impressive one, but when one looks at the list of universities that subscribe to its rather pricey online edition and collections, it's nowhere near as long as would be the list of purchasers of major, top-quality print editions of the kind that Rotunda makes available digitally. And there isn't of course just one mode of publishing digitally, and a press that is willing to work with authors to produce innovative online editions will have a higher overhead than one that is using a more standardized approach.

Things are looking better for open-access journals, and Canada's own Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems can take a large share of credit for helping many journals around the world migrate to digital form or start up in digital form. But someone still has to sustain the hardware and the server software on which these journals run, and figure out how to migrate them as systems and standards change. SSHRC's new program to support open-access journals looks like a great step in the direction of figuring out new means of sustaining these new modes of publication. But how does this program look to editors of scholarly journals? Will it be able to sustain the costs of digital publication? And could something similar be imagined for open-source monographs, especially with innovative models of peer review And what digital scholarly productions that aren't fish or fowl but some other kind of beast than those forms that emerged from print culture? How can they be sustained? And what about literary publishing, a whole other kettle of worms?