Digital Scholarship and Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Lessons from the Text Creation Partnership

Abstract

Electronic technology has changed the way scholars in the humanities do their work, creating two distinct groups of scholars: first, those who perform leading-edge humanities computing research (a relatively small number); and second, scholars who perform traditional humanities research with new electronic tools (a fairly large number). How is it possible to bring these two groups together? The Text Creation Partnership at the University of Michigan provides one way of providing services to both. And as the electronic publishing community looks for ways to provide reliable cyberinfrastructure in the humanities, the Text Creation Partnership provides a model for building large digital collections that meet the needs of future scholars. Comments Postprint ver sion. Published in Journal of Electronic Publishing, Volume 10, Issue 1, January 2007. Publisher URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0010.105 This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/54 Digital Scholarship and Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Lessons from the Text Creation Partnership Shawn Martin Abstract Electronic technology has changed the way scholars in the humanities do their work, creating two distinct groups of scholars: first, those who perform leading-edge humanities computing research (a relatively small number); and second, scholars who perform traditional humanities research with new electronic tools (a fairly large number). How is it possible to bring these two groups together? The Text Creation Partnership at the University of Michigan provides one way of providing services to both. And as the electronic publishing community looks for ways to provide reliable cyberinfrastructure in the humanities, the Text Creation Partnership provides a model for building large digital collections that meet the needs of future scholars. Few would disagree with the fact that electronic technology has changed the way the academic community does its work. Collections like Early English Books Online (EEBO) from ProQuest, Evans Early American Imprints (Evans) from Newsbank-Readex, and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) from Gale have allowed scholars and students to perform research in a matter of seconds that previously would have taken a lifetime. According to Mark Sandler, former Collection Development Officer at the University of Michigan, “the widespread, electronic dissemination of hundreds of thousands of rare books, and their easy availability for undergraduate students, represents a revolution of sorts in higher education. . . . For humanists, these collections represent an intellectual analog to the role played by the cost-effective Model T in unleashing a culture of ubiquitous automotive transportation.” [1] This revolution has manifested itself in a variety of scholarly projects, including, among other, things such as sociolinguistic mapping of ideas in different geographical locations and the creation of interactive learning environments, such work is pushing the boundaries of scholarship and teaching. Though this revolution may have already occurred for many in academe, there are in fact two revolutions going on. The first is being led by a small number of dedicated academics, librarians, and technologists at a handful of institutions. Edward Ayers at the University of Virginia has called this “a revolution led from above.” [2] The second and much slower revolution involves the rest of the scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, librarians, and others who use electronic technology for the “traditional” scholarship they have been practicing for many years. One bridge between these two groups is the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) at the University of Michigan. The TCP, a joint project between librarians, scholars, and publishers at over 150 participating institutions around the world, lets both digital revolutionaries and traditional scholars participate in digital humanities, which, roughly defined, is an “interdisciplinary core. . . illustrated by examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with computation.” [3] The recent report of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure called digital scholarship “the inevitable future of the humanities and social sciences,” and said that, “digital literacy is a matter of national competitiveness and a mission that needs to be embraced by universities, libraries, museums, and archives.” [4] Yet relatively few humanities scholars are relying heavily on electronic tools and methodologies. In fact, some scholars even seem hostile toward electronic resources. [5] So the Commission’s assessment would therefore seem like little more than a pipe dream. Thus the question remains, how do the library and academic communities create an infrastructure that makes digital scholarship an “inevitable” (or at least a prospective) future? Though the TCP may not be the model for cyberinfrastructure, it provides an instructive example of how the electronic-publishing community can achieve the larger goals of electronic resource creation and mass digitization.