Digital tools and other aspects of cyberinfrastructure promise to expand the opportunities for research, scholarship and education in the humanities and social sciences. They - Enable new and innovative approaches to humanistic scholarship; - Provide scholars and students deeper and more sophisticated access to cultural materials, thus changing how material can be taught and experienced; and - Facilitate new forms of collaboration of all those who touch the digital representation of the human record. However, the issues, problems and challenges that might accompany digital tools, other aspects of cyberinfrastructure, and the new activities that are enabled must be explored and addressed if the benefits of these technologies are to be realized.
This award supports a summit of scholars from diverse disciplines, the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences, to assess the state of development of digital tools for humanities and social science research and education, as well as the effectiveness of the supporting and integrating cyberinfrastructure. The objective of the summit is to gain a clearer view of how cyberinfrastructure is changing the social and cultural environment and how to maximize the benefits enabled by this change. Key opportunities and challenges in building, deploying and using digital tools in the context of the enabling cyberinfrastructure will be sampled. Issues related to interoperability, meta-annotation, and usability - attributes that determine a shared environment will be explored. Tools may serve many purposes: analysis, creative development of new material, education, presentation, as well as productivity enhancement. The Summit will address text as well as non-textual media (audio, video, 3-D and 4-D visualization). Finally, this summit will answer the call from the Chair of the American Council of Learned Societies' Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences for tools that can be shared across the boundaries of specific disciplines, practices, and projects in the humanities. Priorities for tool building, and if possible, "charette" new tools will be identified as a result of the summit. These along with conclusions and recommendations for the community as wells as actionable suggestions for the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and other sponsors of humanistic scholarship will be part of the deliverable and documented in a final report.
