New to Nashville

Monday, September 08, 2008

As I said, I attended Bruce Cole’s speech at Vanderbilt University Friday on the state of the humanities in American society. (Video available here, although I didn’t have the correct plug in to view it).

Cole began by explaining how the humanities is often typified by the stodgy old academic, pouring over manuscripts in the back room of a library, scribbling feverishly by candlelight. But then he went on to describe a few of the latest trends affecting the field. Here are a few pullouts from my perspective I found interesting.

Digitization, Wikipedia and Tools for Collaboration

At one point, Cole said that if he knew that issues of interoperability would be at the forefront of his work, or that a head scientist at the Department of Energy would ask him to explore using his supercomputer, he would not have believed it even a few years ago. But that’s the reality. As the National Endowment for the Humanities (Cole’s group), other government agencies, and society at large struggles to convert a mountain of data from analog format (old newspapers, artwork, etc.) to digital databases, those databases have to be both searchable and interoperable with newer, more robust databases once the old ones fall into obsolescence (usually within 12-18 months these days).

As for Wikipedia, Cole tread lightly (probably for fear of fueling a debate on accuracy), but admitted that the humanities has been much slower to adopt new (participatory, collaborative, computational) media for their work, Wikipedia, controversy notwithstanding, being the notable exception.

Questions that remained unanswered

The Q&A session lasted entirely too short, and I still had a number of questions relating specifically to some of the things he mentioned (paraphrased below).

“Books Will Never Die”

In a tone of reassurance, Cole told the audience that books would never die. He then smartly quipped that he picked one up just a week or so ago.

Am I the only one who detects a touch of ominous irony in that? A rush of examples come to mind that question how right he is to reassure. Take the Kindle, Amazon’s latest e-book. As the price comes down, would I rather have on book in my back pocket, or a hundred? Or a thousand? And yes, the tactile experience of a book trumps electronic paper. But will that protect the book publishing industry? Ask Kodak if the poor quality of early consumer digital cameras insulated their bottom line. It’s like the argument about horses. Sure, they didn’t go extinct with the advent of the automobile - they’re just not the most efficient way for personal transportation.

The Internationalization of the Humanities

In one breath, Cole explained that, as a federally funded program, his endowment’s first and first and foremost task was to ensure that all of their research is completely and fully open to the American public. Each and every United States citizen, he exclaimed, should enjoy open access to any and all research. In the next moment, however, he talked about the increasing collaboration among his group and similar ones in China, Italy, Great Britain and Germany, to name a few.

It begs the question, how does the mission of the Endowment change? The fact of the matter is, there’s no way to make every bit of research available to the American public without making it available to the whole world. On the flip side, I can enjoy access to anything produced by the British organization partnering with the U.S. Endowment for the Humanities, or any other country’s for that matter, my only limitations being Internet access and language skills. Does that change the mission? How we get funding? Probably not, and the only immediate outgrowth of global access to information will be what is already taking place, namely, increased collaboration among different groups across the country. But they are interesting questions to ask.

Your thoughts? Is Wikipedia an attack on the Humanities? Or an opportunity to harness the expertise of the many? Any other takeaways from the speech?

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