David Greenbaum and Rich Meyer, IST—Data Services [1]
In fall 2007, campus leaders in the arts and humanities, computer science, the Library, and IST joined together to form a new initiative, Humanities Arts Research Technologies (HART). HART is meant to galvanize UC Berkeley's efforts to bring shared technology services to humanities scholars to help them advance their research and teaching.
At Berkeley, approximately 25 percent of the faculty are part of the arts, humanities, or interpretive social sciences. This is a substantial segment of the campus scholarly community, yet one that has, as regards digital technologies, been underserved and underfunded by comparison with researchers in other disciplines.
At a very broad level, one might characterize the challenges of, and opportunities for, the humanities and digital technologies at Berkeley (as well as other research universities) as follows. Researchers in the arts and humanities who attempt to use technology in their work encounter significant barriers to accessing digital tools and content; work in isolation from systems of technological support; and spend far too much of their time on constructing tools when they should be able instead to focus on using them.
The fragmented way in which technology has so far been created and used in the arts and humanities means that researchers across these fields do not have a shared sense of what technology they need now and what technology they would like to have in the future. Still less do computer scientists or information technologists in academia who wish to work with humanities scholars understand what technologies would be helpful to these researchers in the arts and humanities.
New research and service developments in areas ranging from computer science to the world of Web 2.0 mashups have potential benefit for humanities scholars. For example, within the subfields of computer science such as natural language understanding, computer vision, information extraction, and information integration, the questions of interest and the technologies being developed are beginning to have semantic overlap with the questions of interest to humanities researchers — these two groups are, at least to some extent, finally talking about the same topics.
Berkeley is a world leader in the humanities and sees the humanities as central to its academic mission. There is thus deep concern among a number of academic leaders about the fact that the humanities are so conspicuously underserved at the beginning of what will clearly be a century of great technological innovation.
HART is meant to bring forces together both at Berkeley and with other higher education partners to help begin to address these significant challenges and opportunities. Since the fall, HART's early steps have emphasized building community, understanding commonalities and needs, and working to secure new resources.
HART is guided by a steering committee with members from multiple domains of expertise — arts and humanities, library science, computer science, information science, and information technology. The current steering committee members are Janet Broughton (dean of arts and humanities), Susan Schweik (associate dean of arts and humanities), Tony Cascardi (director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities), Stuart Russell (chair of computer science), Charles Faulhaber (director of the Bancroft Library), Merrill Shanks (associate CIO of art, humanities & social sciences), and David Greenbaum (director of IST—Data Services).
In November 2007, HART held its first campus community focus group, bringing together more than fifty participants comprised of humanities faculty, computer scientists, and library and central IT staff at an all-day session held at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. The HART committee asked this community to help develop an initial picture of the research directions, technology needs, and opportunities for arts and humanities scholars at the Berkeley campus, and to do so in a cross-disciplinary forum where humanities scholars could learn about technology and technologists could learn about the arts and humanities.
Feedback from this focus group was then used to inform the development of a new grant proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: Project Bamboo, An Arts and Humanities Community Planning Project to Develop Shared Technology Services for Research. UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago jointly submitted this proposal in January 2008. The proposal represents an 18-month international planning and community design program where, through a series of conversations and workshops, we will map out the scholarly practices and common technology needs across and among arts and humanities disciplines, and discover where a multi-university, cross-disciplinary technology development effort can best foster academic innovation. The award decision for Bamboo will be made by the end of March 2008.
The prospect of collaborating with humanities researchers to share existing technologies and guide the development of new methods is tremendously exciting. It is our hope that an expanded awareness of what is, or might become, technologically possible can significantly enhance humanities scholarship and enable humanities researchers to develop entirely new modes of inquiry.
For more information about HART, send email to
[1] The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the HART committee and in particular Janet Broughton and Stuart Russell for their ideas and text in this article.
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