Our Cultural Commonwealth
In 2008, John Unsworth was named Director of the Illinois Informatics
Institute, a campus-wide organization that serves to coordinate and encourage
informatics-related education and research. He also continues to serve as Dean
of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a post to which he was appointed in
2003. In addition to being a Professor in GSLIS, he also holds appointments in
the department of English, and on the Library faculty. During the previous ten
years, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in
the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the
University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005
Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center. He chaired
the national commission that produced Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report on Cyberinfrastructure for
Humanities and Social Science, on behalf of the American Council of Learned
Societies, and he has supervised research projects across the disciplines in
the humanities. He has also published widely on the topic of electronic
scholarship, as well as co-directing one of nine national partnerships in the
Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation
Program, and securing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the National Science Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, IBM, Sun, the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, and others. His first faculty appointment was in English,
at North Carolina State University, from 1989 to 1993. He attended Princeton
University and Amherst College as an undergraduate, graduating from Amherst in
1981. He received a Master's degree in English from Boston University in 1982
and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1988. In 1990, at
NCSU, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the
humanities,
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
Reflections on the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure
What does it take to deliver a national report on cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social sciences?
In Memory of Roy Rosenzweig
Wallace Stevens,Farewell to an idea . . . The cancellings, The negations are never final.
In January of 2003, the USA's National Science Foundation published a report from a
This essay reflects on what goes into producing such a report. In practical and
procedural terms, it takes:
What actually happens as a result of such a report? In this case, as with the NSF Cyberinfrastructure report, the object was to change the funding landscape, but in our case there is no one funder who dominates that landscape as the NSF does in computational science. Therefore, in some real sense, it was an important outcome just to get representatives of the private foundations and the public funding agencies to talk with one another about a shared agenda, and it was an equally important outcome for the Commission to be able to represent the scholarly community in setting that agenda.
The meeting with funders in June of 2006 to discuss the draft report was
particularly interesting. The meeting was co-hosted by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and held at IMLS.
Present, in addition to Mellon and IMLS representatives, were representatives of
the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Library of
Congress, the National Science Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Teagle
Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Archives
and Records Administration. There were a number of useful and substantive
suggestions made at that meeting, especially about the recommendations of the
report and how to focus them more effectively on particular audiences and
respondents. But for me, at least, the most striking thing about that meeting was
the realization that it was extremely useful and important for the funding
agencies to have a group and a process that could credibly claim to represent the
aspirations of the community which those agencies served, because it would allow
them to base their recommendations for programmatic goals on something other than
their own perceptions of what was needed. In short, it would help them to make the
case to their own boards, or (in the case of federal funders) to the legislature,
that certain goals and activities were important to support. I have been working
with both federal and private funders for fifteen years now, and in retrospect it
should have been perfectly obvious to me that this was an important reason for
doing the report, but it was not. Why? I think the reason is that when faculty
think about research funding, we find it difficult to step outside of our
immediate role as petitioners and think about the funding landscape from another
perspective--that of the funder. It is a commonly understood dynamic, in science
and engineering, that the community needs to come together and agree on research
priorities for a particular field, in order for funding agencies to prioritize the
programs they will offer and the goals they will pursue. Obviously, there are also
other forces at work in setting funding priorities, and the process of agreeing
on research priorities
in a discipline is not necessarily a process that
ends in consensus, or in a framework into which everyone fits. But in the
humanities, the very notion of asking What are the top research priorities?
in history or in English seems absurd, since the value of a research project in
humanities disciplines is defined, to a large extent, by the originality with
which it defines the question it aims to address. Nonetheless, one clearly useful
outcome of the ACLS Commission's report was that it gave voice to some priorities
of a research community--even if those priorities did not take the form of
research problems to be solved, but of resources needed in digital form, or
training and support, or policy changes.
Some of the direct effects of the ACLS Commission's report on funding agencies can
be seen in their own framing of new programs. For example, in presenting its
JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants program, the NEH notes
that Collaboration between U.S. and English institutions is a
key requirement for this grant category, based in part on the recommendations
for international collaboration in Professor Sir Gareth Roberts's
Other
indications are in the meetings sponsored, for example the NEH Summit Meeting of
Digital Humanities Centers (April 12-13, 2007), organized with the Maryland
Institute for Technology in the Humanities and hosted at the NEH itself. The NEH's
description says that The meeting is part of NEH's Digital
Humanities Initiative and was inspired by a recent report by the American
Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure
http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/cio/centers/.
The Digital Humanities Initiative as a whole can be seen as a programmatic
response to the ACLS report, and it was initiated about the same time that the
draft report appeared for public comment. Other indicators of impact in funding
agencies may be seen in the particular projects funded; for example, in the IMLS
National Leadership Grants for 2007, the Council on Library and Information
Resources was funded for
the new large-scale digital initiatives that are being developed across the country in line with the recommendations of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Scienceshttp://www.imls.gov/news/2007/092507_list.shtm. Further signs might be seen in what program officers are writing and speaking about, for example Joyce Ray (IMLS) speaking on
Not everyone was happy with the Commission's report, of course. And while there
were some amicus curiae briefs filed by scholars and
academic libraries, the stakeholders who felt most alienated by the report were
university presses and scholarly societies. This was in part because the draft of
the report submitted for public comment was directly critical of presses and
societies for failing to take risks, for taking a narrow view of their mission,
and for lacking imagination. After some sharp feedback on the draft, the
Commission did take a different tack in the final report, emphasizing positive
examples rather than negative ones, and credit rather than blame, but publishers
were not much mollified. A more or less typical response is this one, from Robert
Townsend of the American Historical Association: [T]he report
offers a rather fanciful lesson in the economics of scholarly publishing that
makes first-copy costs and sustainability disappear into a fog of
A more recent response, by Sandy
Thatcher, director of Penn State's Press, repeats the complaint that the ACLS
Commission's report is uninformed and unrealistic with respect to the harsh
economic realities of university press and scholarly society publishing: public
goods
and collective action.
The resulting picture should really
trouble non-profit publishers, as the commission rather blithely erases our
role in the system of scholarly communication along with the costs we have to
recover. As a result, we seem to be re-cast as an unnecessary impediment to the
development of a cyberinfrastructure. When the commission then calls on us to
engage with other parties (librarians and university administrators) about
these issues, it just seem to be inviting us into a dialogue about the
arrangements for our own funerals.[U]niversity presses would welcome the freedom to engage in the
supply of a
And later in the same piece: pure public good
like knowledge free of severe economic
constraints. Only the Commission doesn't tell us how to get to this promised
land. It doesn't even include in the final report the acknowledgment of the
draft report that...a variety of activities that presses could pursue...could well produce sufficient value for libraries to be paid
for in the cash economy in which publishers now largely operate, if
publishers were properly capitalized to retool so they could provide such
services.
But that is just the point. Where does such capital come
from?University
presses have been chronically underfunded, and even today few universities seem
to have much inclination to invest in their presses so that they could
What continues to puzzle me, as chair of the ACLS
Commission, is that Presses don't see the report as anything that could be useful
to them in their conversations with university administrators about just these
issues, and also that these publishers--both university presses and scholarly
societies--seem always to start from the premise that the status quo is
non-negotiable, and then proceed to explain why they have no choice but to act as
they have been acting, since the economic conditions under which they operate are
non-negotiable. Certainly libraries and funding agencies did not respond to the
report in that way, nor have libraries often missed the opportunity to turn
criticisms to advantage, in their negotiation with university administrators.
Still, it is true that there are some exceptional presses who are doing
exceptional work that needs to be recognized--especially in those places where the
press has worked out a productive partnership with the library (and, sometimes,
the campus computing organization): Columbia's EPIC, The University of California
Press's Mark Twain project (and CDL collaborations), and the University of
Virginia Press's Rotunda imprint, which publishes a number of digital scholarly
projects that began as library projects, or the University of Illinois' History
Cooperative, which allows individual journals to experiment with pricing policies
in a shared infrastructure for e-journal publishing. But these are remarkable
precisely because they are exceptions, and the recent report from Ithaka (retool
themselves. On the contrary, to provide just one recent
example, the announcement of the position of director of the SUNY Press
includes this among its expectations: increase financial
assets of the Press with the goal of achieving financial sustainability
within five years.
In other words, the SUNY administration expects
the press soon to operate with no subsidy from the university at all. There is
no better way to hamstring a press from engaging in the kind of retooling and
experimentation that the Commission calls for in this report. So long as such
attitudes prevail among university administrators, the road to open
access
will remain closed as far as university presses are
concerned.
In our interviews we detected significant detachment from administrators about publishing's connection to their core mission; a high level of energy and excitement from librarians about reinventing their roles on campus to meet the evolving needs of their constituents; and a wide range of responses from press directors, from those who are continuing to do what they have always done, to those who are actively reconnecting with their host institutions’ academic programs and engaging in collaborative efforts to develop new electronic products.According to this report, press directors
acknowledge that they have not participated actively enough in the academic life of their campus, nor have they effectively demonstrated their worth to faculty and administrators. As a director said,That divorce is not going to come with alimony, though, and if university presses don't figure out how to recast their role as more central to the campus each lives on, they will not be continuing their work somewhere else--they will be dismantled, possibly to be replaced by scholarly publishing offices in libraries, or by commercial publishers. Karla Hahn, who oversees the Association of Research Libraries' office of scholarly communication, estimated in a recent public presentation at the University of Illinois that over half of ARL libraries are now engaged in some kind of publishing activity.We don’t do a good job of telling our universities why we are important to them.One director spoke of afeeling of divorcefrom the university leadership, expressing what seems to be a common feeling among press leaders.
These are internecine disputes, though. The most important audience for the humanities, and the audience least likely to be reached by a report from the American Council of Learned Societies--or by university presses, or by university libraries, for that matter--is the general public. And this was also the most difficult audience for the humanities scholars who addressed the Commission, and for the Commission itself. This is a point worth examining. The problem seemed to be that humanities scholars found it very difficult to say exactly why the work they do should matter to the general public; in fact, they often did not believe that it would. I believe that this is directly related to the aforementioned rhetoric of problem-solving: the sciences have a glorious and durable narrative of progress toward the greater good through medical advances, technological development, and scientific discoveries. Science, technology, and medicine are, arguably, insufficiently self-conscious about whether or not their research produces an unalloyed public good: in the history of the 20th century, for example, they seem remarkably untroubled by Hiroshima, at least in their public rhetoric; by contrast, the humanities seem to be keenly self-aware that expertise in the practice and appreciation of literature, music, philosophy didn't save Germany from Naziism, so they are reluctant to make simple-minded arguments about intrinsic social good arising from the appreciation of high culture. And the more complicated arguments that scholars might make for the value of their research or the importance of their disciplines seem to them to be arguments that will matter most to those who have already accepted the grounding assumption that the activity itself is worthy, rather than being arguments that would persuade someone to share that assumption. Interestingly, I think this self-abnegation is shared and even reinforced by university presses, who seem, on the whole, unable to believe in the Long Tail--unable, in other words, to believe that there are relatively large but widely dispersed and non-professional audiences for almost any humanities topic. In fact, I would argue that in this regard the humanities are much better off than the sciences: the public might want the results of scientific research, but they are not all that interested in the actual content and conduct of that research; in the humanities, research does have a general audience, but publishers aren't accustomed to looking for it. We need to look for it, though, and we need to connect with the public, in the cyberinfrastructure they increasingly inhabit in their daily lives. As I said in a 2006 presentation to the Association of American University Presses on
Fifteen years ago, the challenge before us was to imagine how new technology might provide a new platform for the practice of scholarship in the humanities, but today our challenge is the reverse. It is no longer about opening the university and inviting the public in: it's about getting out where they already live, and meeting the public in the information commons, on the same terms that everyone else does. In fact, it's almost too late for us. We will find that hard to believe, ensconced (as we all are) in solid-seeming residential universities, with long histories and the expectation of a long future — but older institutions on more solid foundations have been swept away or radically transformed in cultural upheavals of the past. In spite of the inertia of these institutions, which we all know so well, the forces of change outside the institution have much greater inertia, and all of the practical furniture of our daily academic lives could easily be gone, or changed beyond recognition, in a generation.http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/AAUP.2006.html
Gold Standard
for Promotion and
Tenure in the Humanistic Disciplines: A Report to Provosts and Arts and
Sciences Deans in CIC Universities.
Our Cultural Commonwealth