The University of Illinois, home to one of the world's biggest libraries, the nation's top-ranked library and information school, a nascent Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a supercomputing center and key scholars, is poised to become a leader in the effort to "digitize the humanities." ...
In the last year, John Unsworth, the dean of Illinois' Graduate School of Library and Information Science, has secured two major technology grants from the Mellon Foundation to lead multi-institutional projects in the digital humanities. He also chaired the national commission that produced the recently released report, "Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences," on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies....
In January...the Mellon Foundation announced that Illinois would receive a two-year $1 million grant for a text-mining collaboration called "Metadata Offer New Knowledge" (MONK)....MONK will create "an inclusive and comprehensive text-mining and text-analysis tool-kit of software for scholars in the humanities," Unsworth said....
In March, Michael Welge, of NCSA, won a $1.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, for an infrastructure project, with Unsworth serving as one of the co-principal investigators. SEASR, or Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, begins in June. According to the project's online report, SEASR seeks to deliver "a means of addressing the challenges of transforming information into knowledge by constructing the software bridges that are required to move from the unstructured and semi-structured data world to the structured data world." ...
Unsworth also is co-principal investigator, with the U. of I. Library's Beth Sandore, of a $2.6 million project, the ECHO DEPository, a digital preservation research and development project at Illinois in partnership with the Online Computer Library Center and funded by the Library of Congress....
At North Carolina State, Unsworth and some junior faculty colleagues wanted to start a journal on postmodernism, but the school couldn't cover the printing and mailing costs, "so the director of the library suggested that we visit the people in campus computing and explore a new software package called 'Listserv,' which is how we ended up publishing the first peer-reviewed electronic [and open access] journal in the humanities, by e-mail, three years before the advent of the Web." ...
Unsworth said that even at Illinois, one of the most wired and digitally active campuses in the world, "junior level faculty in the humanities who have interesting ideas and good skills for mounting digital humanities projects hold off until they are tenured."
"That's too bad -- and it should underline the need for department heads and senior faculty members to make digital humanities safe for junior faculty."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/18/2007 09:54:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
