Root, trunk, and branch: institutional and infrastructural models for humanities computing in the U.K.

“Root, trunk, and branch: institutional and infrastructural models for humanities computing in the U.K.”

Willard McCarty King's College London Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk Lou Burnard Oxford University lou@vax.oxford.ac.uk Marilyn Deegan De Monfort University Jean Anderson University of Glasgow Harold Short King's College London Harold.Short@kcl.ac.uk

The question

In the half-century since humanities computing began, with the work of Roberto Busa, the activities grouped under this rubric have grown in number, sophistication, and institutional importance. They have developed from a loose collection of techniques, often applied as "mere tools" in the pursuit of seemingly unrelated research questions, to what at least some argue is a coherent academic field with its own role to play in research and training of students. Although full- and part-time academic posts are as yet very rare, and dedicated support units in the field are still by no means the norm, academic institutions throughout the world are beginning in a serious way to identify humanities computing as part of their basic mission and institutional profile. Humanities computing plays a major role in the planning of professional associations and international academic bodies such as the British Academy and the American Council of Learned Societies. At this stage it is not entirely clear, however, how the field should best be organised, or indeed how it should be defined and related to the other disciplines and to the support activities with which it is associated. How institutions within the U.K. are dealing with these issues is the broad question this panel seeks to address. It is an important question because good models, which we are in process of discovering, are an invaluable aid to others who wish to bring the benefits of computing, intelligently applied, into their departments and disciplines. Institutions are under considerable pressure to get whatever they do right the first time; this is, as always, truer for the application of technology in the resource-poor humanities than in other disciplines. Proven models are therefore badly needed.

Scope

The scope of the panel is limited to the U.K. for practical reasons, but the intention is very much to contribute to an international discussion. Its aim -- ambitious enough -- is a coherent view of what may be possible for humanities computing within one country. The U.K. in fact makes a good case in point, since it is sufficiently small and centralised yet institutionally diverse to form the basis of a manageable study. From within the U.K., three universities with long history of activity in humanities computing are represented -- Glasgow, King's College London, and Oxford -- together with national initiatives, such as the Office for Humanities Communication (OHC), the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI), and the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).

History

Attention to the institutional issues surrounding humanities computing is possibly as old as the field itself; such issues were, for example, the basis for the creation of Humanist in 1987 and have continued to be among the revisited topics. Panels devoted to the subject have become a regular feature of ACH/ALLC conferences. This panel follows directly, however, from a Colloquium on Humanities Computing, convened in September 1996 by the STELLA Project (Glasgow), King's College London, and De Montfort University to discuss the nature and purpose of the field. Position statements and notes from the Colloquium were put on the Web shortly after the event, and there are immediate plans to use these as stimulus for discussion on Humanist, and thence in further publications. This panel is intended as one means among these others of advancing the discussion.

Structure of the panel

Based on the outcome of discussions preceding the Conference, panel members Burnard, Anderson, and Short will be asked first to address the fundamental question of what humanities computing is, then to describe its form at their home institutions and how they see it evolving, with particular attention to the problems and opportunities of their particular model. Deegan will then describe the supra-institutional means in the U.K. for coordinating activities among institutions and representing these both to national agencies and to the international community. McCarty, as chair, will introduce the issues and discussants and following their presentations, sum up and lead a discussion with members of the audience.

Individual statements (in the order of presentation)

Lou Burnard Computing support for the arts and humanities at Oxford is provided centrally by the Humanities Computing Unit (HCU) within Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS), whose facilities it complements. The HCU embraces several types of activity and forms of support. It includes a Centre for Humanities Computing (CHC); a nationally-funded CTI Centre for Textual Studies; the Oxford Text Archive, and a number of externally funded research projects, including the British National Corpus (BNC). The objective of the HCU is to serve the students, post-graduates, and staff of the humanities disciplines by providing expertise, training, and consultancy in the uses of information technology; by facilitating and promoting their access to a variety of high-quality scholarly electronic resources for use in research and teaching; and by carrying out research and development in computing as it is applied to the humanities disciplines. The CHC, as the primary centre of local expertise, encourages visits from post-graduates and staff; it also sends its staff to the humanities faculties. It provides these faculties with a range of training, from general introductory sessions to special purpose colloquia and workshops and one-day topical overviews that can be integrated into existing or new lecture series and courses. The national activities, such as the CTI Centre, contribute to the overall strength of the CHC by bringing in wide-ranging knowledge and experience. For the future, the HCU needs to secure funding to establish new and currently temporary posts in IT support, research support, and publications, and to put the infrastructural services on a firm basis. Especially promising is the new position shared between the CHC and the English Faculty.

Jean Anderson My paper will describe the form that computing has taken in the Arts Faculty at the University of Glasgow, what has been achieved, and why we are currently changing our model. While computing in the humanities has a history several decades long at the University of Glasgow, humanities computing as such is a comparatively new endeavour for us. At Glasgow, computing has been centred in the departments serving specific disciplines. The paper describes the several units which are attached to departments, how the disciplines served by them use computing in their teaching and research, and how these units have expanded to create new opportunities for collaboration between them. This department-centred model is now undergoing a change. Humanities computing methods and techniques have become more sophisticated and inter-disciplinary co-operation is easier and more common. At Glasgow we have developed a trans-disciplinary capacity which is allowing us to pull together these previously disparate groups into one centre. The paper describes our new humanities computing centre, how it continues to support our existing units and why it provides greater opportunity to share and disseminate our expertise and create new projects.

Harold Short The Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), King's College London, is a department in the School of Humanities, with both academic and support responsibilities. It runs a three-year undergraduate minor programme - "Humanities with Applied Computing" - and offers training to post-graduates through workshops and co-supervision of research. (An M.A. programme in humanities computing is currently being designed.) The CCH provides collegial support, in the form of consulting or direct participation, to teaching and research projects within the School, as well as applications and desk-top support to staff, complementing the less discipline-specific services of the Computing Centre. The staffing structure of the CCH has been designed to provide close integration of the academic and support activities, and includes a full-time Director, a Senior Lecturer, a Lecturer, and 3 applications and 3 operational support staff. The department's academic focus is the responsibility of the lecturers, who are expected to contribute to the research profile of the College as well as to teach in the undergraduate programme and participate in collaborative projects. King's College London has a long history of innovation in humanities computing. The CCH represents, however, a new stage in its evolution. It reflects a long-term institutional commitment to the idea that this field is not only an essential part of teaching and learning in the humanities, but that humanities computing also has its own scholarly and intellectual integrity, and that all the disciplines are best served by a model which encompasses both the academic and support elements and embeds them in the academic structure of the institution.

Marilyn Deegan My topic is the national infrastructure for humanities computing and its effects on institutional models such as those described by the other participants. It is important to understand that the UK Higher Education community is a relatively cohesive body compared with other countries like the U.S. Most institutions of higher education in the U.K. receive funding from central government sources and are mandated to operate in a highly controlled fashion. While such centralisation can cause problems, it also offers opportunities for national funding of initiatives that address issues in various subjects throughout all the institutions. Other national funding bodies in the U.K. can also be approached for funds, e.g. the Research and Innovation Centre of the British Library. Two such initiatives have proven especially beneficial in spreading the growth of humanities computing in the U.K. over the last ten years: the CTI, which now funds subject-based centres in many subjects, several in the humanities; and the OHC, now based at King's College London. New, more recent national initiatives in electronic library research and digitization programmes will also have a huge impact on the provision of resources to the humanities community. There are also projects which have been taking advantage of funding provided by the European Union. As a result of these supra-institutional bodies and the projects they have funded, humanities computing fits within a broader national context alongside other fields concerned with providing digital resources, for example. The creation of this national context means that humanities computing has moved from a specialized area, the concern of only a few researchers, to the mainstream of humanistic practice and discourse.