A proposal for a Digital Humanities Initiative
Submitted by the Executive Committee of the Digital Humanities Working Group Meredith Martin (English); Cliff Wulfman (Firestone Library); Ben Johnston (OIT); David Mimno (Computer Science); Janet Vertesi (Society of Fellows & Sociology); Grant Wythoff (Grad, English).
Proposal for a Digital Humanities Initiative, Princeton University
Table of Contents
Executive Summary ...... 3
What are the Digital Humanities? ...... 4
Process ...... 4
Vision Statement ...... 5 A Digital Humanities Initiative at Princeton will: ...... 5 A Digital Humanities Initiative at Princeton will provide: ...... 5
Research and Teaching ...... 6 Overview and Vision ...... 6 In the Short- and Long-term Part I: Courses ...... 6 Short-term needs to achieve a longer-term view: ...... 8 In the Short- and Long-term, Part II: Individual or Group Projects ...... 8 Short-term needs to achieve a longer-term view: ...... 9 Mid-range planning: Field Guides with ability to form individual or group Tool Kits ...... 9 Mid-range needs: ...... 9 Long-term Goals ...... 10 Long-term needs: ...... 10
Programming ...... 11 Digital Tuesdays, 2012-2013 ...... 11 Show & Tell, September 18, 2012...... 11 Reading Group ...... 11 Speaker Series ...... 12 Informal Happy Hour ...... 12 "Hack the Humanities" Series ...... 12 Long Term View ...... 12
Infrastructure ...... 13 Overview and Vision ...... 13 In the Short-term: Virtual infrastructure ...... 13 In the Short- and Long-term: Physical infrastructure ...... 13
Funding ...... 15 Overview ...... 15 Description of Vision ...... 15 Timeline ...... 15 Budget for 2012-2014 ...... 16
Summary ...... 18
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Executive Summary
Digital media have revolutionized the practice of scholarship from the archive to the monograph. Over the next few decades, computation will become as vital in humanistic scholarship as it is today in fields like plasma physics and climate modeling. Researchers have already begun to develop new methods for analyzing online collections which are too large for traditional methods, and students now require formal experience with digital technologies to be competitive, both in academia and other workplaces. Princeton has existing strengths in these areas, but they are isolated and poorly coordinated. This document suggests coursework innovations, infrastructural improvements, coordination efforts, and financial investments to support a growing Digital Humanities Initiative at Princeton University. The Digital Humanities Working Group is a collaborative and inter-disciplinary cross-campus community involving faculty and staff at all levels. We provide a vision for achievable tasks over the coming 1-2 years to establish a robust base for Digital Humanities activities on campus, and long term goals for 3-5 years. Highlights include: creating new courses and founding a Digital Humanities Certificate Program at the undergraduate level; producing a Digital Humanities “ToolKit” or “Field Guide” to circulate resources among faculty, staff and students; initiating a Digital Humanities Speaker Series, workshops, and, eventually, a fellowship program; upgrading computing infrastructure and strengthening connections to existing computational resources; and acquiring funding to support immediate and long-term goals. By investing in these goals, Princeton will enable Digital Humanities to play a dynamic and exciting role in its humanistic research and teaching.
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What are the Digital Humanities?
The Digital Humanities, loosely applied, refers to the use and application of computational tools and methods to humanist domains of study, and vice versa: from history to papyrology, from comparative literature to historical geography, and to the artistic or humanities-influenced design of computational artifacts. Large-scale databases, text-analysis software, geographical information systems, consumer-programmable hardware, and countless other tools are enabling new solutions to research problems, as well as posing new challenges to scholars. While debates in the Digital Humanities concern the scope, reach, and methodological range associated with these new approaches, we at Princeton have decided to take a catholic approach to the topic and resist drawing strict boundaries around our scholarship. Instead, we are interested in fostering interdisciplinary connections across the humanities, computational sciences, and library sciences to inspire new research questions and approaches to classic topics, while at the same time leveraging our unique history and solid grounding in the humanities, broadly conceived.
Process
The Digital Humanities Working group was formed in September of 2011, bringing together a significant number of participants from across the University’s units and centers including the Library, the Office of Information Technology, campus museums, and twenty-four departments and programs, including English, Computer Science, History, and Music. Following three productive months of discussion hosted over lunch at Mathey College, the group formed an Executive Committee. The Working Group assembled on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 for a day-long workshop aimed at brainstorming the characteristics of an Initiative on campus. Through a series of exercises and breakout groups, the community agreed that research and planning in four major areas was required: Research and Teaching; Programming (Events); Infrastructure (including sustainability, another issue of concern); and Funding. Groups were formed around each of these topical headings, and these groups met throughout the semester to research their domain and provide specific recommendations for action over the short, medium and long term to produce and sustain a Digital Humanities Initiative on campus. This document was compiled from the reports authored by each of these subgroups.
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Vision Statement
A Digital Humanities Initiative at Princeton will: – Inspire and facilitate new scholarship, knowledge, collaborations and resources for humanities projects at Princeton
– Build networks, skills and tools for novel forms of humanistic and computational interaction and interpretation
– Leverage Princeton’s resources to inspire and facilitate the creation and innovation of new kinds of cross-disciplinary discovery, research, and knowledge in the humanities and computational sciences
– Provide a nexus to showcase existing projects, best practices, and new cross-disciplinary digital collaboration on campus (and beyond)
– Be project-oriented, supporting individual tools, classes, departments and scholarship
– Seed, fund, support, promote and curate cross-campus projects on digital humanities themes and topics
A Digital Humanities Initiative at Princeton will provide: – Infrastructure: A space (virtual at the outset and perhaps eventually physical), tools, and training to support this collaboration
– Programming: Engaging, active and interactive scholastic ways to bring academics, professionals, and alumni together around digital humanities projects
– Teaching & Research: Educational and training options (technical literacy skills) for undergraduate and graduate curricula and for academic / professional development, plus criteria for evaluating this work academically
– Sustainability: Shared guidelines and/or clarity about intellectual property, digital rights and responsibilities, and project curation (Note: Sustainability is tasked to the Infrastructure group)
– Funding: find and/or allocate support for the above activities as a unified initiative
Compiled and ratified January 24, 2012 by members of the Digital Humanities Working Group.
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Research and Teaching
State of resources and summary of possibilities
Compiled by Bill Guthe (Academic Services, Office of Information Technology) and Joanna S. Smith (Art and Archaeology and Computer Science) with input from Kathleen Crown (Mathey College), Bill Gleason (English and Program in American Studies), Jeff Himpele (McGraw Center), Trudy Jacoby (Art and Archaeology), Brian Kernighan (Computer Science), Meredith Martin (English), and Janet Temos (Educational Technology Center, Academic Services, Office of Information Technology)
Overview and Vision The Digital Humanities Initiative aims to prepare students and researchers with the hardware and software tools to collect, access, represent, express, manipulate, and analyze data, texts, and images. But the initiative also seeks to identify the ways of knowing and problem-solving possible with these tools. It seeks to articulate and advance our understandings of how students may learn and faculty and staff may teach and research effectively with these tools, whether in independent work or in the classroom.
Princeton students, faculty, and staff already engage in innovative digital teaching and research, both in the humanities and collaboratively among the humanities and the sciences. Semester and half-semester courses integrate software and offer training, making opportunities available to students to work with texts and images in ways not possible before the digital age. Senior theses, dissertations, and faculty research and field projects also provide curricular and extra-curricular contexts for incorporating information technology into the humanities.
There are multiple resources available at Princeton for working in digital humanities, but finding those resources and making the kind of connections that bring people and projects together require a centralized facility. Such a physical and online resource would allow Princeton students, faculty, and staff to make rapid progress in the digital humanities by eliminating the need for each individual to acquire basic tools and competencies independently. Instead, as a community, they could immerse themselves in what is available, focus on the existing resources most pertinent to their current needs, and create new avenues for research and teaching with and about digital humanities subjects.
In the Short- and Long-term Part I: Courses Current courses in digital humanities fall into three categories, each of which links to individual and group project research. Some involve technology that supports the learning process, sometimes in collaboratively taught, interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary courses that bring data and innovative technologies together, sometimes integrating training within the
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course (e.g., COS/ART/HLS 495 Modeling the Past).1 Some courses offer training, as in half-semester courses, and bring humanities and digital technologies together, but not centered on one data set or problem (e.g., WWS593n GIS for Public Policy).2 Other courses are for self-training through tutorials (e.g., Princeton’s subscription to Lynda.com: http://www.princeton.edu/etc/services/lynda.com-at-princeton/).3
Course curricula vary as to whether they are about digital humanities topics (e.g., COS 109 Computers in Our World),4 include digital technologies as part of teaching and assignments related to the humanities (e.g., FRS 171 Earth’s Environments and Ancient Civilizations and FRS 119 Sprawl),5 and/or whether the focus of the course is software training (e.g., series of two-hour training sessions on GIS, Google Earth, and GPS offered by Library and OIT staff).6 Training is also offered outside of a formal course or training session, as in the Department of Art and Archaeology’s Visual Resources
1 Google SketchUp, Google Earth, Blender, Microsoft Access, and Sharepoint were used for the modeling of buildings from the excavations in Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus in this class co-taught by Szymon Rusinkiewicz (Computer Science) and Joanna S. Smith (Art and Archaeology). The models contribute to long-term research, a web site, and a short film for the exhibition, City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus, in the Princeton University Art Museum (October 20, 2012- January 20, 2013). The course combined project specific work, with wider scholarly issues related to the project from the point of view of Computer Science and Art and Archaeology. In ART 401 starting in the spring of 2013, not only will the course include GIS training as it does currently through a single class session, but a group project in the course, carried out in stages during the semester, will make use of this digital tool for researching archaeological sites. 2 Generally, software training is not the focus of a for-credit course. Yet this half-semester course, co-taught by William Guthe (Academic Services) and Wangyal Shawa (Library) for graduate students in the Woodrow Wilson School, explores the strengths and limitations of digital geographic information as it is used in the public sector. In-class exercises familiarize students with ArcGIS, and students receive copies of the software to complete assignments out of class. 3 Also available through on-line resources as part of the University’s site-wide license, dozens of ArcGIS courses are offered free-of-charge through Esri’s Virtual campus (http://www.princeton.edu/~geolib/gis/GIS_courses.html lists these courses.) Mathworks makes Matlab and Simulink tutorials are available through http://www.mathworks.com/academia/student_center/tutorials/. 4 Other courses related to digital humanities subjects include ARC 374 Computational Design, AST 201 Mapping the Universe, ELE 381 Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes, HOS 599 Sensory Histories, SOC 596 Web-based Social Research, VIS 219 Art for Everyone, VIS 261 Introduction to Video and Film Production, and WWS 334 Media and Public Policy. 5 FRS 171 co-taught by Adam Maloof and Frederik Simons (Geosciences) with Joanna S. Smith (Art and Archaeology) includes training in ArcGIS Geographic Information System (GIS), MatLab, and software for working with geophysical survey equipment for fieldwork in Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus; FRS 119 taught by Shlomo Angel (Woodrow Wilson School) includes training in ArcGIS to compare urban growth in North and South America. 6 These sessions are advertised to all departments and give a general introduction to GIS tools likely to be used by most academic disciplines. The training is not tied to a particular course. Overall, Princeton has a wide selection of software for students to use in data collection, analysis and presentation. Students’ abilities to use these software tools can vary greatly, and assistance to help students learn these tools also varies by discipline and software type. Departments may guide students towards specific software packages and make training available informally or through exercises assigned as part of a course. Such training is specific to course needs. Princeton’s Employee Learning Center (http://www.princeton.edu/training) provides instructor-led courses that deal with Microsoft Office products and other software packages of interest to students and faculty. The New Media Center offers short tutorials on software tools of interest to students. OIT also offers Lunch and Learn, The Productive Scholar, and Technology Spotlights—one-hour sessions to introduce new technologies to students, faculty and staff (http://www.princeton.edu/etc/seminars/). These presentations are recorded and made available to the wider community. 7 Proposal for a Digital Humanities Initiative, Princeton University
instructions sessions.7 For students interested in pursuing digital humanities subjects or in gaining a certificate in the subject, it would be useful to include a tag on courses depending on the nature of digital technology involved.
Short-term needs to achieve a longer-term view In order to have a more complete view of the courses and training currently available at Princeton and those planned for coming years, a review of each department’s offerings would be extremely helpful. With such a list, the digital humanities initiative could reach out more effectively to those already engaged in such work and could make information from those experiences available to those wishing to engage in digital humanities teaching and research in new ways in the future.
In the Short- and Long-term, Part II: Individual or Group Projects Individual student projects, especially JPs and senior theses, build on Princeton’s unique offerings and present many opportunities to involve students with digital humanities. Courses and extracurricular projects also draw them into potential topics. For example, in COS 333 Advances Programming Techniques, Brian Kernighan solicits friends on campus for potential projects (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring12/cos333/projectideas.html), though very few scholars in the humanities have been aware of this course until very recently. The course website includes several suggestions from the library, work on the Princeton Prosody Archive (Meredith Martin, English), and a study of textual influences on William James (graduate student Henry Cowles in History of Science). Past project suggestions not yet undertaken are also listed (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring12/cos333/prevproj.html).
While it is difficult to find several students in the same course who might take on a single project, unless that project is the chosen focus for the class overall (e.g., COS/ART/HLS 495), individual students have taken on such challenges. These range from fairly mechanical exercises such as building flashcard systems for various languages to an interactive system for visualizing relationships among the characters in the classic Chinese historical novel "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms." The earliest such undergraduate thesis project known to this compiler of information (Smith) is the 1989 undergraduate thesis by Christopher Wright, The Application of Interactive Computer Graphics to Archaeology.
Several field projects run by faculty, usually during summer months, involve students. These include archaeological projects, such as the Avkat (Turkey) Survey Project and the Medieval Logistics Project directed by John Haldon (History),8 as well as other field projects such as the Amboseli Baboon Research Project through the Altmann Laboratory directed by Jeanne Altmann (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), all of which use GIS. Digital scanning and computer modeling, as in the work of Szymon Rusinkiewicz of Computer Science, has enhanced the research of students, faculty, and staff in Hellenic Studies, Firestone Library, and Art and Archaeology in the study of archaeological materials such as coins, frescoes, and buildings.
7 The Visual Resources Collection in the department of Art and Archaeology runs an instruction session for members of the department (including faculty, grad students and undergrads) and others as requested. Training in the available image resources and the use of PowerPoint for making image-based presentations is made available. Practicalities such as finding images, image formats, building personal image collections and software for showing images are addressed. 8 The Princeton Cyprus Expedition, run by Professor Emeritus William Childs of the Department of Art and Archaeology, has long incorporated digital technologies into its excavation project in Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus. Not only does this include a database and now, of course, digital photography and GIS, but also innovative early work in digital modeling through the IRIS system in the 1980s, now superseded by contemporary 3-D technology. 8 Proposal for a Digital Humanities Initiative, Princeton University
Short-term needs to achieve a longer-term view A thorough review of faculty and staff research past and present, as well as of thesis work by undergraduate and graduate students in the digital humanities, would surely produce an impressive list and would help to point the way toward the future.
Mid-range planning: Field Guides with ability to form individual or group Toolkits Students, faculty, and staff may develop an interest in a problem or a research tool, but they may not be able to find the training materials they need or learn to use the relevant software once they find the materials. There is no common service to help students, faculty, and staff identify the best software for their research, or find the University’s training and support resources for selected software.
A listing of potential projects, such as for independent work, analogous to that for COS 333, would be useful for bringing people and skills together. Such a list should include a brief description of what the problem is, what a potentially useful outcome would be, some statement of the available resources (data, maps, etc.), and of course the faculty member(s) who would be willing to offer advice.9
A digital humanities toolkit could immerse the user in available resources. If customizable by each individual, it would serve both to centralize and organize content and resources and to make connectivity work, as through portals and blogs.
Toolkits may also be useful for acquiring skill sets and content in the digital humanities that would prepare students for careers in academia and public humanities. Students who follow a curriculum with emphasis on digital humanities resources might earn a certificate in this area. Indeed, the Job Information List of the Modern Languages Association for 2012 listed more than twice as many jobs than last year for candidates with some expertise in Digital Humanities (the English-language list alone).
Mid-range needs: To achieve this field guide and enable the creation of tool-kits, someone needs to assemble all the connections and maintain them. Here is where a permanent hire will be needed. Potentially this work could be done in conjunction with the McGraw Center. Building on what is learned from the short-term goals for courses and research as outlined above, the initiative could develop a plan. This plan would define the objectives of learning specific to digital tools and data and assess student learning entailed with them. Defining the criteria and values that underlie these objectives will also be especially important for shaping teaching strategies, as well as for funding and promoting pedagogical projects in the digital humanities. These criteria would help to address the question of what counts as digital engagement: what is the range of forms of digital engagement that the initiative seeks to advance and support based on our criteria and values? Most of the discussion in the statement concerns training for hardware and software and accessing data, or digital forms of expression.
9 The Teaching and Research Group also identified a need for more general-purpose digital tutorials and technical support for instructors. These guides and tutorials are not specific to the Digital Humanities, but instructors will need to know how and where to locate these and other resources at OIT to support their classroom activity: for example, tutorials on how to use Blackboard and similar online learning management systems; how to use e-reserves and other digitized media for the classroom; outlines of digital resources available or not available to students; specifications about what resources are or are not PC- or Mac-specific; a guide to Princeton University mobile technology; a database of common mishaps and how to prevent them; details about podium compatibility, connectivity, clickers, and so on for Mac, PC, iPad, and other devices; and user guides to OIT's file-sharing services. 9 Proposal for a Digital Humanities Initiative, Princeton University
The McGraw Center offers to assist in developing a plan for understanding ways of knowing and problem-solving entailed in these forms of digital engagement, especially in the contexts of teaching and learning.
Long-term Goals Long-term goals involve not only developing but also publicizing digital humanities research and teaching. It is here that the digital humanities finds one of its largest challenges: peer-reviewed digital humanities publications.
Peer-reviewed digital humanities publications that are acceptable for tenure reviews and publication reviews is an ideal yet to be achieved fully in the humanities. In the discipline of English, a large number of new peer-reviewed online publications have appeared in the last few years (NINES and BRANCH, for example) and best practices for evaluating and reviewing Digital Humanities projects for tenure and promotion are ongoing (see http://institutes.nines.org/docs/2011- documents/recommendations-for-chairs/ ). Digital publication in general is more widespread, especially as an adjunct or version of an in-print publication in the humanities. There is, however, a wide difference between text-based publication and those that include images, for which permissions to disseminate digital versions may be difficult or impossible to acquire. Princeton University Press is considering publishing through books at JSTOR and has encountered this problem already. In addition they have found that publishing for the wide array of extant digital platforms can be problematic, especially with images, for captions and labels may not appear correctly on Nooks, Kindles, and other e-readers.
Permissions, reviews, and ease of use have caused digital-format digital humanities publications to lag behind the sciences. A goal for the digital humanities initiative might be to find innovative ways to move beyond current problems. In the Department of Art and Archaeology, the departmental publication office (Christopher Moss) works closely with the university press. That department’s several long-term archaeological excavations are looking to digital publication so as to alleviate the enormous cost of publishing image-rich volumes. Print-on-demand would still allow for hard copies in cases where those are needed.
Long-term needs: While a building per se is not necessary to achieve the long-term goal of collaborative, online publications between the university press, the library, and relevant departments, the long-term goal will build on the success of the digital humanities community at Princeton. In order for that community to come together, as described at the start of this document, both an online and a physical space are needed. Through this community, the impetus for, purposes, and criteria for peer-reviewed digital humanities could be a topic for serious discussion. One goal of the digital humanities community at Princeton might be to have a peer-reviewed digital humanities publication, an on-line journal and/or book series. This publication could highlight the work by the Princeton community, although for a peer-reviewed publication it should also consider the work by the larger digital humanities community.
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Programming
Authors: Cliff Wulfman and Janet Vertesi Developing a robust Digital Humanities curriculum and an awareness of Digital Humanities tools and resources at Princeton entails devoting time and resources to fostering a community. The Programming Committee envisions a multi- pronged approach of events, workshops, speakers and a reading group to help develop the academic community on campus and to build Princeton’s collective expertise in the Digital Humanities.
Digital Tuesdays, 2012-2013 The Program Committee has planned an integrated series of events for the academic year 2012-2013. The goal of these events is to inform and engage Princetonians in current debates in the Digital Humanities and to provide them with the skills and tools necessary for research projects that use its methods and techniques. To this end, a weekly series, called “Digital Tuesdays”, hosts a selection of events on Tuesday in the late afternoons from 4:45-6. Each will present a speaker, a workshop, or a reading series for formal academic discussion.
Show & Tell, September 18, 2012. The semester began with a wine-and-cheese event at the Joseph Henry House on September 18, 2012. Local researchers and practitioners gave brief overviews of current work in an effort to share our experiences and plans, and promote potential collaborations.
Reading Group Digital Tuesdays will largely feature meetings of a Reading Group in Mathey College. At these meetings we will read and discuss a series of papers drawn from a recent collection, Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold (U Minnesota Press, 2012).
This activity picks up on the success of the DH Reading Group which kicked off in February 2012. Led by Cliff Wulfman, the group met over the course of the Spring 2012 semester. We had five to ten regular participants from a variety of disciplines, even including colleagues at the Seminary. Readings included the following:
• Unsworth, John. "What is Humanities Computing and What is not?" Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 4 (2002): n. pag. Web. 27 Sept. 2011.
• Schnapp, Jeffrey, and Todd Pressner. "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2." 2009.
• Moretti, Franco. "Conjectures on World Literature." New Left Review 1.1 (2000): 54-68.
• Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. "Design Noir." Book (2001): 1-5.
• Sengers, Phoebe et al. "Reflective design." /Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing between sense and sensibility/ - CC 05. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2005. 49. Web. 27 Mar. 2012.
• Oliver, Julian, Gordan Savičić and Danja Vasiliev. "The Critical Engineering Manifesto." The Critical Engineering Working Group. Berlin: October 2011.http://criticalengineering.org.
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Speaker Series On April 9, 2012, we launched our speakers’ series with a visit from Gregory Crane, Professor of Classics at Tufts University and Director of the Perseus Digital Library Project. Professor Crane's talk, entitled "Wikipedia, World of Warcraft and the Rediscovery of the Humanities in a Digital New World," was very well attended, with at least 60 in the audience. Following the talk, a group of about 15 participants came to dinner, which took place in the Mathey special dining room. The undergraduate students in particular valued the opportunity to exchange ideas with Professor Crane and excitedly discussed prospective research projects.
In 2012-2013, the speaker series will continue with events in the fall and spring. We welcomed Charles Henry of the Digital Public Library project, on September 27, and are currently re-scheduling the November 20th visit by Anne Balsamo, Dean of New Media Studies at the New School in New York City (due to hurricane Sandy). Jeffrey Schnapp, Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and faculty director of the metaLAB at Harvard, and Julia Flanders, Director of the Women Writers Project and Associate Director for Textbase Development in the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University, have agreed to speak in the spring and we are currently scheduling these events. These scholars are considered luminaries in the field and are charged with bringing their perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the Digital Humanities to our community at Princeton. Events will be followed with dinners and opportunities for Princeton students, staff and faculty to meet with the speakers. We are also investigating opportunities for co-sponsorship with relevant departments, to increase these speakers’ reach on campus.
Informal Happy Hour All Digital Tuesdays will be followed by a regular Happy Hour at a local pub. This informal get-together was incorporated on the advice of the computer scientists on the committee, who informed us that a happy hour is one of the most important features of successful computational teams.
"Hack the Humanities" Series In addition to these regular events, we propose to run a series of hands-on workshops to develop our community’s skills and familiarity with software and hardware tools essential to digital humanities projects. These workshops will assume no prior knowledge of the tools and will give the fundamentals required to conceive of new research projects. The workshops will run on occasional evenings in the fall and spring. Workshop topics tentatively include statistics for humanists (November); an introduction to GIS (December); the basics of text encoding (February-March); and a "Make Workshop" with Arduino and other open hardware (April-May). The series will culminate in a hackathon (“Hack the Humanities”) in May: a community event at which faculty, staff, and students are invited to bring their ideas for projects and realize them in a short period of time with a variety of tools and resources which will be provided on site.
Long Term View Looking forward, the Program Committee expects to host an ongoing reading series, regular happy hours, one or two workshops per semester, and between 2-4 invited speakers per year. We propose that the slate of activities in 2012-2013 be repeated in 2013-2014; and in the spring of 2014, we will evaluate the success of these activities and adjust our proposal for moving forward. However, in the absence of a physical home for the DH movement on campus, we hope that this annual schedule of interdisciplinary events will provide continued support, education, and momentum for humanities scholars at Princeton to engage in the Digital Humanities.
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Infrastructure
Overview and Vision The infrastructure committee has been investigating models of support, outreach, and training for digital scholarship that address immediate concerns and shortcomings but that also fit into the long-term goals of the Digital Humanities Working Group. In an attempt to fulfill immediate infrastructure needs, the group has proposed the creation of virtual resources and the repurposing of existing physical spaces within the next two years. In looking toward the longer term, the group has explored institution-wide support infrastructures involving the library and OIT and has begun to talk about possible site visits to other institutions to gather evidence of ‘best practices’ in support for digital humanities.
In the Short-term: Virtual infrastructure In attempting to address immediate goals, the infrastructure group has established or proposed two virtual resources:
• A digital humanities website through which the digital humanities community can stay informed of the events, people, and news within Princeton’s Digital Humanities Working Group. The website can be found at http://digitalhumanities.princeton.edu. The website is hosted free of charge on OIT’s Wordpress service. OIT’s Academic Services donated the funds for the creation of the digital humanities logo, developed by Princeton’s Office of Communications. A “Field Guide to the Digital Humanities” has been proposed which would document resources available on campus that may have relevance to digital scholarship. As originally proposed, this ‘Field Guide’ would be a non-linear representation of people, software, facilities, training opportunities, and projects related to the digital humanities. In light of the Bamboo Project’s recent ‘Bamboo DiRT’ project, a database of software tools for digital work in the Humanities, the scope of this ‘Field Guide’ will likely be revised. The field guide is capable of using tags and categories to organize references to these resources, but also relations between records in the database, creating a network structure rather than a simple list. It was also suggested that the ‘Field Guide’ contain case studies of digital projects, outlining the process, tools, people, and issues.
• An XML database for general community use. OIT has established an eXist XML database server that will provide the infrastructure necessary for many types of digital projects. It can be used to house small-scale digital projects and serve as a sandbox for scholars interested in investigating the use of XML technologies for research purposes. The database allows one to perform xPath and xQuery upon XML documents, opening up many possibilities for advanced searching, indexing, and display of digital documents.
In the Short- and Long-term: Physical infrastructure Some immediate goals for physical infrastructure have also been addressed:
• Working with the New Media Center, a digitization service has been developed through which analog materials can be digitized for use in research and teaching. Support for the storage, streaming, and display of these digitized materials can also be arranged. Just in the four months this service has been available, it has proven to be quite popular, showing a definite need for digitization for teaching and research purposes.
• During the next two years, renovations to the Humanities Resource Center will be made to help explore ideas in physical infrastructure for the support of Digital Humanities. It is hoped that ideas which develop
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within the group or gleaned from site visits to other institutions could be more immediately tested in this existing physical location. The Center classroom will be kept up-to-date as a technology enhanced teaching space which allows teaching staff to explore digital tools in their teaching. The layout of the HRC computer lab will be changed in an attempt to make the space more welcoming to faculty as a consultation and project development workspace and to other members of the Digital Humanities Working Group.
• The Infrastructure Committee has also looked at several possible models of support and consultation for the digital humanities. It was unanimously recognized that although informational websites may be useful and necessary, these resources should also be augmented with structure of face-to-face support. It was suggested that an immediate goal should be the establishment of a single point-of-contact (aka Clearinghouse, aka Triage Center). In the future we could think about having multiple dispatchers. These might be subject librarians, SCADS, or graduate students who are familiar with the resources, tools, and facilities on campus.
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Funding
Overview
Most of the work of the Digital Humanities Initiative requires some form of funding – from paying the travel expenses for visiting speakers to afternoon happy hour discussions to course development funds (a subject for which we receive MANY queries) for new courses with Digital Humanities components to new technology for the University libraries and the Office of Information Technology. With that in mind, Carol Rigolot (Council for the Humanities), Stanley Katz (Woodrow Wilson School), and Daniel Claro (Visual Resources Curator, School of Architecture) met with Meredith Martin during the January 24, 2012 meeting. Every issue that raised in the January meeting requires some form of funding, whether internal or external. With those immediate needs in mind, Meredith Martin went on to apply, with Carol Rigolot’s encouragement, for a two-year seed-money grant from the Humanities Council, which awarded the Digital Humanities Initiative $51,000 to support their efforts over the next two years (AY 2012-13 and ay 2013-2014). The details of the grant are below.
Description of Vision Over the next two years, the funding committee would like to investigate stable and renewable sources of internal and external support for the Digital Humanities at Princeton. Whether we decide to apply for a multi-million dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities, we want to carefully isolate what makes Digital Humanities at Princeton important and unique. Collaborating, from an early stage, with the Dean of the College, we believe that the teaching and research component of the Digital Humanities Initiative might best be funded internally, while the more bricks-and-mortar aspects (constructing or dedicating a campus location for collaborative projects or a Digital Humanities Center, for example) might be better funded via the Priorities Committee. We have assembled an advisory board consisting of Jay Dominick (Vice President for Information Technology, CIO), Stanley Katz (Woodrow Wilson), Serge Goldstein (OIT), Tony Grafton (History), Clayton Marsh (Dean of the College), Carol Rigolot (Humanities Council) and Karin Trainer (University Libraries) to assist us in our next steps toward approaching the administration and approaching external foundations for the long-term funding of this project.
As part of our funding goals we are trying to collaborate as much as possible with existing programs and invited talks. In this way, the program committee is co-sponsoring events across campus. We are also exploring the possibility of using the long and short-term fellowship programs through the Council of the Humanities to expand the Digital Humanities platform on campus.
Another funding priority is to assess what we already have here at Princeton and highlight our strengths before moving forward with proposals that require major new funding. There is a lot of excitement about a new kind of resource center for digital projects but before we take on a larger grant for that kind of project — and move toward a proposal for the priorities committee — we will rely on the infrastructure, teaching and research committees to tell us what we already have and what we truly need to make Princeton’s DH component unique.
Timeline The immediate funding we received from a handful of departments allowed us to sponsor our inaugural event, a talk by Greg Crane, on April 9th. The funding we received from the Gardner Grant facilitated our hiring of an undergraduate assistant, Maryam Patterson (History department), who is working for both the programming and teaching and research 15 Proposal for a Digital Humanities Initiative, Princeton University
groups throughout the year. We have hired Orlando Reade (from the English Department) as a graduate student assistant for 2012-13.
In addition to this seed-money from the Gardner Fund, the Digital Humanities Initiative received and continues to receive in-kind contributions from Serge Goldstein and the Humanities Resource Center, who contributed to the design of our logo and who have donated time and effort toward the creation of the website, and from Mathey College, which allows the use of its classroom and sponsors our lunch meetings.
As part of our goal for the end of 2014, the funding committee would like to have approached and made headway with the priorities committee, to have worked closely with the Dean of the College and Dean of the Faculty to investigate new ways of supporting technology in the classroom and Digital research initiatives in the Humanities, to have created an application based (and funded) summer program via the McGraw Center and the graduate school to help train Assistants in Instruction on Digital Humanities issues (perhaps even issuing a certificate in collaboration with the new IHUM program) and to have applied for at least one large-scale external grant to support the creation of a Digital Humanities Center on campus.
Budget narrative for 2012-2014
Our budget falls into four categories: Graduate and Undergraduate research assistance; Programming; Teaching and Research; and Infrastructure. Below please find a narration of each section of the budget.
Research Assistance As part of our goals for the end of 2014, we would like to have robust involvement from graduate and undergraduate students across campus. It is a given, for us, that our graduate student and undergraduate student assistants will participate actively in promoting digital humanities across the graduate school and through the student government and residential college programs. In addition to spreading the word, we expect both of our research assistants to help the programming committee on researching speakers and inviting them, coordinating their visits and coordinating food and room-reservations for large and small group meetings, and helping with other organizational tasks. We expect the graduate student to perform research tasks that would involve disseminating a survey to DH centers across the country and helping to keep the website up to date with current faculty projects, as well as finalizing the survey questions that we will use during site research visits and elsewhere. The graduate student assistant will also develop a short (10 min) and longer (20 min) slideshow presentation, with video, for the website and also for members of the DH committees to present to their departments in order to define the possibilities for collaborative DH work on campus. The undergraduate assistant will work specifically with residential college directors of study and the registrar in order to survey undergraduates about technology models they use most. The undergraduate assistant will also work to assemble a list of courses relevant to DH work for use in the new “ehum” concentration. She will also coordinate discussions, events, and activities around digital media for undergraduates and, finally, work with the alumnae association to create a database of alumnae in the tech industry. We have a total of 200 hours for each position in our budget.
Programming Our programming budget will support one invited external speaker per term including travel, honorarium, and one night in a hotel, in addition to a reception, dinner, and a master class lunch for each speaker. Because we are inviting many local speakers, we have already found that we can stretch this number to include two speakers per term and have proceeded
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accordingly for the 2012-2013 academic year. We are also collaborating and co-sponsoring visitors and events whenever we can. Our programming budget also includes publicity via the Student Design Services for posters publicizing visiting speakers and our “digital Tuesdays” discussion group. The “DH Happy Hours” (part of the digital Tuesdays which include short talks) is supported in the budget, as are the ongoing technology workshops and hackathons. OIT and DHI will co- sponsor a series of 12 instructional lunches. Finally, our budget includes a day-long conference on Digital Humanities at Princeton, to take place in the spring of 2013. This conference will include four external and four internal speakers and we have budgeted for receptions, publicity, lunches, dinners, lodging, and travel.
Teaching & Research Though very modest, we felt that one way to immediately publicize our commitment to cross-disciplinary digital humanities work in the classroom would be to sponsor a small grant of $4,500 during the summer of 2013 to support a course that could count toward the DH certificate. In addition, we are hoping to work with the 250th Anniversary Fund to earmark funds for technological innovation in the classroom. Our budget includes the creation of a workstation for teaching and research, to be housed in the Humanities Research Center, and the purchase of a 27-inch imac, a 27-inch Thunderbolt display, Adobe & Office Suite, and software licenses for various software (Oxyen, XML editor, Filemaker, Nvivo) as well as a Wacom Tablet. Many of these will be available via OIT through Princeton’s already extant license agreements. In addition to using this station in the workshops, we plan to hold “Office Hours” with computer science faculty geared toward training humanities faculty who would like to learn how to use technology more effectively in teaching and research.
Infrastructure Because we have many partnerships already with universities that have long been promoting digital humanities (specifically Stanford and Maryland) we feel that gathering information from these and other centers will be crucial to the development of a successful proposal at Princeton. With that in mind, our budget includes monies to support site visits to four Digital Humanities Centers for two members of the Initiative (we hope to send someone from OIT and the Library to each site) to four centers over the next two years. This future-looking information gathering will be supplemented by the survey we are developing, which we plan to disseminate much more broadly, collecting and collating our results into a report for our proposal. We are also committed to archiving and making available the resources and information we are already gathering. With that in mind we are recording all of our events as well as the conference, and will edit and publish these events on the website. OIT has donated, already, the creation of our DH at Princeton logo, as well as much of the time and labor toward the DH website.
Conclusion and Summary of Funding The Council of the Humanities and the Office of Information Technology are the largest supporters (monetarily and through in-kind contributions) of our efforts thus far, in addition, of course, to the donated time and efforts of each member of the Executive Committee and the generous hosting of many of our events by Mathey College. By far the most 17 Proposal for a Digital Humanities Initiative, Princeton University
gratifying news for us in spring, 2012, however, came when we finished our initial request for funding and circulated it across campus to all departments and programs we felt might be curious about our initiative and might benefit from it. The outpouring of support we received was stunning. As of fall, 2012, we are operating on a budget of $40,000 for each year, in which $25,500 of this comes from the Council of the Humanities but the remaining $14,500 (each year — $29,00 total) is the result of donations from the following enthusiastic and interested departments (listed in order of the size of their donation):
Department of History, Department of Computer Science, Firestone Library, Department of Music, Department of Mathematics, Center for Information Technology Policy, Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Department of English, Department of Art and Archeology, Department of Classics, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Philosophy, Department of Religion, Princeton University Art Museum, McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of East Asian Studies, The Woodrow Wilson School, The School of Architecture, The Program in American Studies, The Department of German, The Department of French and Italian, The Program in Linguistics, and the Department of Sociology.
Though these 24 departments, programs, and division in no way represents the breadth of involvement on campus and is really only a first pass, we are galvanized by their support and interest. The Dean of the College as well as the Keller Center seem interested in more sustained collaboration, and we have also been encouraged to continue trying to collaborate with the Lewis Center for Performing Arts and the Center for African American Studies (two places where we feel that participation is conspicuously absent).
Summary
The Humanities are at a crossroads. Digital methodologies are changing the kinds of questions we can ask in our scholarship, and providing new answers. To compete in and contribute to this domain, the next generation of humanists will need to be equipped not only with the humanistic framework, knowledge of classic texts, styles of scholarly criticism and critical thinking skills, but also with the tools of digital analysis. Through our attention to teaching and research, programming, infrastructure, and funding, the Digital Humanities Initiative at Princeton lays out a plan for coordinating our digital efforts, while making an important and lasting contribution to undergraduate and graduate education and faculty research. Our focus for the period 2012-2014 is on the growth of our community: providing the basic skills and tools necessary for transformative research, drawing connections between the museums and libraries, computing centers, classrooms and faculty offices, and introducing Princeton humanists across campus to the debates, figures, and topics central to this new domain of inquiry. These activities and strategic investments will enable us to move forward with our colleagues in other top universities in the nation, ensuring Princeton’s continued leadership in humanistic studies into the 21st century.
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