Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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expertise, tools, experience, and guidel<strong>in</strong>es; “<strong>in</strong>frastructural facilities” to support both researchers and
NLP tool developers (cit<strong>in</strong>g CLARIN as a good example); open-access sources and standards;
metadata schemata; best practices, and exchanges, protocols and tools; and service centers that would
be able to support heavy computational process<strong>in</strong>g (de Jong 2009). Her requirements go beyond those
of the ACLS by also specify<strong>in</strong>g several other important features: the need for a number of pilot
projects between NLP researchers and humanists to test specific features of the <strong>in</strong>frastructure; flexible
user <strong>in</strong>terfaces that meet a variety of scholarly needs; and realistic evaluation frameworks that assess
how well user needs are be<strong>in</strong>g met by all the components of the <strong>in</strong>frastructure.
Questions of general <strong>in</strong>frastructure were also considered at a 2007 <strong>in</strong>ternational workshop hosted by
JISC and the NSF. This workshop produced a report that explored how to build an <strong>in</strong>frastructure that
would support cyberscholarship across the discipl<strong>in</strong>es. The report emphasized a number of necessary
conditions for <strong>in</strong>frastructure, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g new methods for data capture, management and preservation of
digital content, coord<strong>in</strong>ation at the national and <strong>in</strong>ternational levels, <strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary research, and,
most important, digital content that is truly “open,” or, <strong>in</strong> other words, available for computational
process<strong>in</strong>g and reuse. The authors of this report caution, however, that creators of cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure
will need to understand that a s<strong>in</strong>gle approach will not work for all discipl<strong>in</strong>es while at the same time
resist<strong>in</strong>g the assumption that there are no standardized services to be offered across discipl<strong>in</strong>es (Arms
and Larsen 2007). A similar warn<strong>in</strong>g was given by the CSHE report on scholarly communication.
“Although robust <strong>in</strong>frastructures are needed locally and beyond, “ Harley et al. concluded, “the sheer
diversity of scholars’ needs across the discipl<strong>in</strong>es and the rapid evolution of the technologies
themselves means that one-size-fits-all solutions will almost always fall short” (Harley et al. 2010).
Specific advice <strong>in</strong> terms of design<strong>in</strong>g VREs or <strong>in</strong>frastructures that can be widely adopted across
discipl<strong>in</strong>es has been given by Voss and Procter (2009). “Creat<strong>in</strong>g an <strong>in</strong>tegrated e-research experience
fundamentally relies on the creation of communities of service providers, tool builders and researchers
work<strong>in</strong>g together to develop specific support for research tasks,” Voss and Procter argued, “as well as
the creation of a technical and organisational platform for <strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g these tools <strong>in</strong>to an overall
research process.” While they argued that <strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary approaches must be <strong>in</strong>vestigated, they also
stated that any <strong>in</strong>frastructure must address the fact that social or organizational/discipl<strong>in</strong>ary behaviors
and technological issues are closely related.
Creat<strong>in</strong>g an <strong>in</strong>frastructure that is both general enough to encourage wide-scale adoption and use and
that can meet the needs of different discipl<strong>in</strong>es at the same time is a complicated undertak<strong>in</strong>g. While
laud<strong>in</strong>g the ACLS report <strong>in</strong> general, Stuart Dunn also warned that:
… the “not only discipl<strong>in</strong>e-specific” aspect of cyber <strong>in</strong>frastructure expresses both its strongest
appeal and its ma<strong>in</strong> drawback: while generat<strong>in</strong>g new knowledge by work<strong>in</strong>g across and beyond
established <strong>in</strong>tellectual discipl<strong>in</strong>es is at the heart of “digital scholarship”, the lack of a
discipl<strong>in</strong>ary focus with which scholars can identify is another reason why the term VRE has not
established itself (Dunn 2009).
While as Dunn observes <strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary research is at the “heart” of digital scholarship, the lack of a
discipl<strong>in</strong>ary focus for <strong>in</strong>frastructures can make it hard for researchers to identify them as useful for
their needs and has thus limited the uptake of potential tools such as virtual research environments.
Tobias Blanke has also explored how e-Science tools and methodologies (<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g virtual research
environments) may or may not be able transform “digital humanities” <strong>in</strong>to “humanities e-Science”
(Blanke 2010). One of the most successful tasks of digital humanities, Blanke noted, is us<strong>in</strong>g