This was a four/six (four minutes delivery of four slides, six minutes of discussion) at a planning meeting for "Bamboo" - a new and major effort to enhance research in the Arts and Humanities in the US with common digital tools and infrastructures.
Slide 1
The Bamboo project aims to specify and design digital tools and infrastructures for enhancing research in the Arts and Humanities.
Where do you start with technology and tools?
This is a key question of design.
I suggest we think of the Bamboo challenge as one of knowledge design and management
Bamboo is making a behavioral start - one centered upon functions and behaviors. This is a powerful, tried and tested strategy in engineering. Experts consult with users and parse their tasks. They anticipate needs beyond the consulted group, then design and deliver a toolkit that is designed to meet the needs of the majority.
So we have been invited to specify tasks and objects in Humanities research. This set of defined processes and entities will be taken by the IT experts, modeled and refined in a few pilot studies, then put into production.
Slide 2
A key question - how can we encompass diversity, unknown needs and anticipate futures?
How can the IT tools be flexible enough - and what does flexibility and adaptability mean - extensibility/modularity/interoperability?
When the arts and humanities are so diverse.
And so empirically oriented.
When the focus of the Humanities and Arts is not so much specifiable tasks as materials and experiences.
Slide 3
We might learn from the IT design community and a complementary design methodology.
Think agile and iterative!
Start with people by giving them something they want now and keep working with them to see what happens - watch, listen, respond, and start the cycle again. Don't anticipate (too much). Make sure you can change and adapt.
Research in science studies shows that there is nothing really special about "science" as an activity. Most of it is very mundane. So we might focus as much on understanding groups of people - beyond the behavioral - put in context the parsable tasks and functions.
Slide 4
Some key components (from our own iterative trials at Stanford) of digitally-enabled research:
Again - much of this does not comprise tasks and objects - it is about engagement with others, with materials and experiences.
For amplification - see also
Collaboration and research networks in the Humanities - with Nicole Coleman
Digital media, agile design and the politics of archaeological authorship
Artereality - a manifesto for the future of arts and humanities education in the US - from What Is Art Education? A 21st-Century Question, edited by Steven Madoff, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008)
Bamboo is an ambitious project to develop digital tools and infrastructures to enhance research in the Arts and Humanities. The meeting in Berkeley opened up eighteen months of consultation, planning and piloting - preparation for full implementation thereafter.
There was a lot of energy in Berkeley and some good hearted enthusiasm for the task set for the meeting - to describe what it is that researchers in the Arts and Humanities do. The organizers have decided that a necessary first step is to parse the work of humanities research - break it down into basic tasks and objects/products, so that the IT people can build the tools and environments to help us do what we do better. The pre-circulated project description (that we have all shared) is quite excellent. It outlines the state of the digital humanities very effectively, I think, and particularly reports some preliminary consultation with humanists, IT people, librarians, in a series of very instructive narratives/vignettes. This was the basis of the small-group workshops I attended on Tuesday.
In spite of enthusiasm we quickly ran into boggy ground. There were relatively few faculty among the many library and IT staff. While we are all academics, the lack of faculty to act as informers on the nature of humanities research was a cause of concern to many. It was also quickly clear that it is not that easy to specify tasks and objects in the humanities. Methodology is not a well-developed part of our field, and to parse reading/looking/listening, rumination and writing (the time-honored fundamentals of the Humanities) doesn't take an IT designer very far. In a short intervention/talk I was asked to deliver in the afternoon, I stressed that the humanities are as much about disposition towards certain cultural materials and experiences; they are focused on content, as much as on tasks and outputs. A tool to help one organize one's notes on an archive may succeed functionally in providing an efficient database perhaps, and fail completely to be adopted and used because its ugly aesthetic or interface hinders one appreciating the qualities of the archive. This crucial qualitative and emotional aspect could well be missed in the way the design of Bamboo was being pursued. I suggested that the project might include a less behavioral and more "humanist" component - offering already existing digital tools to humanists who don't normally use them and track their response - watch and listen, adapt the tool, continue to watch and listen. This iterative and agile technique of rapid prototyping with a broad user community is commonplace in software design.
Some of us feel that there is a common and somewhat mistaken perception among IT experts that the humanities have a problem that IT can solve. The "problem" is that many humanists make only little use of widely available digital tools. The solution, often left implicit, is to let the IT people build a new "better" toolkit that will be more widely adopted. But many humanists don't think they have a problem at all with the tools of their trade. Better therefore perhaps for IT to be much more closely connected with researchers and focus on what motivates the humanities - rich and substantive content - find ways of enhancing our engagement with "stuff" and "materials" and "experiences" (the words that kept cropping up on Tuesday).
A concern voiced several times therefore is that our IT colleagues seem to already know what we need. It will be called Bamboo and will be a general swiss-army-knife of a toolkit for the humanities. It will sit on some centralized servers somewhere and faculty will be able to log into its integrated systems environment to search libraries, make notes, communicate with colleagues, post papers, run classes etc. We already have several local versions of such a toolkit - Bamboo will be bigger and more comprehensive. The concern is that the local diversity and dense intellectual ecology that makes the humanities so rewarding and so much what they are would not fare so well. Bamboo might be a white elephant.
To keep with the metaphors: as someone said - Bamboo - a flexible, fast-growing, versatile resource suitable for many different uses. A good name therefore for a toolkit in the Arts and Humanities. Unfortunately bamboo, uncontrolled, is also an aggressive monoculture somewhat incompatible with a rich and diverse ecology ... (!)
There are perhaps too many negatives in my report here. I was also not able to attend Wednesday's gathering. It is early days, and these concerns were voiced and noted. The meeting at Berkeley was a great prompt for some of us at Stanford to realize that we have a good understanding of many of these issues. It helped galvanize and further forge links within and beyond the Stanford community interested in such agendas. Stanford is already very aware of this complementarity of top-down service provision and grass-roots attention to faculty and student needs - with the likes of Sakai and the initiatives underway in the Humanities Center. We have a lot to offer in the way of understanding.
Thanks for reading