Cyberinfrastructure, Application Program Interfaces, Data Mining….It Sounds Intimidating!
I was in Pennsylvania this weekend for a bridal shower and bachelorette party (hence why my posting is a tad on the late side), and I ended up staying at my parents house the night before the festivities. I got to my parents house later than expected, and I was bummed that I missed the beginning of the Presidential debate. As I am a political junkie, I used my iphone (my parents do not own a computer) to go to CNN.com and see if there was anything earth shattering that I happened to miss. Being that my parent’s house is surrounded by trees and cornfields, my internet connection was on the slow side. As I muttered obscenities underneath my breath, my mother looked at me and said, “Stop complaining. Your father and I are primitive.” Primitive is an understatement. They still do not know how to operate the DVD player, let along use a computer. But it got me thinking. When I think of someone or something being “primitive,” I immediately picture a horse and buggy instead of a car or someone rubbing two sticks together to create a fire. It is hard to imagine that not having the internet, a world wide phenomenon that was virtually unheard of until CERN[i] launched its World Wide Web project in the early 1990’s, is considered primitive. But it is. I shudder to think what would happen tomorrow if the computer, the very life blood of millions of businesses and thousands of college campuses, ceased to exist. Chaos would ensue. Hell, I might even think the world was coming to an end. Have we grown that attached to the computer and the internet that we would fail to function without them?
Of course the world would not end (we got by without computers for thousands of years, right?) but the idea that a society could be come so dependent on a mechanical box filled with microchips and wires in such a short amount of time is frightening to a generation of people who grew up using old fashioned pen and paper. Just when people have figured out how to master Microsoft works, the program is considered obsolete and something better has replaced it; people finally learn how to use basic search engines (does anyone remember Gopher?) and then all of the sudden, words like “hypertext,” “html,” and “programming interfaces,” are thrown into the mix, and people go, “huh?” So what exactly are algorithms and electro-optical components, how can they be used to help make sense of the human record, and why are people so intimidated?
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), an organization committed to the advancement of the humanities and the social sciences, coined the term cyberinfrastructure to denote the make up of the web as a layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools and services that can be used to broadly share information and pose inquiries for specific scholarly purposes. The ACLS argues that the web has revolutionized the way we find and process information, communicate and do research. Journals, books, reports, art, etc…can be easily accessed via the web, thus resulting in more efficient research and the creation of online communities where people can share information in a matter of seconds. Yet, many people are still resistant to this “digital scholarship.” The ACLS certainly makes a clear and convincing argument in, Our Cultural Commonwealth, the Report of the American Council of Learned Societies On Cyberinfrastructure For the Humanities and the Social Sciences, as to why we should embrace cyberinfrastructure and digital scholarship: yes, it will facilitate online collaboration; yes it will support experimentation; yes it creates an easily accessible virtual library. But it still scares the crap out of people, and it is easy to see why.
For one, many people, including many scholars, think that in order for them to successfully use the web as a means of conducting research or putting together projects, they have to have an array of advanced technical skills. And with terms such as wiki and web 2.0 becoming more and more common, it is easy to see why scholars are hesitant. But as Amy Taylor, associate professor at the State University of New York, points out in Interchange: the Promise of Digital History, people do not need to acquire a broad range of advanced technical skills in order to use the web for digital scholarship purposes. In fact, the beauty of digital scholarship and cyberinfrastrucutre is that it encourages online collaboration, hence making it easier to communicate with other scholars or individuals who may possess different and equally valuable technical skills.
I think the biggest challenge facing digital scholarship is that it can be difficult and cumbersome to explain. I read Daniel Cohen’s article, From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections, about how he used basic application programming interfaces (APIs) to create a Syllabus Finder search engine for students and professors, and I have to admit, I had to read it like three times. The article was so technical and required so much extra research on my part to figure out what the hell he was talking about, that I eventually got annoyed and moved on to the next thing that I was reading. And I think this is what is so intimidating. Scholars and ordinary people like myself take the time to read these informational articles so that we can have a better idea of how digital scholarship is changing, and it is so difficult to comprehend what is going on that we get frustrated. And I like to think I have a pretty good grasp of digital technology. So for someone who has little to no technical background to sit down and read an article like Cohen’s…it is no wonder they are intimidated!
The whole concept of digital scholarship began to make sense again after reading Lisa Spiro’s article, Doing Digital Scholarship: Presentation at Digital Humanities 2008. Finally, a woman who gets it and knows how to present it so people like me can understand. (Not that Cohen does not get it. He is a renowned expert on digital scholarship.) She posed the questions that many people and many scholars are asking: what is digital scholarship? What kind of tools are available to support it? To what extent do these resources and tools enable us to do research more productively and creatively? That is what people want to know! If they are going to buy into the concept of digital scholarship, they have to understand what the benefits are. Sure, a number of scholarly articles point out how the web allows us to access an infinite numbers and easily communicate with people who have similar interests. But a number of the articles and reports that exist are geared towards people who already have a good understanding of the web. What about the people who have limited knowledge? How do we get them invested? We get them invested by making the concept of digital scholarship easier to understand, and that is what Spiro does.
Digital scholarship…cyberinfrastructure….data mining…it sounds exciting. And yes, still a little scary.
My guess is that internet is the new television…I hate to say it’s a generalization thing though. I’m old enough to be your mother, and I have no problem with technology, yet I see kids coming into school who cannot use a computer properly outside of texting and surfing.
To me, it’s scary how much people don’t know, even those who have the education. I work with someone who is doing her Master’s Degree in Library Sciences, and she still doesn’t understand what Facebook and MySpace is. Granted, English is her second language, but they have social networking in her country, too.
While I would understand people like your parents or mine not understanding social networking, I wonder, is she’s not getting any digital info from her library classes?
| Posted 1 year, 1 month ago