Digitizing the humanities

I've just come back from ALA Annual conference in Chicago, where I wrapped up my term as Chair of the Literatures in English Section. One of the highlights of the conference was attending our section's program, titled "Open Access Digital Initiatives in the Humanities: Creation, Dissemination, Preservation." (Props to Angela Courtney and the LES 2009 Conference Program Planning Committee for putting this together!)

For a while (quite a long while) it seemed as though the sciences were really lapping the humanities in terms of cyberinfrastructure. In fact, this seemed so much the case that a report (okay, many reports, many articles) was written about the fact. While the sciences were leaping ahead into new publishing and scholarship models, led by PLoS and arXive, the humanities were still struggling to work electronic journal articles into the tenure and promotion formula. If you're ever very, very insomniac, give me a call and I'll tell you about a paper I wrote on this subject.

But now I'm pleased to say that some truly fascinating, robust digital initatives are taking hold (and gaining ground) in the humanities. One of the most interesting (to me) is NINES, which has been around for a very long time, but which now seems to be really taking off in new directions.

Dino Franco Felluga, associate professor of English literature at Purdue, opened NINES up to us in his talk, and I was delighted to see what a beautiful, rich site it's become. Their front page sums it up: "Searching 404,279 peer-reviewed digital objects from 58 federated sites." Some of this is licensed content (Project Muse results, for example) that will only be available to users at member institutions, but much of it is on the free web. And NINES features gorgeous exhibits, forums for users, a tagging system, and a peer review system. I didn't take enough notes, but I even recall hearing Professor Felluga mention a built-in game called Ivanhoe. And of course this is all part of a peer-reviewed digital repository with three editorial boards reviewing original content submitted by scholars...making it a fascinating new venue for digital publication and dissemination of scholarship.

Several people commented on how important it is that the site is well-designed--not only that it's highly usable, but that it has a rich, nineteenth-century look and feel. It's encouraging that the NINES folks have realized this--you may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but looks do matter! I have high hopes for NINES and the many other open-access digital projects by and for humanities scholars. As Professor Laura Mandell mentioned, the more digital access and metadata we bring to these works, the greater our ability to do what Northrop Frye did on his own: notice and tease out the interesting, important patterns that emerge from our cultural commonwealth.