"The Humanities in the Digital Age"
Internet2 Spring Members Meeting — Arlington, VA
April 25, 2007
(As Prepared For Delivery)

Good morning, and thank you, Doug, for that kind introduction. I'm honored to be here, and I want to thank you and Laurie Burns and your other colleagues for inviting me to speak at this Internet2 members' meeting.

I must begin this morning with a confession: Until just a few years ago, I was a bit of a Luddite when it came to technology. In my previous life as an academic, my scholarship and teaching were in the field of art history, which isn't exactly obsessed with staying on the cutting edge of technology. In fact, back when everyone was switching from typewriters to computers, I was actually regressing - from an IBM Selectric to a manual typewriter.

But eventually I did enter the digital age, thanks to some prodding from my wife. One day, upon returning home after a research trip in Europe, I found a brand new computer sitting on my desk — and my wife said: "Learn it." So of course, I did.

By the time I became Chairman of NEH in 2001, I had made some progress with computers. But I certainly didn't foresee how different my life would be just a few years later. Today, I am a confirmed "Crackberry" addict … I am the proud owner of an MP3 player … and here I am, giving a major speech to the Internet2 consortium. How about that?

Yet my presence here this morning is about something much bigger than just my personal embrace of the digital world. That a Chairman of the NEH is speaking to you says a great deal about the transformation that is happening today in the realm of the humanities.

What are the humanities? The humanities are the study of what makes us human: the legacy of our past; the ideas and principles that motivate us; and the eternal questions we ponder.

When most people think about the humanities, computers usually don't come to mind. Yet in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that rapid advances in digital technology are making a profound impact on the humanities. So this morning, I'd like to share with you some thoughts on this new landscape. What opportunities and challenges does it present? What will the humanities look like in the digital age?

In the digital age, the humanities will be increasingly democratized. Digital archiving and search tools are making primary documents, scholarship, and other humanities resources much more portable and more broadly available.

This development is significant for us at NEH. As a federal agency, our mission is to bring the humanities to every America citizen — because the humanities must be more than just a luxury for an elite few. The liberty of the mind is the foundation for all liberties — and that fact makes the humanities essential for the well-being of our democracy, for enlightened citizenship, and even for national survival. So the Endowment is eager to use digital technology to make the humanities more accessible to everyone.

In recent years, a tremendous amount and variety of humanities materials have been digitized and made available online. NEH has been proud to support many of these projects — everything from the English Short Title Catalogue to the digitization of major papyrus collections.

One project the Endowment is particularly proud of is our National Digital Newspaper Program. A few years ago, we realized that the future of newspaper preservation and access would be a digital one. So in 2004, we joined our partners at the Library of Congress with an ambitious goal in mind: to make available online, fully searchable, digital files of historic newspapers from every American state and territory in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Last month, we unveiled the first results of our labors — the "Chronicling America" website. This first public version of the site contains more than two hundred thousand pages of public domain newspapers from six states and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. "Chronicling America" shows how digital technology can bring history alive for today's citizens by helping us enter more deeply into another time and place. Anyone who is interested — students, teachers, scholars, history buffs — can now go to their computer and, at the click of a mouse, get immediate and searchable access to this incredible resource — the news, before it was "History." Ultimately, "Chronicling America" will make more than 30 million pages of historic American newspapers available to the public — for free, and forever.

Clearly, digitization is already affecting the humanities by making resources like the English Short Title Catalogue and historic newspapers more accessible, portable, and searchable.

But this is only the beginning. In the digital age, we will see an incredible transformation in how we read, write, think, and learn.

In this respect, the humanities are like every other field of human activity that has come in contact with digital technology. Many observers have noted that this encounter typically comprises two stages. In the first, digital technology helps us do the same things we did before — but faster, mostly better, and usually cheaper. In the second stage, the very nature of what we are doing is changed.

The humanities are now well along in the first stage. On the most mundane level, consider how much easier word-processing software has made it for a scholar to compose and edit her dissertation and organize her footnotes! And going beyond that, think of how she can use search technology and digitized archives to find her information and sources more quickly and efficiently.

Yet the humanities disciplines are only now on the verge of the second stage of the digital revolution — the moment when technology begins to change not only the efficiency of our scholarship, but the essence of humanities scholarship itself.

For example, in the digital age, the work of humanities scholars will be much more collaborative. As the Chairman of NEH it pains me to admit this, but at this point, scholars in the hard sciences and social sciences are far ahead of humanists in this regard. Those disciplines have embraced collaborative work — yet the humanities disciplines still prize individual scholarship. Our ideal is still the lone scholar, the "individual genius," roaming the stacks of libraries and archives to dig out golden nuggets of information, or hunching over a desk, writing feverishly.

Without question, this model has produced much brilliant scholarship. And certainly some humanities scholars will continue to work this way — and NEH will continue to support them. Yet much of the future of the humanities lies in the type of collaborative scholarship that digital technology makes possible.

Many of you are probably familiar with Eric Raymond's concept of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Raymond devised this metaphor to describe two different models of developing software. Under the "cathedral" model — or what I prefer to call the "monastery" model — a core group of developers works in isolation, comes up with the source code, and presents their software to the world while keeping the code under their control. This is a very top-down, hierarchical arrangement. In the "bazaar" model, by contrast, the source code is made available in the marketplace — in other words, on the Internet — so everyone can tinker with it and help improve it. Raymond's great insight is that with a complex project like software development, you can get better results more quickly by taking advantage of the collective knowledge of a larger group of people.

You can apply this same concept to the humanities using digital technology. The most famous example — or infamous, depending on your viewpoint — is of course, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Now certainly Wikipedia is not perfect — and its founder, Jimmy Wales, readily admits this. But Wikipedia is an incredible resource. It demonstrates the remarkable results we can achieve when we tap into the shared knowledge of enthusiastic communities. Wikipedia is also showing us the future of reference works. In the digital age, reference works can be "dynamic." They can be constantly updated … created and edited in collaboration with users from around the globe … and remarkably adept at policing themselves to maintain accuracy, balance, and quality.

I find it puzzling that many denizens of the academy have had attacks of the vapors over the use of Wikipedia by their colleagues. More far-sighted persons in the academic world recognize that Wikipedia embodies the kind of collaborative work that will be the future of most scholarship. And they have embraced it as a useful tool for helping their students evaluate and think critically about the sources they use.

In the digital age, humanities scholars must begin to think beyond their default preference for individual scholarship, if they want to reap the benefits of increased collaboration.

But there is another obstacle. Today's humanists face a great paradox: A massive amount of humanities materials is now being digitized — yet so far, humanists have only a limited number of content tools to help them interpret, analyze, and work in collaboration on these materials. As the American Council of Learned Societies declared last year in their report on cyber-infrastructure in the humanities, humanists need "tools that turn access into insight and interpretation."

For the humanities to reach the second stage in the digital revolution, humanities scholars must develop digital tools that can give us the ability to see new relationships and patterns … make new connections across different times and vast bodies of material … and ask new questions — which will, in turn, lead to new knowledge. Put simply, we need tools that will help us transform today's profusion of mere information into real wisdom.

The scientific parallel to this is the Humane Genome Project. That was an immense undertaking, made possible only by the computational analysis of massive amounts of data. This new analysis allowed researchers to conceptualize and then answer new questions, which in turn led to the creation of new knowledge.

In the digital age, we can do much the same thing in the humanities. For example, let's imagine an archeologist working at a remote dig site. He unearths an ancient pot with interesting and distinctive markings, but he can't quite determine how to categorize it. Today, he might have to wait until he returns to his university before he can solve the puzzle. But imagine, instead, if he had the ability to make a three-dimensional scan of the pot right on the site. He could tag it with Geospatial data and other descriptions, and send the information back to a central database of ancient pottery. Within perhaps a few minutes, he could receive a summary of pots already in the database that have similar markings and date ranges — along with a vast amount of information about their original cultural context. In a case like this, digital technology allows us to narrow considerably the gap between acquiring a new piece of information and seeing how it fits into the broader picture of what we already know.

New digital humanities tools should also help scholars build trails of associations that can later be shared and manipulated. Today we can see how these tools might work by observing how links and tags function in the various social networking sites, news feed readers, and other content tools that have become known collectively as "Web 2.0." We are beginning to recognize the truth of what Vannevar Bush foresaw over half a century ago: What makes a nugget of information truly valuable is not the overarching class it belongs to, but rather the connections it has to other data.

In the digital age, then, we will not only link humanities scholars — we will connect the objects and sources that these people use. In the future, as more books are digitized through projects like Google's Digital Library, books will no longer be isolated objects. With the help of our tags, links, and trails of associations, these books will interact — in essence, they will "talk" to each other. And those "conversations" will provide insights that help humanists create new knowledge.

In the digital age, the teaching experience in the humanities will also be significantly enhanced. To illustrate this, I like to refer back to my days as a professor of art history at Indiana University — "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," as the Star Wars movies used to say.

Let's say I wanted to give a lecture on Italian Renaissance portraits. Back then, I would consider which images I wanted to use, and I would be limited to the slides in the slide library at the university. I would choose images from the slides that were available, and then I would go into the classroom with two projectors. I would show a few pairs of images side-by-side to draw comparisons and illustrate the points I wanted to make to my students.

With digital technology at my disposal, I could approach this situation much differently. First, I am no longer limited by what's in the slide room; in fact, there is no need for a slide room, because you have so many digitized images on the Web. (Indeed, digitizing is changing the very notion of "place" and "venue" in the humanities — but this is a subject for another day.)

With digital technology, now I can talk about a complete universe of Renaissance portraits — instead of showing two, I can show 40. And I am no longer limited to images. For example, let's say I want to talk about a patron of one of these portraits. I can pull up a link to an article about this patron, or another portrait of him, or a genealogy. Or I could discuss the building in which the portrait was originally displayed — say, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence — and pull up images and information about it.

As I mentioned earlier, the digital age will allow scholars and students to enter more broadly and deeply into different times, places, and cultures. For instance, scientists, historians, and archaeologists around the world have begun to embrace the 3-D modeling of cultural heritage sites. Information technology has permitted them to recreate buildings and monuments that no longer exist — or to digitally restore sites that have been damaged with the passage of time. The results can be used both in research, to test new theories, and in teaching, to take students on virtual tours of the historical sites they are studying.

One of the most impressive of these projects is "Rome Reborn," a 10-year effort to rebuild ancient Rome digitally. It was begun at UCLA and is now based at the University of Virginia, under the leadership of University of Virginia Professor Bernard Frischer.

You are now seeing a series of screen shots of the model that show how imperial Rome appeared in the year 320 A.D. At the time shown in the model, Rome had reached the peak of its development, with an estimated population of one million people, occupying over 25 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls. Looking at these images gives you a vivid impression of the capital of the Roman Empire.

The "Rome Reborn" model runs in real time. On the screen, you are now seeing some footage recently captured from a fly-through of the model at the University of Virginia. As you can see, users can navigate through the model with complete freedom, moving up, down, left and right at will. They can walk down the streets of the ancient city … fly into the air to see whole neighborhoods … or enter important public buildings such as the Colosseum, or a law court such as the Basilica of Maxentius.

In the footage, we're approaching the city from the south — we pass over the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum can be seen on the right. Next, we descend into the heart of the Forum. Now we climb again and see the River Tiber in the distance … and then we head back south to the floor of the Colosseum. Alas, there are no gladiators battling in the model — but I'm sure Professor Frischer's team is working on that!

As new discoveries are made, "Rome Reborn" can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. Even more importantly, the model doesn't simply represent the knowledge we have — it enables us to make new discoveries. For example, scholars checking the model for accuracy last month noticed some hitherto unsuspected alignments of buildings, plazas, and colossal statues. This is the kind of discovery you only are able to make when you can re-experience what it was like to walk around the city as the ancients did.

One of the challenges that "Rome Reborn" and similar digital models face is to provide thousands of users with secure, real-time access to such simulations over the Internet. This will require two things: First, humanists need access to supercomputing resources that will allow for real-time rendering of these models while supporting a high number of simultaneous log-ins. Second, we need the speed and bandwidth of networks like Internet2 to reduce latency in the transmission of the imagery.

In the digital age, the National Endowment for the Humanities has a duty to take a leadership role in exploring this new frontier in the humanities. So last year, we created an agency-wide initiative under the direction of our Chief Information Officer, Brett Bobley, to focus our digital efforts and ensure their effectiveness. We call it our "Digital Humanities Initiative," or DHI.

The Endowment is committing a great deal of time, energy, and resources to DHI — and since its launch last year, the Initiative has moved forward rapidly. In this short period, we have already established five new grant programs under DHI. We are now accepting applications for Digital Humanities Fellowships. These fellowships will support scholars pursuing projects in the humanities that use digital technology — for example, the creation of the digital content tools that I discussed earlier. We are also supporting the creation of Digital Humanities Workshops. These workshops will help K-12 educators learn how to use digital resources to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in our schools.

As part of NEH's Challenge Grants program, we are creating Digital Humanities Challenge Grants, which will endow digital humanities centers and other large-scale projects. Earlier this month, NEH and the University of Maryland co-hosted the first "summit meeting" of these centers. This meeting gathered all the leaders of the nation's digital humanities centers and all the major digital humanities funders in one place for the first time, so they could discuss how they could work together.

Another crucial element of DHI is the collaborations we are pursuing with other institutions, both public and private. I have already mentioned our work with the Library of Congress on digital newspapers. At our summit of digital humanities centers, Ray Orbach, director of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, offered to work with NEH to give humanities scholars access to the same supercomputers that the national science labs use.

NEH is also working with the National Science Foundation to document the world's 3,000 endangered languages. And, last September, we forged a partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, called "Advancing Knowledge." Through this partnership, NEH and IMLS are helping libraries, museums, archives, and universities use technology to make educational and scholarly resources more broadly available. Finally, as you can probably deduce from my presence here today, NEH hopes to work with the Internet2 consortium to help humanities scholars take advantage of the high-powered network capabilities that Internet2 offers.

Another key DHI program is our Digital Humanities Start-up Grants. We chose the name "Start-Up Grant" deliberately to evoke the technology start-up — companies like Apple or Google that took a brilliant idea and, with a small amount of seed money, grew those ideas into new ways of doing business. Our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants will encourage scholars with bright new ideas, and provide the "seed money" to help promising digital humanities projects get off the ground.

Now, this is new and uncharted territory for NEH, because whenever you seek to encourage innovation, you have to support some ideas that are inherently "risky." Some will probably fail — while others will succeed wildly and develop into important projects. But all of them will incorporate new ways of using technology for humanities research, scholarship, and access.

Our staff was pleasantly surprised by the high caliber of the applications we received for the first round of these Start-up grants. We were also pleased to see that over 70 percent of the applications came from institutions or individuals who had never before applied for an NEH grant — which tells us that this initiative is reaching a whole new audience in the humanities.

Without question, the prospects for the humanities in the digital age are exciting. Yet the digital age is also raising great questions and challenges . On a practical level, as I have already noted, humanists and technologists need to develop good content tools and cyber-infrastructure, and acquire the computational power to make digital humanities projects worthwhile and effective. They must also solve the technical challenges of interoperability … the long-term preservation of digital resources … and the need to develop common standards. Through our Digital Humanities Initiative, the Endowment is committed to helping humanists tackle these challenges.

Beyond the practical level, the marriage of digital technology and the humanities poses deeper questions. As I talk with humanities scholars — for example, at next month's annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies — I am urging them to think through these issues. For example:

• How do we change the minds of those humanists who simply don't believe they have much to gain from digital technology?
• How can humanists incorporate digital analysis and tools in their work, while retaining the sense of ambiguity that is so highly valued in our field?
• How should humanities scholars adapt to their reduced role as "gatekeepers" of knowledge in a new world of democratized scholarship?

The questions keep coming. What is the future of the scholarly monograph and journal? Perhaps it is a hybrid approach, with monographs being "born digital" and delivered electronically to the audiences that need them, while also being available for print-on-demand. If so, what happens to peer review and quality control in a world of "born digital" publications? And how will the academic institutions properly credit scholars for their work in the digital humanities when they are considered for promotion and tenure?

These are difficult questions, to be sure — yet on the whole, I believe the digital age will change the humanities mostly for the better. Digital technology offers us an unprecedented chance to make the world of the humanities more accessible and more collaborative — in short, more democratic. Anyone who cares about the future of the humanities will recognize this possibility and welcome it — and that is what we are doing at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Let me just say how fortunate I feel to be leading NEH at a time of such exciting developments. We have only begun to scratch the surface of what will be possible when the digital revolution makes its full impact on the humanities. And through this period of hopeful change, the Endowment's mission and priorities will remain unchanged: We will promote excellence in humanities scholarship — and we will strengthen our democracy, by spreading the benefits of the humanities to all Americans. I hope that all of you will join us in this vital work.

Thank you for letting me share my thoughts with you this morning.