0.1 Foreword

Foreword

I am pleased to commend Our Cultural Commonwealth to what I hope will be the many readers who will findin the report a vision of the future and a guide to realizing that future.

One role of the American Council of Learned Societies is to convene scholars and institutional leaders toconsider challenges important to the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields. The effective and efficient implementationof digital technologies is precisely such a challenge. It is increasingly evident that new intellectual strategies are emergingin response to the power of digital technologies to support the creation of humanistic knowledge. Innovative forms of writing andimage creation proliferate in arts and letters, with many new works accessible and understood only through digital media. Scholars areincreasingly dependent on sophisticated systems for the creation, curation, and preservation of information. In 2004, therefore, ACLSasked John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, tochair a Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Dean Unsworth selected the other members of theCommission and its advisers, who worked with dedication and determination. The analysis and recommendations of this report aretheirs, but the responsibility for grappling with the issues they present lies with the wider community of scholarship andeducation.

The convergence of advances in digital technology and humanistic scholarship is not new. Indeed, thispublication is at least the sixth major report focused on technology and scholarship in the humanities and interpretivesocial sciences issued by our Council.