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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.

Herbert C. Morton and Anne J. Price, The ACLS Survey of Scholars: The Final Report of Views on Publications,Computers, and Libraries (Washington: University Press of America, 1989). Herbert C. Morton et al, Writings on Scholarly Communication:An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles on Publishing, Libraries, Scholarly Research, and Related Issues (University Pressof America, 1988). Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Enquiry, (John Hopkins University Press, 1979).“Computerized Research in the Humanities,” ACLS Newsletter, Special Supplement, June 1966. Pamela Pavliscak, Seamus Ross, and CharlesHenry, “Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship: Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges—The United StatesFocus,”ACLS Occasional Paper #37,1997.
In 1965, ACLS began a program of providing fellowships to scholars whose projectsexperimented with “computer aided research in the humanities.” A forty-year-old statement of that program’s purpose remainsconvincing: “Of course computers should be used by scholars in the humanities, just as microscopes should be used by scientists. . .[t]he facts and patterns that they—and often they alone—can revealshould be viewed not as the definitive answers to the questions that humanists have been asking, but rather as the occasion for awhole range of new and more penetrating and more exciting questions.”
Charles Blitzer, “This Wonderful Machine: Some Thoughts on the Computer and the Humanities,” ACLS Newsletter,Vol. XVII, April 1966, No. 4.
For the past forty years increasing numbers of individual scholars have validated andre-validated that assertion. We now have arrived at the point, however, where we cannot rely on individual enterprise alone. Thisreport is therefore primarily concerned not with the technological innovations that now suffuse academia, but rather withinstitutional innovations that will allow digital scholarship to be cumulative, collaborative, and synergistic.
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Source:  OpenStax, "our cultural commonwealth" the report of the american council of learned societies commission on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. OpenStax CNX. Dec 15, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10391/1.2
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