0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology  (Page 5/10)

But it is not enough to say this, as a principle we all say we subscribe to. How do we actually enable open access? Far too often, what actually happens is that scholars and project leaders think that open to all simply means that anyone can see the work on a free-to-all website somewhere. That is: you have to go through the interface provided by the scholar to get to the data. The result is that you can only see the data the way the interface permits. All too often, too, this means you cannot get to the original files themselves. Typically, the browser shows the original XML converted to HTML, with no way to access the XML. If the reader wants the XML, to work on and perhaps republish, he or she has to write to the scholar who originated the materials. The scholar may be very willing to hand these over—or might just be too busy, or might not even have access to them.

Bagnall has several pertinent arguments here. The first is the tyranny of the interface: as he points out, interfaces create project silos, with the result that the data is inaccessible to the burgeoning array of tools which other scholars might want to use on the data. It is astonishing to me that so many digital humanities sites, created often at vast expense, cannot be searched by Google. The interface locks out Google, and any other search engines, and indeed everything apart from the tools authorized by the project team. His response to this is startling: he proposes to liberate the data from the single interface, so that anyone can write a different interface: “both data and code will be fully exposed. Anyone who wants can write an independent interface.” This flies completely in the face of orthodox practice in digital projects, where the project team goes to considerable lengths to craft beautifully-fashioned interfaces—and, collaterally, decides without even thinking that there is no need to make possible any other access as the project interface does it all. Again, without even thinking it: the interface serves as a means of control. It allows scholars to pay lip service to open access (“anyone can see my site!”) while continuing the scholarly game of controlling who can do what to the materials collected in the site (“Of course, I will give permission to anyone to make use of my materials, if they ask, and...”).

This brings us to the key question of sustainability, perhaps the single most urgent issue facing us these three days of this meeting. Bagnall (in one of the few weaknesses I find in this paper) does not link the issues of control, sustainability and interfaces: but they are intimately related. It is absolutely true, as Bagnall comments, that “Control is the enemy of sustainability.” In the case of the transcripts we have made for the Canterbury Tales , we are acutely aware that if anyone in future has to go through the same process of negotiation that we have had to endure, for ten years now and counting, they simply will not bother. It would be quicker and more certain just to start again. If we had known, years ago, that we—we being many of us, all round the world—might not be able to publish our work on these transcripts, we would assuredly not have bothered. In turn, those original transcripts would have disappeared, quickly or slowly, as scholars turned away from them, either to work in areas unclouded by issues of control or to new materials genuinely free to all. Again, open to all means open to all.