Introduction  (Page 3/4)

That parallel universe of scholarly desire underscores a point made repeatedly during the conference: that our work needs to move outside the tight little island populated by digital humanists—tight little disciplinary islands; tight little techie islands; tight little islands of higher education. Out to what John Unsworth calls “constituencies.” If sustainability is a problem for online humanities projects, “constituencies” are a key to its solution: “crowd sourcing” at the back end, user-communities at the front end.

So a chief Outcome of this conference was shaped as its initial Income, the multi-textual intercourse of the various participants, those different constituencies, who came together to talk. Over the years many of us have grown anxious at the scholar’s isolation from our larger world. “Who is my neighbor?” a lawyer once asked Jesus. The inherited scholarly system, paper-based and five-hundred–years mature, has made us lose touch with some of our most important neighbors. There will be no successful business plans, no effective financial sustainability, unless the problem is approached as a systemic one, with all of the stakeholders and educational agents acting together in conscious cooperation.

There are crowds of us who have yet to be sourced. We want to remember that the state of humanities scholarship in 2010 is not the same as it was in 1993. Then and for many years the approach we took at IATH The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at U. of Virginia ( www.iath.virginia.edu ). —we were typical—made sense: to promote specific projects in digital scholarship outside the traditional departmental and institutional structures of the research university. It seems obvious now, as we move from here, that we need to integrate our scholarship into the programmatic heart of the university, and specifically into our courses and with our students, undergrads as well as grads. Humanities scholarship needs those people, and most of all it needs to work with them in the world of their degree programs, and not along the marches of that world. And we need them not simply because we want collaboration. We need them because the future of humanities scholarship, exposing what Michael Keller calls the “big ideas,” often comes from that population of young people. Everything I’ve seen over the past seventeen years has proven that to me.

This conference also demonstrates that “big ideas” often come from established scholars. But as we all know, online scholarship is still practiced by only a tiny fraction of our humanities faculties. The absence of a broad professional involvement has been long-lamented and variously explained: steep learning curve, entrenched habits, lack of available time and resources, wariness at the volatile character of the new technologies. And all of those explanations are pertinent. But equally pertinent is the general failure of scholars who use digital media to give clear explanations of its critical research value. A website, however elaborate it may look, is rarely an act of critical inquiry or scholarly research. What would make it so? Hyperlinks? GIS technology? Hardly. A signal failure of online scholarship has been its reluctance, perhaps its inability, to explain why and how a specific online project constitutes an important research undertaking.