...and that's a wrap

Well, our first week has officially come to a close! Today was a pretty awesome day; the weather was mild (high of 72F/22C but 22mph wind gusts coming off the Atlantic and only like 55% humidity - the lowest it has been all week. We had the morning free to research or convene at will, or some less proactive individuals (like myself) chose to sleep in.

Digital Humanities & Virtual Knowledge

We met at 12h30 and took a short bus ride to the Virtual Knowledge Studio and reunited with Dr. Paul Wouters, Dutch native who recently achieved professorship (a pretty big deal in Holland, not at all like the US) who originally received his degree in biochemistry. The VKS is housed in the same building as the International Institute of Social History(IISH) which focuses social movements throughout history.

VKS is purely interested in the humanities, as defined by Cathy Davidson & David Goldberg:

"The humanities engage three broad sets of questions: those of meaning, value, and significance. Meaning concerns interpretation of data, evidence, and texts. Value ranges over the entire field of cultural, aesthetic, social, and scientific investments. Significance, implicating both the former two, raises questions of representation, in the sense of accounting for (explanation) and of capturing, in the sense both of offering a faithful rendition (description) and of making broad claims (generalization)"

VKS operates by "changing (ICT) practices, telling stories and building tools," according to Dr. Wouters, "Turning philosophical questions into empirical ones."

Three Dimensions of VKS' work

1 Building and Designing (collaborating with Universities and other scholarly bodies)

2 Analysis and Reflection

3 Brokering and Interface

The VKS' characterizes their team (of 12) as follows:

Everyone plays - that is, every member of the team (including management staff) are working on research projects. The entire studio is extremely interdisciplinary, and everyone has a diverse background in several fields (usually not relating specifically to the humanities, like geography, chemistry or economics).

Let's begin by defining some key terms: IT (Information and Technology) or ICT (Information, Communication and Technology) are two of the fastest growing fields and degree programs (in the US). According to Dr. Wouters, these two fields can broadly be defined as "part accessibility, part analysis, part visualization."

Lay Participation: Service or Disservice?

With the rapid development of various ICT fields, tools, techniques and theories, the availability for public scholarship and participation by those not directly involved in the world or academia (lay participation) raises several issues. Which fields can or should be open for public scholarship? Which should remain in the world of academia? After a brief discussion, we decided that while the humanities are fair game for public research, the hard sciences (physics/chemistry/biology) should remain closed, due to their highly technical nature. Now, more importantly, how does public scholarship affect the integrity of the research? Is it more important who discovered it, or the discovery itself? This questions is somewhat unanswerable at this point, but perhaps in the near future we'll be able to determine whether or not public scholarship is a benefit or detriment.

Three Perspectives on ICT

1 Conservative: ICT as a neutral container; separate from the data with which it interacts. That is, ICT are simply media through which data is transferred, stored, analyzed and synthesized.

2 Pragmatic: ICT as a tool; the data is a part of the technology and vice versa.

3 Critical: ICT as a control technology; not only is the information a part of the ICT system, but so are the researchers and their tools.

In any case, we finished our lecture with Dr. Wouters, who introduced his final pet project: Research Dreams, an online forum of sorts for sharing narratives on the future of science, information, communication and technology. I encourage all of you to check it out! (That means now!)

We returned to our dorms (again, via bus) only to find that the construction team across the street accidentally cut power to the entire complex. Yay. First, no hot water for four days, now no power. It's kind of like camping, but the food is better. We finished up the evening with a lovely group dinner, thanks Jessica and Clifford!