Foreword
The Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Scholarship was convened by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) at the behest of the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The goal of the Commission’s work is to ensure the health and enduring availability of recovery scholarship, work that is bringing to light histories and literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that have been ignored, forgotten, or pushed to the margins by established educational and cultural institutions. Much of this work extensively employs digital technology, and the digital environment for the humanities affects recovery scholarship’s ability to thrive and to reach its growing audiences, now and in the future.
In 2004, ACLS, with backing from the Mellon Foundation, appointed a commission to address the needs of digital scholarship. The commission found that the humanities cyberspace lacked the kind of essential infrastructure that had been built over centuries in analog scholarship. In 2006, the commission issued Our Cultural Commonwealth. The report focused on institutional innovations that would allow digital scholarship to be cumulative, collaborative, and synergistic. NEH Chair Bruce Cole cited this report as the inspiration for the Endowment’s Office of Digital Humanities. The work of this new Commission extends ACLS’s earlier efforts to understand the possibilities and gaps for the digital humanities (DH) of today and tomorrow.
Over the past 25 years, digital scholarship has become widespread within the academy. Cameras, database software, text analysis, geospatial mapping, and other tools that support digital collection building, curation, and interpretation are commonly used in many types of institutions, from the wealthiest to those with scant resources. In some important ways, digital humanities have enjoyed great gains in equity, becoming more accessible to more and a greater variety of people. The impact is difficult to overstate. Community history gains public significance when it circulates beyond word of mouth or the passing down of artifacts in family circles. Digital translation revives the study of texts in understudied languages.
But severe inequities in how knowledge is created and distributed via digital methods persist. In historically understudied fields, key material runs a higher risk of being lost. Even as new sources and perspectives emerge, their rich diversity makes preservation, curation, and circulation difficult. A community college may struggle to keep up with the software updates it needs; an industry standard academic archive may not accommodate projects designed by people outside academia.
The Commission engaged the expertise of a wide range of communities invested in this work—digital project leaders, university leadership, scholarly publishers, public-facing scholars, and many others—in order to move beyond patchwork solutions. The problem at hand is not a straightforward matter of reforming library practices or funding better software. It is closer kin to a public health issue, where successfully enabling marginalized communities to thrive requires drawing on different types of people, resources, and habits of thinking. Equitable and sustainable efforts to preserve and circulate digital knowledge must be supported (1) at the institutional level where most digital projects originate, (2) within a trans-institutional infrastructure, and (3) with the collaborative leadership of diverse voices.
Sustaining healthy digital infrastructure is a global challenge. But the Commission found that opportunities and challenges for this work in the US were specific to the American system of higher education. While the Commission benefitted from the experiences of other countries, its observations and recommendations are largely focused on the United States.
The research team that supported this work has my thanks: Katrina Fenlon and Zoe LeBlanc who, among their many contributions, developed the Resources section, and particularly Carol Mandel, who led the Commission’s support efforts; Carol played the central role in drafting this report. For over two years, they worked closely with my colleague, ACLS vice president James Shulman, and with well over 100 community experts whose voices are reflected in this wide-ranging report.
Humanistic scholarship is always changing, and its place in departments, fields, and curricula is dynamic: It builds on past scholarship even as it maps out new questions. Incubating fledgling fields of scholarly inquiry has long been a way to make the most of the intellectual assets of the humanities; over the last 100 years, ACLS has convened research planning committees that have worked toward this end. Perhaps the most prominent outcome of past committee work was the development of area studies—the study of the history, culture, and societies of different world regions—beginning in the 1920s. Other fields aided by the work of these committees include African American studies, intellectual history, musicology, the history of religions, and linguistics, especially the study of Indigenous languages.
We at ACLS have been and will continue to be devoted to the work of field building. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, we are in the second year of supporting projects in the areas covered by this report; our Digital Justice program led by Senior Program Officer Keyanah Nurse has been intertwined with the Commission’s work. ACLS is committed to building on this work in both programmatic and policy initiatives.
This report draws together the intellectual and administrative threads of field building in the humanities, highlighting the voices and stories that have been historically marginalized and celebrating the possibilities of digital technologies in carrying out reparative rebalancing of the enterprise.
The Commission is an extraordinary, forward-looking group whose varied accomplishments and expertise remind us of the many complex elements of communication, organization, and vision needed to ensure the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. I heartily thank its 21 members for their time and wisdom. This report will help guide how we tell the world’s stories through digital technology, now and in the future. All of us at ACLS stand ready to spread its insights and support its recommendations.
Joy Connolly, President, ACLS