Have just read Stephen Nichol’s Ariadne article, ‘Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship.‘ Right now I am particularly interested in how we balance the achievement of ’system-wide’ objectives (i.e. via national/international services) with the need to cater to local and highly specialised goals, especially those concerning research and teaching. Nichols article starts from a different place than I have been of late — how do digital scholarship projects become scalable to other contexts? (From Copac and Archives Hub perspective, I’ve been working from the opposite direction — how to largescale systems support local/niche activities and communities of practice?) Some of the key points he makes that I find useful (though worth pondering some more):
Digital humanities scholarship needs to more adequately consider issue of scale before embarking. How can the value of the project scale to other areas (for instance, a medieval research project scale to museum sector?) (He also discusses how the tackling of large-scale datasets itself transforms what is meant by ’scholarship’) Critical to this scalability is the requirement to build interoperable, or what he refers to as ”ecunemical,” systems:
This step alone, however, cannot assure a truly collaborative environment. If digital projects have not been able to interact more effectively, it is in large measure because they remain proprietary to a sub-discipline.To encourage other projects and their organisers to see the advantage of collaboration, scholars should look beyond the specificity of their topic to the larger rubric under which both may be subsumed. In short, we need to change our thinking when conceiving scholarly projects.
According to Nichols, all this means taking a ‘use-agnostic’ approach to designing digital scholarship projects. This notion of ‘use-agnosticism’ runs against the grain of everything I’ve been thinking and reading lately — that developments need to be use-case as opposed to ‘tools’ led. Context and task must drive development and functionality. And I think Nichols would agree. Perhaps a better way to think about ‘use-agnosticism’ is less a disregard for use case, but instead a more macro (as opposed to micro) view of use-case. Development must be use-case driven, but how can that use-case be imagined beyond the domain of a particular project (i.e. beyond the work of a Medieval history researcher, and to the domain of the museum curator, visitor, or teacher?)
Next month I’ll be chairing the session ‘Looking Into The Future - What is the impact of user generated content on research and scholarship?’ at the JISC Digital Content Conference. I think this issue of scale and the challenge of the ’silo’ oriented approach will be key points for discussion.
