Humanities and High Performance Computing:

The New Age

Mark Lawrence KornbluhCyberinfrastructure Days in

KentuckyFebruary 23, 2010

My Perspective

•Historian, Modern American History

•Humanities and Social Science Technology

MATRIX – A Research Center at the Intersection of Humanities/Social Sciences, Computer Science, and Information Science

Historians Look to the Past to Understand the Present and the Future

•Modern Scholarship Begins with the Printing Press

The Gutenberg Paradigm

•The printed page is:•Reproducible•Immutable•Basis of modern educational systems: Research and teaching are both print-based

Technology and Economics

•The wood pulp industry, the economics of publishing, and the democratization of education in the 20th century

•Vast international inequalities characterized the 20th century print world

Post-1960 Professional Humanities

•Larger range of sources beyond the written word – images, films, maps, oral histories, census data

•An effort to look at greater diversity of peoples and cultures

•Still largely print-based

•Still largely individual scholarly effort

•Broader field, but fundamentally unchanged

The Digital Revolution Represents a Fundamental Paradigm Shift

•Unprecedented access to content – data driven

•Changing nature of content – audio/video, active databases, 3d, complex digital objects, etc.

•Dramatic change in scale, capacity, and speed of communication

•New forms of research and publication

•Visualizations and simulations•Active engagement – mutability of content

Digital Content – Unprecedented Access

•The human record – Primary materials for scholars

•Libraries and Museums: American Memory •Museums: Louvre•Across Museums: The Quilt Index•Special Collections: Valley of the Shadow•Books: Google Book Search and Google News•Social Science Data: ICPSR

•From resource discovery to analysis: Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative and The Quilt Index

•The importance of scale, breadth, and depth

Digital Content – Beyond Text•The human record – images, sound, video, 3d•Example: “The Lost Museum”

•Developing tools to work with images, linear, and multi-dimensional materials•Example: MediaMatrix

•Paradigmatic shift in evidence

Digital Communication, Collaboration, Personalization•Fundamental shifts in scholarly communication•H-Net: International, interdisciplinary, across levels

•First steps toward collaborative scholarship•Zotero and Heurist

•Collaboration: Wikipedia

•Personalization: Maine Memory Network, American Voices

Humanities Research and Teaching in the Digital Age

•Beyond the book and the article

•Hypertext: multiple voices, non-linear publication

•Multimedia: Complex digital objects

•Databases: Non-static publication

•Visualizations

•Simulations•Example: Cultural contact, interaction, and settlement

Enabling the Future of History:How Do We Get From Here to There?•Need for new infrastructure

•Pipes and iron•Digital repositories for long-term preservation and access•New tools for analysis•New environments for collaboration and publication

•New skill sets (peopleware)

•New understanding of the Humanities: Interdisciplinary, collaborative, dependent on cyberinfrastructure, and increasingly computational

Final Thoughts: Opportunities and Challenges•Disruptive technology opens doors to new players

•Resources are important, but so is creativity

•All aspects of the university from bench science to the humanities, from basic research to applied knowledge will be transformed. Indeed, the humanities provide many of the most exciting challenges for IT.

•The university of the future will be IT-infused.

•Only choice that UK has is whether to pursue opportunity or lag behind.