Resources

By any standard, investment in an American cyberinfrastructure is meager, as is U.S. research funding in general. 1In 2003 the Atkins report recommended annual expenditures of $1 billion to create a cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering; in 2005 funding specifically designated to shared cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF) was about $123 million. On a per capita basis, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom and other European countries have made proportionally much greater investments in developing a broadly accessible cyberinfrastructure than has the United States. The countries of the European Union arguably are far ahead of the United States, especially in the humanities and social sciences areas, given their recent investments in digital cultural heritage. 2

One example of the kind of resource we need to develop here in the United States is the UK Data Archive, a “centre of expertise in data acquisition, preservation, dissemination and promotion and . . . curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK.” The Data Archive is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, and the University of Essex. 3

In the United States, the only similar institution is the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), established in 1962. There is no direct equivalent of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), mentioned in the UK Data Archive description and founded in 1996 as a “UK national service aiding the discovery, creation and preservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities.” 4The AHDS is jointly funded by JISC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), whose closest U.S. equivalent would be a combination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The AHRC has recently committed several years of new funding to the Methods Network to provide a “national forum for the exchange and dissemination of expertise in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for arts and humanities research.” 5

The lack of a similar coordinated effort in the United States is troubling, and even in the national context, support for humanities and social science research is dwarfed by other governmental spending commitments. Health research accounts for more than half of federal spending on basic (nondefense) research: the National Institutes of Health’s budget request in fiscal year 2006 was about $28.5 billion. The National Science Foundation budget, which provides some funding for the social sciences and almost none for the humanities, was $5.6 billion. Of that amount, about 10%, or $509 million, went to the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), which until recently had the primary responsibility for cyberinfrastructure. (The CISE budget also funds NSF’s portfolio of basic research in the computer and information sciences and related areas.) The NSF now has an Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which will guide the agency's investments in cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering, funded at $123 million. Federal funding for humanities-related projects is tiny by comparison. The fiscal-year 2006 budget requests of the most important agencies—the National Endowment for the Humanities ($138 million) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services ($247 million)—combined equal less than the budget for CISE, which is itself only one-tenth of the NSF budget. And the ability of the NEA, NEH, and IMLS to fund cyberinfrastructure directly is diminished because much of the money in these agency budgets goes to states through block grants over which the agencies have little control.

Private foundations are important sources of support in the humanities and the social sciences, but they cannot make up for the low level of federal funding. For example, no single private foundation in the United States—with the exception of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which primarily funds health initiatives—has annual funding that equals the budget of CISE. 6Among the large private foundations, few are focused on humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, philanthropic sources have so far played a disproportionately large role in funding the experimentation in digital projects in the humanities. Foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Trust, the Carnegie Corporation, and the William and Flora Hewlett, David and Lucile Packard, and Alfred P. Sloan foundations have made strategic investments in building resources or seeding projects. There have also been remarkable instances of individual philanthropy from committed individuals, such as Brewster Kahle (the Internet Archive 7), Rick Prelinger (Archive Films 8), and David Rumsey (the David Rumsey Map Collection 9), who not only collect high-value resources for the humanities and social sciences but also make them freely available on the Web. These are the Carnegies of the digital age, building digital libraries just as Andrew Carnegie built physical ones.

New federal funding is urgently needed for cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and also for research and demonstration projects that explore new, sustainable business models for digital humanities and social science. Received wisdom on the limits of the market for ideas has been radically reoriented by the rise of networked communities, and, at this point, scholarly communication may well stand to lose more by failing to experiment than from experiments that fail. Universities need to connect with commercial information-technology innovators in order to understand these new information markets, experiment with business models, and think creatively about the value that is produced by research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences. In fact, corporate supporters and partners have played an important, often foundational, role at campus-based technology and media laboratories such as the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon; the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab; the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California; and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Commercial partners in these ventures may understand better than their academic counterparts how to communicate value to those who will pay for it, and academic institutions may understand better than their commercial counterparts how to ensure that value is not only circulated in the present but handed down in the future. There is a public interest even in privately held cultural materials, so it is inevitable that some difficult issues will arise where public and private meet; yet the creation of a robust cyberinfrastructure will require vigorous collaboration across this boundary. 10If such bridges can be built and crossed, the resulting traffic will be good for education, good for business, and good for civic life.