The "necessary characteristics" of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and interpretive social sciences are
1. It will be accessible as a public good.
2. It will be sustainable.
3. It will provide interoperability.
and most important for us:
4. It will facilitate collaboration.
and finally and most interesting for us:
5. It will support experimentation.
Although cyberinfrastructure itself should be stable and reliable, it will need to support ongoing experimentation, and it will need to evolve. Researchers in the social sciences and humanities will need to experiment, and that experimentation will be crucial to bringing change to those disciplines. Institutions must encourage risk-taking by creating frameworks through which junior scholars and students are rewarded for ambitious research programs. Offering this encouragement means providing laboratories, postdoctoral grants, and other support that allows these research programs to be worked out and critically assessed. Institutions also need to allow their libraries and university presses to experiment and take chances in order to find more successful models of scholarly communication. It is important to foster a culture of experimentation by underwriting explicit mechanisms and traditions for capturing and sharing the lessons learned through innovation. True experimentation always carries with it the possibility of failure, as the necessary price for success, yet informative failures are essential to moving forward into the unknown, and they should be reported without prejudice and duly valued on that account. (p. 29)
key words: messy, idiosyncratic, ambiguity, complexity
"The humanities and the social sciences are critical players in the development of cyberinfrastructure because they deal with the intractability, the rich ambiguity, and the magnificent complexity that is the human experience...Humanities scholars and social scientists will require similar facilities [to those called for in the 2003 NSF report] but, obviously, not exactly the same ones: “grids of computational centers” are needed in the humanities and social sciences, but they will have to be staffed with different kinds of subject-area experts; comprehensive and well-curated libraries of digital objects will certainly be needed, but the objects themselves will be different from those used in the sciences; software toolkits for projects involving data-mining and data-visualization could be shared across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, but only up to the point where the nature of the data begins to shape the nature of the tools. Science and engineering have made great strides in using information technology to understand and shape the world around us. This report is focused on how these same technologies could help advance the study and interpretation of the vastly more messy and idiosyncratic realm of human experience." (p.8)
ACLS likens its conceptualization of "cyberinfrastructure" to that of the 2003 NSF report on cyberinfrastructure: "the term cyberinfrastructure is meant to denote the layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry but developed for specific scholarly purposes: cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline. So, for example, digital history collections and the collaborative environments in which to explore and analyze them from multiple disciplinary perspectives might be considered cyberinfrastructure, whereas fiber-optic cables and storage area networks or basic communication protocols would fall below the line for cyberinfrastructure." (p. 1, emphasis added)
In advocating for cyberinfrastructure, the ACLS called for digital technologies that go beyond presentation and visualization of extant materials, collections, or scholarship, which tends to reinforce the individual-centric model of DH. Instead part of its call was for what we would call a research environment or experimental system, that encourages interaction and "feverish archives": "A cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social sciences must encourage interactions between the expert and the amateur, the creative artist and the scholar, the teacher and the student. It is not just the collection of data—digital or otherwise—that matters: at least as important is the activity that goes on around it, contributes to it, and eventually integrates with it." (p. 11)