Promoting Digital Scholarship: Formulating Research Challenges In the Humanities, Social Sciences and Computation

Advanced research takes place in an evolving, technologically-mediated environment of data, computationally intensive capabilities and functions, and new forms of expression. As part of its ongoing programs in digital scholarship and the cyberinfrastructure to support teaching, learning and research, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) organized a one-day, invitation-only symposium in which we invited a group of some 30 leading scholars to articulate the research challenges that will use the new media to advance the analysis and interpretations of text, images and other sources of interest to the humanities and social sciences and in so doing, pose interesting problems for ongoing computational research. We asked each participant to consider the direction of research in the technology (as opposed to capabilities of commercially available applications) as well as the needs and opportunities in several humanities disciplines through a series of background papers, and to consider the following: What would I do differently if I only had [x], where “x” represents a desired digital tool, function, or resource? What questions would this analysis answer? And why are those questions important? What are the implications of the following -Scale and heterogeneity of source material -Analytical depth (for example, the ability to see or model a resource or analysis in new ways) -Power, either locally or remotely (for example, the ability to mobilize more information more quickly) -Network, viewed as either or both a human or engineered syste