The Charleston Multimedia Project: A DH Public Library Case Study

In a three-part series for dh+lib on Digital Humanities in the Research Commons, Donald Beagle, Director of Library Services at Belmont Abbey College, reflects on influences to his 1999 writings on Strategic Alignment in the information commons, uncovering precedents to his theories, tracing subsequent development, and suggesting future prospects. In this first part, Beagle introduces the series and considers his experience producing the Charleston Multimedia Project, an early DH project.

Precedent 1. The Charleston Multimedia Project: A DH Public Library Case Study

On May 16, 1996, Steve Cisler of Apple Computer stood before the National Community Networking Conference in Taos, NM, and introduced a project that he predicted could point toward a new role for public and academic libraries to “…nurture, facilitate, incubate, and produce digital projects in the humanities.” The project, The Charleston Multimedia Project (CMP), came into existence by way of Cisler’s visionary Apple Library of Tomorrow (ALOT) grant program. As the creator and coordinator of that project, I was the unknown speaker being introduced to the audience. Cisler’s interest in supporting CMP in 1995-96 was sparked by his awareness of humanities computing projects during that period. The CMP was envisioned as an early demonstration project that would provide an online forum for both popular and scholarly explorations of the city’s history and culture.

Surprisingly, the summary page of that 1996 conference panel can still be found on the web, although the presentations (and Cisler’s introduction to my talk) are no longer posted.

The CMP initiative itself, funded by one of the very last grants awarded in the ALOT program, was already considered a success. It had been profiled in the “Libraries of the Future” column in Computers in Libraries and prominently featured on the initial “Important Links” page then hosted by the Society of Architectural Historians. It had even been featured in the book, Great American Websites, published by McGraw-Hill.[1. Renehan, Edward. Great American Websites: An Online Discovery of a Hidden America. Berkeley: Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1997. Print.] My article about the project, “The Virtual City,” had just appeared as the lead article in a special issue of the journal Microcomputers for Information Management (April 1996).

I want to briefly mention three central features of CMP.

  • Collaborative. First, it entailed collaboration between the Charleston County Public Library (the project host) and organizations like the Preservation Society, Historic Charleston Foundation, the Charleston Museum, and especially what was then called the Office of Applied Technology at the College of Charleston, which digitized a number of key source texts and provided several student interns.
  • Extensible. Second, the virtual framework of CMP, consisted of four interlinked elements (Guidebook, Topics, Timeline, and Tours) and was designed to be extensible, modular, and recursive. That is, our vision was that CMP could grow over time to incorporate any number of subsequent digital scholarship initiatives related to the cultural history of the city and the social and ecological contexts of its built and natural environments. This framework also permitted individual modules to be extended independently to face popular and academic audiences.
  • Anticipatory. Third, it was anticipated that future IT innovations would bring new possibilities for DH components featuring more advanced media, including video, 3D renderings, and virtual reality “walk-through” capability (as mentioned in “The Virtual City”). This was a key reason why the word “multimedia” was featured so prominently in the CMP title itself (The CMP title, proposed in 1995, was directly influenced by a 1994 HyperCard-based DH initiative at CalPoly titled “The Blake Multimedia Project”).[2. Note: Over the years, any number of DH projects have incorporated multimedia features similar to what was envisioned for future DH extensions of CMP. A good example is the “Oxford Friars” project created in 2010 by graduate students of Caroline Bruzelius at Duke University (Jim Knowles and Michael Koszycki). Note how this video superpositions a vertical timeline component over landscape layouts and 3D renderings (developed in SketchUp Pro) of Oxford’s early growth.]

Fifteen years later, the core structural components of CMP remain online, accessible within the larger website of the Charleston County Public Library (CCPL). The Guidebook remains the CMP module that faces a popular audience, as it holds the digitized street-by-street descriptions of major neighborhoods in the Historic District, with photographs from each neighborhood (The CMP grant included Apple’s first digital camera, the QuickTake, used by myself and student interns over two semesters to generate jpegs of the most significant structures in each neighborhood to accompany the online Guidebook text). It remains the source text still used by the City Tourism Office in licensing local guides.

In one sense, the CMP must be considered a long-term success, as it is online and well-utilized nearly two decades after the initial ALOT proposal was written, although some internal navigation links and a few CMP content pages disappeared when the CCPL’s website migrated to a new system server in 2001.[3. An example of a surviving CMP module that features scholarly content related to architectural history can be found under the subsection “Topics: Architecture & Preservation.] In fact, the rise of mobile devices has given it a whole new utility, as tourists can now call up Guidebook pages to review on tablets and smart phones as they walk among the historic neighborhoods. But the scope of its original vision as a framework for potential future digital humanities extensions has never been fulfilled. The CMP content remains for now essentially static; much as it was left when I departed CCPL to become Associate Library Director / Head of the Information Commons at UNC-Charlotte in 1997. This unrealized potential relates to a number of factors, such as the closure of the Office of Applied Technology by the College of Charleston (also in the late 1990s).

For example, years after the CMP went online, Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston initiated what has since become known as the Lowcountry Digital Library (LDL). Yet, while the public library has contributed content to be scanned into LDL, there is no indication of online linkages between the two web-based resources. Why? One reason seems to have been the understandable perception of an academic library as the naturally autonomous host and sponsor of scholarly digital library initiatives, based on mutually-assumed organizational boundaries and community roles. LDL remains essentially (at least for now) an archival digitization project focusing on preservation and utilizing current online tools within a relatively narrow functional scope, while CMP remains essentially a cultural heritage demonstration exhibit focusing on access, dating back to the earliest period of web development but still exhibiting a structure that offers potential for expansion and extension. In fact, the structural schema of CMP, while disadvantaged by the crude development tools available in the mid-1990s (I scripted its original HTML in Apple’s “Notepad” utility!) shares features in common with some current leading edge academic DH initiatives. For example, compare CMP’s structural sections (Guidebook, Topics, Timeline, and Tours) to the structural sections of “The Dorr Rebellion” (Gallery, Constitutions, Letters, and Lesson Plans), a newly-created DH project posted by the Digital Publishing Services of Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College.

The continued success of CMP as a component of a public library’s online presence relates almost entirely to the popular front-end of its content: an online guidebook to the city’s historic district. Note how this aligns with the prevalent perception of a public library’s role in its community. This seems consistent with other digital cultural heritage exhibits successfully mounted by public libraries, such as the “The Great Cyclone of 1896” online exhibit recently posted by St. Louis Public Library. By contrast, the Lowcountry Digital Library’s success in mounting digitized archival content for historical research aligns well with the prevalent perception of an academic library’s autonomous and differentiated role in its own community of users.

[pullquote]library role / project scope alignments are not coincidental[/pullquote]

I will offer a more detailed description of the differences between an Information Commons and a Research Commons in my forthcoming “Prospects” post, but I want to start this discussion of DH in the Research Commons by suggesting here that library role / project scope alignments are not coincidental. In fact, they go to one justification for applying Strategic Alignment as a model for DH incubation in academic libraries.

Managing the Information Commons

The prevailing limitations of the public library as a host and incubator of DH projects going forward became a major motivation in my own move to UNCC in 1997, where I developed a management framework for what became called the Information Commons (IC). It is important to note that I was not initially contracted by UNCC to consult on IC space reallocation. The IC space layout had already been finalized by the project architect (including the now somewhat-infamous cluster of five service desks in that IC’s original layout). I was contracted, and then formally hired, to propose a new service delivery framework and organizational model.[4. For supporting detail, see the August 1997 letter from Associate Vice Chancellor Ray Frankle. Note Frankle’s repeated emphasis on “services,” and lack of any references to space planning or layout (this was in spite of my work as Head of Main Library on CCPL’s executive team in the mid-90’s that had planned the highly successful space layout for Charleston’s new $15 million Main Library). At any rate, it was on the strength of my consulting report (reproduced in part with Frankle’s letter, with some redactions) that I was then hired by UNCC the following month as Associate Director of Library Services / Head of the Information Commons.] My choice of Strategic Alignment for UNCC’s IC was based on three problems faced by academic libraries in the late 1990s as the online revolution accelerated.

a. As was already clear to me by 1997, the prevailing organizational model of a traditional reference department hosting a generic computer lab was broken beyond repair. The model’s endemic problems had been specifically predicted by Molholt (1985) and later substantiated through the focus group study by Young and Von Seggern (published in 2001).[5. Molholt, Pat. On Converging paths: the Computing Center and the Library.” Journal of Academic Librarianship. Vol. 11, No. 5. (1985): 284-288. Young, Nancy J. and Marilyn Von Seggern. “General Information Seeking in Changing Times: A Focus Group Study.” Reference & User Services Quarterly. Vol. 41, No.2 (Winter 2001): 159-169.] The Young/Von Seggern study was very limited in sample size, but its findings closely echoed our 1997 internal studies of UNCC students and anecdotal accounts from numerous other libraries. Further confirmation came later via the Shill-Tonner study (ca. 1999-2004), which found that generic “computer labs” per se showed only a very weak correlation with increased student library use, despite the exponential rise in student use of technology overall. As I moved to UNCC, I was deeply skeptical that such endemic problems could be fixed merely by applying band-aids to existing reference department / computer lab organizational models, because, as Molholt had discussed, the operational norms of traditional reference service and generic computer labs were not yet aligned with student needs for a tightly-coupled linkage between knowledge retrieval from library databases and coursework completion using productivity software (such as MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite).[8. Note: By 2013, of course, a large and growing stack of IC / LC assessments now demonstrate strikingly strong correlations between IC / LC facilities and increased library use, in stark contrast to what Shill and Tonner found with those earlier generic library computer labs. These remarkably consistent IC / LC usage results are a clear repudiation of those few remaining skeptics who continue to insist that IC’s and LC’s are “merely computer labs in libraries.”]

[pullquote]the likely future trajectory of the online revolution would become a disruptive dynamic that would force ongoing reformulations of how libraries could best support print / digital hybrid scholarship, emerging pedagogies, and knowledge creation[/pullquote]

b. Initial models of the Information Commons, including examples from University of Southern California (1994) and the writings of Philip Tompkins, offered potential solutions to some of the computer lab problems described above. But looking toward the future, even these carried an inherent shortcoming. This IC model had emerged with a very specific focus on the needs of undergraduate students. USC’s IC was specifically articulated as a core feature of its new Leavey Undergraduate Library, and Tompkins’s writings drew on that USC experience and also his work at Estrelle Community College.

While UNCC’s first-floor IC initiative was also aimed initially at undergraduates, built around the focal point of a “continuum of services and resources,” or one-stop shopping, the larger vision I developed at Associate Vice Chancellor Ray Frankle’s request was to later extend enhanced versions of the model (described by us as a “Learning Commons” and “Research Commons”) for graduate students and faculty up to the library’s second floor. The Learning Commons was envisioned as an incubator for faculty / librarian collaboration on constructivist pedagogies (integrative learning, project-based learning, etc.), while the Research Commons would be oriented toward graduate student research and faculty knowledge creation needs, including the digital humanities and new multimedia. This schema grew from my view that the likely future trajectory of the online revolution would become a disruptive dynamic that would force ongoing reformulations of how libraries could best support print / digital hybrid scholarship, emerging pedagogies, and knowledge creation. My work in 1995 developing a public library space where college students, faculty, and collaborating scholars could co-develop the CMP had already given me a concrete sense of how such a Research Commons might someday “look and feel.” Therefore, I sought a robust IT management framework (Strategic Alignment) with sufficient scope and flexibility to generate models beyond the USC / Tompkins undergraduate IC framework, models that might someday be labeled Learning Commons (LC) and Research Commons (RC).

c. Academic libraries themselves continued to function within college and university governance structures which, as loosely-coupled systems, perpetuated traditions of academic tenure and promotion which were too often proving resistant, sometimes inhospitable, and on occasion even hostile to digital scholarship initiatives. Such discouraging accounts of institutional inertia persuaded me that early-adopter faculty were likely to continue looking beyond campus for corporate and foundation co-sponsorships for future DH initiatives—just as I had turned to Apple for CMP in lieu of any hope of funding support from local government.

[pullquote]Strategic Alignment has always seemed to me to be an excellent choice because it puts the library in a position to continually realign itself with ongoing innovation while repositioning its contribution to its host institution’s mission and objectives[/pullquote]

If the hypothetical library Research Commons were to function as an effective host and incubator of DH projects, I felt it would be strengthened by a strategic planning and management model drawn from beyond the academic norms of 1997-99. Strategic Alignment has always seemed to me to be an excellent choice because it puts the library in a position to continually realign itself with ongoing innovation while repositioning its contribution to its host institution’s mission and objectives. Plus, in nurturing potential corporate and private foundation support, a planning model drawn from corporate IT governance could bring inherent advantages. Therefore, I felt Strategic Alignment was a model that could both help libraries more effectively start serving the one-stop technology needs of undergraduate students in 1997-99, while also bringing the potential to dynamically evolve to serve the future needs of faculty engaged in both pedagogical innovation and in digital humanities research and development.

Beyond Strategic Alignment: Matrix Management

While Strategic Alignment has in fact proven to be an effective (though certainly not exclusive) approach to the initial wave of IC development, by 1999 I also began to realize that it was not sufficient in itself to meet those future developmental needs. I first articulated the need to add a framework for developmental change in my white paper for the University of Southern California’s Information Commons Conference in 2004 (“From Information Commons to Learning Commons”). This paper added a matrix “change management” perspective to the proposed developmental process, from adjustment to isolated change (change that remained internal and library-centric) to far-reaching change and transformation, (involving collaborations both across campus and beyond), thus projecting IC development beyond my own UNCC first-floor example to something that could encompass the sorts of collaborations earlier seen in CMP. (That 2004 white paper referenced the Learning Commons but not the Research Commons, because the theme of that USC conference was shaped by the keynote speech of Joan Lippincott, whose important work with Diane Oblinger on “Educating the Net Generation” fit the pedagogical focus of the LC model, rather than the digital humanities / knowledge creation focus of the RC model. But a developmental schema projected across the entire IC-LC-RC spectrum was central to my inclusion of matrix management in concert with strategic alignment.)

 

Figure 1: Typology of Change as a basis for matrix management
Figure 1: Typology of Change as a basis for matrix management
Source:  Image Courtesy of ImageQuest. Used with permission. Terminology adapted from Eckel, P., Green, M., Hill, B., & Mallon, W. (1999). On Change III: Taking charge of change: A Primer for colleges and universities. Washington D.C.: American Council on Education. 
Note that this figure, used here with permission, is not included in the CC BY-NC 3.0 licensing terms that apply to the text of the post.

A full discussion of matrix management is beyond my scope here; I’ll simply add these brief pertinent Wikipedia quotes about the general concept that apply to the lessons from CMP: “…to increase cooperation and communication across the traditional silos and unlock resources and talent that are currently inaccessible to the rest of the organization….To develop broader people capabilities – a matrix helps develop individuals with broader perspectives and skills who can deliver value across the business and manage in a more complex and interconnected environment.” This matrix approach to IC-LC development from my 2004 white paper was also well-received, and has been frequently cited in the years since.

Based on my conversations with early hypertext theorists Joyce and Bolter (see, for example, the 1991 letter from Bolter archived in my Skydrive file. The “Michael” referenced in Bolter’s letter was, of course, Michael Joyce), I also felt that yet another conceptual feature was needed: the idea of aligning service delivery, knowledge resources, and technologies across carefully-defined physical, virtual, and cultural domains. This was reflected in the “Three-Domain Diagram,” first proposed in my presentation prepared for Deutscher Bibliotekartag / Düsseldorf in 2005, and enhanced in my keynote for ACRL’s New England Chapter Conference in 2006.[7. Note: Neither the DB/D nor the ACRL presentations remain online, but both were similar to my “Visions Going Forward” presentation prepared for TRLN’s “Information Commons Symposium” in February 2005, which also featured the first version of the Three-Domain Diagram. By 2006, I had further refined and republished this diagram in The Information Commons Handbook, with helpful input from Paul Hagner, then Vice-President of EDUCAUSE. In this version, which Hagner began using in his own presentations even before the Handbook was published, the three domains carry their now-current headings of “physical / virtual / cultural,” as shown in Figure 2.]

Three-Domain diagram
Figure 2: Three-Domain Diagram
Source: Beagle, Donald. The Information Commons Handbook. ALA/Neal-Schuman, 2006. p. 4. Used with permission.
Note that this figure, used here with permission, is not included in the CC BY-NC 3.0 licensing terms that apply to the text of the post.

[pullquote]matrix management and cross-domain alignment can still help libraries serve the needs of academic DH developers across this still-evolving landscape[/pullquote]

To help clarify the potential of this enhanced model for the incubation of DH, I need to a) look back even before the CMP initiative to briefly review my involvement in discussions in the late 1980s and early 1990s with early hypertext theorists Michael Joyce and Jay David Bolter; b) discuss how and why online knowledge media have changed the academic and library landscape even beyond what Joyce and Bolter may have originally anticipated; and finally c) explain more clearly how and why I feel matrix management and cross-domain alignment can still help libraries serve the needs of academic DH developers across this still-evolving landscape.

 

Editor’s note. This post is part one in a three-part series. Recommended citation: Donald Beagle, “The Charleston Multimedia Project: A DH Public Library Case Study,” Part I in “Digital Humanities in the Research Commons: Precedents & Prospects,” dh+lib (January 30, 2014). 


Towards a Learning Commons: The Influence of Hypertext Theorists of the 1980s-90s

In part two of a three-part series exploring precedents to and prospects for the development of Research Commons to incubate DH, Donald Beagle considers the influence of hypertext theorists and the distinct paths created by those seeking to redefine or realign libraries in an age of rapidly-changing technologies.

Precedent 2: Towards a Learning Commons: The Influence of Hypertext Theorists of the 1980s-90s

Michael Joyce, novelist and hypertext theorist, is credited with authoring one of the first true hypertext novels, Afternoon: a Story (1987).[1. Coover, Robert. “HYPERFICTION; And Now, Boot up the Reviews.” New York Times Book Review. August 29, 1993. Note: Joyce was one hyperfiction author reviewed by Robert Coover in New York Times Book Review. I recommend Coover’s article not only for its review of Joyce’s work, but also for the context of Coover’s discussion of academic views about hypertext writing circa the early 1990’s.] I had known Michael Joyce since 1975-76, when he had taught at Jackson Community College (JCC) in Michigan around the time I was guest teaching a writing workshop there for a year (1975-76). By the 1980s, after I had left Michigan to work in public libraries in the Carolinas, the introduction of Apple’s early PCs, especially the revolutionary Macintosh, launched each of us independently into explorations of this new technology and its potential impacts on writing, learning, and libraries. Joyce established the Center for Narrative and Technology at JCC, served as a Visiting Fellow at the Yale University Artificial Intelligence Project (1984-85), and teamed with Jay David Bolter to develop the early hypertext writing software package, Storyspace. Meanwhile, I was authoring early articles exploring potential impacts on libraries from both a theoretical perspective (“Libraries and the Implicate Order,” 1988) and a practical perspective (“Online with a Macintosh,” 1989).[2. Beagle, Donald. “Libraries and the Implicate Order: A Contextual Approach to Theory.” Libri: International Library Review.  Vol. 38, No. 1 (1988): 26-44. Beagle, Donald. “Online with a Macintosh.” OCLC Microcomputing. Vol. 6, No. 2 (1989): 13-26.] I also taught an experimental writers workshop through Duke University’s Office of Continuing Education, drawing upon a monologue / dialogue / discourse model proposed in the 1970s by psycholinguist Josephine Harris—a workshop I held not in a classroom, but in Duke’s East Campus Library (the Lily Library), where we experimented with an early Macintosh interface for student creation, revision, and annotation of texts that I had developed in HyperCard.

After sharing my articles with Joyce, he introduced me to Bolter, and invited me to consult on a proposal for an Apple Library of Tomorrow Grant (A LOT) to create a new type of library-based writing/learning space for JCC. This initial ALOT proposal became a very early articulation of what would later come to be generally described throughout the library community as a “Learning Commons.”

“Actual, Virtual, and Conceptual Space”: Theorizing the Learning Commons

[pullquote]”…the library of tomorrow will be an actual, virtual, and conceptual space…”[/pullquote]

The original JCC ALOT proposal (1991) preceded the World Wide Web, and so would have depended upon extending an enhanced version of HyperCard among collaborating libraries by way of a local area / metropolitan area network. In the end, this proposal was not funded by Apple, but it included interesting elements pertinent to my later successful ALOT proposal for CMP, and then to my organizational work on UNCC’s Information Commons. In the JCC Proposal, note that the “Introduction” includes a vision statement: “…the library of tomorrow will be an actual, virtual, and conceptual space…” (p. 1). This “actual, virtual, and conceptual space” description later evolved into a three-domain framework (physical/virtual/cultural), and will be explored in more detail later in this post.[3. Note: Additionally, sections in the JCC proposal on “Virtual Information Space” and “Information Utilities for Patrons” were influenced by the experimental Macintosh-based writing my students at Duke’s Lily Library had undertaken with poetry composition, revision, and annotation.]

The JCC proposal does not mention humanities computing, but those listed as JCC “project collaborators” (p. 4) were well aware of a number of pre-WWW humanities computing projects already under development via HyperCard. The absence of a humanities computing reference in this 1991 proposal was, at least on my part, simply due to the exigency of crafting the most credible possible grant proposal for community college funding, not due to any lack of interest in the potential of humanities computing. Perhaps the most notable pre-WWW humanities computing effort in HyperCard became known as The Blake Multimedia Project, developed by Steve Marx and Doug Smith at the Interactive Learning Institute at CalPoly. (As noted earlier, it was formally begun in 1994, and its title directly influenced my 1995 choice of a title for The Charleston Multimedia Project).[4. Note: In their new book, William Blake and the Digital Humanities, (2013), Whitson and Whittaker now describe this early Blake DH project as “an illustrative example of the failure of a particular ecosystem…. is for the majority of users a dead end that exists now merely as a relic of the new media technologies available in the mid-1990’s.” (p. 44). CalPoly still maintains a sort of memorial tribute page to the Blake Multimedia Project, but regrettably, no attempt has been made to forward-convert its full multimedia content and hypertextual capabilities for modern interactive web access (other than some partial features found in independent ebook editions of several Blake texts). Thus, clear lessons for Research Commons librarians to draw from the BMP example are to a) establish an institutional culture of long-term digital curation, and then, b) strategically align physical and virtual components of their DH initiatives with that culture of digital curation.]

Lastly, before leaving the topic of 1st generation DH on HyperCard altogether, it is worth noting, as Whitson and Whittaker also observe, that Joyce’s fellow-hypertext theorist George Landow still considered HyperCard “…a much better illustration of the potential of hypertext than HTML….” (p. 44). A full discussion of this question goes beyond the scope of my post, but remains pertinent to future semantic web innovations that may yet offer academics a more flexible toolkit and a richer palette of hypermedia apps for future DH projects than are currently available in 2014.[5. Note: Glimpses of that future are already visible in a current leading-edge DH-friendly semantic web authoring tool SCALAR. But one also sees in SCALAR ongoing conceptual and developmental threads that can be traced back to early hypertext software like Joyce and Bolter’s Storyspace. For a brief comparison, compare some screenshots and descriptive overview notes about Storyspace here (from Larsen and Higginson, “An Anatomy of Anchors”), with the rough equivalent overview of SCALAR, here (courtesy of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC)).]

The failure of the 1991 JCC proposal was followed by events that sent project collaborators and colleagues off in a number of independent but interestingly associated directions. Jay David Bolter completed his move from UNC-Chapel Hill to Georgia Tech, where he still holds the Wesley Chair of New Media. Michael Joyce moved to Vassar, where he collaborated with college librarians to establish what was then called the Media Cloisters. The Media Cloisters project opened in October 2000, and thus followed closely on the heels of my work establishing UNCC’s Information Commons, which had opened in September 1999. Following is the period description of the project that appeared in the Winter 2001 issue of Vassar: The Alumnae Quarterly:

The Media Cloisters is a sophisticated technology center at the heart of the Vassar College Library designed for collaborative academic work using high-tech tools. …It is where students, faculty, librarians, and information technology specialists meet to explore emerging pedagogies made possible by the latest technologies….. ‘In monastic tradition the cloisters were a place where one would come out of one’s cell and converse,’ says Michael Joyce, assistant professor of English and faculty director of the Media Cloisters. The name, coined by Joyce, is intended to imply a high-tech version of such a meeting place. The Cloisters will, he explains, ‘serve as the ‘public sphere’ for networked interaction.’ … its purpose is not to provide yet another place for students and faculty to sit for hours as they word-process papers or design elegant presentations. It is instead where they might go with a project in-progress, demonstrate it on Cloisters hardware in the company of librarians, faculty, or other colleagues who can offer advice–technological, pedagogical, or research–then take their projects back to their home computers for additional work.

[pullquote]”‘I’m not interested in these kids learning a particular technology like making a Web page,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in them learning how we create a culture together.'”[/pullquote]

And the New York Times, in a December 2000 article titled “Liberal Arts Colleges Add Technology to the Curriculum,” added this quote: “Professor Joyce, a pioneer of the hypertext novel, said he envisioned the Media Cloisters as a gathering place for faculty members and students that would foster the kind of intellectual exchanges that took place in stone monasteries in earlier centuries. ‘I’m not interested in these kids learning a particular technology like making a Web page,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in them learning how we create a culture together.'”[6. Note: For further insight into Joyce’s views on the collaborative creation of a new culture of learning in libraries, I recommend his book Othermindedness: The Emergence of Networked Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2000), and especially chapter 4, “The Lingering Errantness of Place, or Library as Library.”]

Define v. Align: Positioning for Institutional Change

Joyce’s quote, “learning how we create a culture together,” accurately and elegantly began to articulate, I believe, what faculty, librarians, and students should ultimately be doing with our new library learning and knowledge-creation spaces (whatever we choose to call them). It also meaningfully connects those early discussions about hypertext theory to our contemporary musings on digital humanities. This returns me to an important point about this larger notion of aligning spaces, services, resources across physical, virtual, and cultural domains.

Joyce’s quote hints at a critical distinction between what I believe he and fellow hypertext theorists were attempting with their early efforts (in building Storyspace software, in authoring innovative novels like Afternoon, in writing analytical books like Bolter’s Writing Space, and in establishing the Media Cloisters), and what I was working to help instigate in libraries with the Information Commons, Learning Commons, and Research Commons. Perhaps this distinction might be best described as the difference between their ambitious endeavors to define or redefine a changing cultural domain, and my somewhat-more-prosaic efforts to align or realign an institution to a changing cultural domain.

[pullquote]our digital / virtual future will always feature numerous interacting elements of genuine novelty, and thus will always defy a priori attempts at pre-definition[/pullquote]

My more-modest framework for institutional change was based not only on practicality, but also on a theoretical view dating back to my very first article, “Libraries and the Implicate Order.” In that article, I attempt to make the case that the emerging universe of digital knowledge and virtual expression can never contain enough information to accurately predict its own future potential state(s). In other words, our digital / virtual future will always feature numerous interacting elements of genuine novelty, and thus will always defy a priori attempts at pre-definition. If correct, that theoretical view means we must re-envision libraries as organizations that are sufficiently agile and malleable to be actively seeking out and continually incorporating and leveraging this ongoing flow of novelty.

Lisa Shen captured this in her revised version of the Three-Domain Diagram, included in her assessment study of the IC at McGill University (2009). As seen in Figure 3, Shen shows the changing cultural domain actively stretching virtual and physical domains of the library commons away from the matrix base of adjustment and isolated change, and toward the more highly-leveraged benchmarks of far-reaching and transformational change.[7. Shen, Lisa. Cyberthèque—love it or hate it? Students’ perceptions of McGill Libraries’ information commons. (2009).]

shen three domain diagram
Figure 3. Lisa Shen’s “Service Evaluation of an Information Commons”
Source: Shen, Lisa. “Cyberthèque—love it or hate it? Students’ perceptions of McGill Libraries’ information commons.” 2009.
Note that this figure, used here with permission, is not included in the CC BY-NC 3.0 licensing terms that apply to the text of the post.

Even though I believe the Media Cloisters was ahead of the curve in that Joyce’s rhetorical framework potentially embraced both the pedagogical innovation of a Learning Commons and the knowledge creation potential of a Research Commons, it was later replaced by a less ambitiously framed “Digital Media Zone,” while, by contrast, the IC / LC model flourished and has since been successfully replicated (while also being customized and enhanced) on hundreds of campuses across Canada and the U.S., and hundreds more across Europe (Degkwitz 2006, Gläser 2008) and around the Pacific Rim (Nagata 2009, Wong 2009).[8. Degkwitz, Andreas. “Convergence in Germany: the Information, Communication and Media Center (ICMC/IKMZ) of Cottbus University.” Library Hi Tech. Vol. 24, No. 3 (2006): 430-439. Gläser, Christine. “Die Bibliothek als Lernort—Neue Servicekonzepte.” Bibliothek:Forschung und Praxis. Vol. 32, No.2 (2008): 171–182. Nagata, Haruki. “New ‘ba’ (locale) in Academic Libraries: Information Commons and Learning Commons. Annals of Nagoya University: Library Studies. Vol. 7, No. 1 (2009): 3–14. Available at: http://libst.nul.nagoya-u.ac.jp/pdf/annals 0702.pdf. Wong, Gabrielle K. W., “Piloting an Information Commons at HKUST University.” Reference Services Review. Vol. 37, No.2 (2009): 178-189.]

On a practical level, the shift from a relatively narrow focus on hypertext to the broader perspective of DH relates at least in part to a cultural shift (in itself, an example of that relentless flow of novelty discussed just above). Joyce authored Afternoon and Bolter authored Writing Space during a period when the B.A. in English was often still the default or de facto undergraduate major. In the 1960s-1980s, students who had not yet made a firm career choice assumed (or were being assured) that study of writing and literature would serve them well in whatever career or profession they might eventually pursue in graduate or professional school (a viewpoint specifically voiced by my writing students at Duke’s Lily Library in 1987). Personally, as a writer myself, I remain deeply sympathetic to that view. Accurate or not, this supported at the time a steady stream of tuition-paying young recruits to fill literature classrooms and writing labs. But on many campuses today, English is no longer the default major.

But while early hypertext theory did indeed form an important precedent to current work in the digital humanities, the future prospects for DH in the Research Commons simply cannot be constrained by the disciplinary silo of literary theory any more than it can be constrained by reductive definitions of the academic library as only (or even primarily) a legacy institution from the Age of Print. The expanded realignment of the library away from those legacy constraints does not imply utter abandonment of the still-valid elements of print scholarship. But it does form an excellent pivot point to my next section on the future prospects for digital humanities in the Research Commons.

 

Editor’s noteThis post is part two in a three-part series. Recommended citation: Donald Beagle, “Towards a Learning Commons: The Influence of Hypertext Theorists of the 1980s-90s,” Part II in “Digital Humanities in the Research Commons: Precedents & Prospects,” dh+lib (January 30, 2014).


The Research Commons in 2014 and Beyond

In the final post of a three-part series, Donald Beagle explores future prospects for the use of an enhanced variant of the Commons models to facilitate DH in libraries. The previous two posts recounted influences on Beagle’s application of Strategic Alignment to manage Information Commons in libraries and the subsequent development of change management approaches.

Prospects: The Research Commons in 2014 and Beyond

Something quite similar to the phased three-level development of Information Commons-Learning Commons-Research Commons I had envisioned for the University of North Carolina-Charlotte in 1997-99, can be seen at Indiana University-Bloomington, where an Information Commons was initially announced in 2002.

In March 2005, IU responded to the IC’s “overwhelming popularity” by creating a second “IC2,” “…as part of a plan for the renovation of the library to address needs of today’s academic community. Planning is well underway for a faculty-centered Research Commons, designed to become a destination for research support of the Bloomington campus” (emphasis added). And by April 2012, Indiana University had posted “A Report to the Board of Trustees on Academic Quality: New Directions in Teaching and Learning,” which stated: “Indiana University Bloomington will make significant progress in creating a Learning Commons … that can support the move to online testing and the gathering of intelligence about student performance.” In summary, IU’s phased tri-level approach has been solidly based on the demonstrated success of each preceding implementation of the Commons model, allowing management and staff to assess impacts and successively build upon previous configurations. Given the model’s record of demonstrated success on campuses such as IU-Bloomington, this seems an opportune time to revisit my original vision for UNCC, but updated in the context of Lisa Shen’s version of the Three-Domain Diagram (described in Part II of this series).

enhanced shen diagram
Figure 4: The Commons as phased enhancements of a model across three domains
Source: Author’s enhanced version of Lisa Shen’s “Service Evaluation of an Information Commons,” in “Cyberthèque– love it or hate it? Students’ perceptions of McGill Libraries’ information commons,” 2009.
Note that this figure, used here with permission, is excluded from CC BY-NC 3.0 licensing terms.

[pullquote]By my underlying theoretical view, culture-at-large domain is itself subject to the greatest continuing influx of unpredictable novelty; accordingly, the Research Commons will likely always remain a more rapidly-moving target[/pullquote]

Each successive iterative variation of the Commons model plays itself out across physical, virtual, and cultural domains, forming a sort of staircase-patterned spectrum. The Information Commons (IC) is most strongly anchored in the physical domain as a “learning space,” but with its continuum of tech-supported services and resources extending its reach across the virtual domain, and with student experience and experimentation with social media and video games crossing just across the boundary of an ever-evolving cultural domain. The Learning Commons (LC), as more of an interacting community among learning-support units including faculty, librarians, academic support staff, and students, is drawn farther across the boundary of institutional and digital culture, but also keeps one foot firmly situated in the library as learning space.

The Research Commons (RC) is the iterative variant least dependent upon the physical domain in terms of users’ (i.e.: faculty) space-specific dependencies, except for the fact that it may come to include pieces of high-end technology (display-walls, 3-D printers, etc.) too expensive to scatter across campus. But through the digital humanities and analytical and curatorial context of Research Data Services (RDS), the Research Commons becomes the Common model’s variant that most assertively stakes a claim across the full extent of the cultural domain, by which I include both a given campus’s institutional culture and our society’s “digital culture-at-large.” By my underlying theoretical view, culture-at-large domain is itself subject to the greatest continuing influx of unpredictable novelty; accordingly, the Research Commons will likely always remain a more rapidly-moving target, calling upon IT and library support to continually innovate new software (or cross-purpose software across disciplinary silos). The library’s ever-evolving data management and digital curation tools will in turn spark corresponding change in the virtual and physical domains. This shift toward an ongoing attempt to align with those changing domains has interesting correlations with the abandonment of classical attempts to define utopian societies, yielding to continuing attempts to instead create narratives that describe the voyage toward utopia across a restless and unpredictable oceanic realm.[1. Note: This correlation has perhaps been best described in the explorations of digital culture by Pramod K. Nayar, in books such as An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures, and Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cybertechnology. As a follow-on to Joyce’s Othermindedness, I recommend especially Nayar’s article “Information Spaces, Digital Culture, and Utopia,” which appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Thought, Vol. 31 (Summer 2010): 113-132. In this article, Nayar cites The Information Commons Handbook as an example where the IC may be viewed as an emergent cultural instantiation of what Nayar calls Infotopia—“something…both material and representational…which engages with and mediates our everyday life, generates cultural anxieties, and often the hope for the new, for the reimagining of the present” (p. 116).]

[pullquote]the spectrum of Commons iterative variants may be the optimal way to address serious problems that DH practitioners and theorists alike have for several years now been highlighting and broadcasting: problems of isolation, scattering, lack of skill-sharing, and a lack of venues for dissemination of expertise[/pullquote]

The central point I wish to make is that something like the spectrum of Commons iterative variants may be the optimal way to address serious problems that DH practitioners and theorists alike have for several years now been highlighting and broadcasting: problems of isolation, scattering, lack of skill-sharing, and a lack of venues for dissemination of expertise.[2. One of the most direct discussions of the isolation / scattering problem in DH was published in the 2011 NITLE paper, “Divided and Conquered: How Multivarious Isolation is Suppressing Digital Humanities Scholarship,” by Rebecca Frost Davis and Quinn Dombrowski. I won’t belabor the numerous interrelated problems of isolation and scattering uncovered by this report, not only between and among campuses, but between and among faculty on individual campuses. Davis and Dombrowski (to their great credit) interviewed librarians and IT staff to better understand the issue from those perspectives, but their findings fall short of offering a solution.] It is my contention that these problems could be mitigated by the RC model—particularly if the model becomes implemented on a substantial number of campuses.

Gradually, faculty on some campuses are indeed undertaking related initiatives. In August 2013, DH project faculty at Stanford confronted the problem of scattering and isolation by starting a webcenter—which, in the parlance I use for this blog, can be viewed as a Research Commons in the virtual domain. As Glen Worthey describes it (posted 8/14/2013) on the new site (emphasis added): “We Stanford Digital Humanists (a.k.a. DHers), scattered as we are across campus, have long talked about uniting under the banner of a collective website. Now we have: here it is, and here we are.”

While I would never discourage digital humanists from following Stanford’s example and forming webcenters on their own initiative to highlight and introduce projects, share expertise and express their needs, it seems to me that these initiatives could be most effectively leveraged by tangible facilities called Research Commons, aligned with faculty needs across physical, virtual, and cultural domains. Such a model which would then permit librarians and IT professionals to collaboratively 1) gather more complete “…information about how many faculty are interested;” 2) identify both the “unmet needs” as well as the “available tools” potentially applicable to meet those needs; and 3) mitigate the problem of faculty isolation by providing physical and virtual showcases (see, for example, my description of a Faculty Showcase as described in The Information Commons Handbook, p. 185).[3. Beagle, Donald. The Information Commons Handbook. ALA/Neal-Schuman, 2006.]

Customizing the Research Commons for Digital Humanities

A sufficient number of campuses have now implemented and assessed IC and/or LC models with great success that consideration of the model’s next logical variation, the Research Commons, is indeed becoming more widespread. Craig Gibson drafted a brief but cogent overview of current activity on this front in a 2012 paper from Ohio State University, “Overview of Research Commons in Academic Libraries: A White Paper.”[4. Note: The OSU white paper draws partly on my 2011 research report for the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (“From Learning Commons to Learning Outcomes”), but then moves well beyond my earlier work to explore Research Commons developments across a broader multidisciplinary spectrum, including the sciences and social sciences.] In the following section, I would like to expand on Gibson’s OSU paper to extrapolate aspects of specific importance to the digital humanities.

The OSU white paper highlights a number of examples, including the UCLA Research Commons (featuring “…Collaborative work areas around display screens; presentation and board rooms; a digital humanities collaboration and demonstration area…”; the Penn State Knowledge Commons (featuring “…Multimedia production centers; consulting spaces; collaborative work areas;  hybrid staff positions between Library and IT;  research assistance; multimedia classroom; group instruction rooms;  group study rooms equipped with mediascapes (technology-enabled collaborative tables); reading rooms and group areas furnished with lounge furniture; public computers.”); and Columbia University’s “…Digital Centers in Humanities, Social Sciences, Sciences, with appropriate expertise, hardware, software, and other resources in each. Digital Humanities Center emphasizes scanning and editing texts and images; digital video editing, and textual and quantitative analysis … All the Centers provide advanced workstations, study spaces, consultation spaces, and in some cases presentation practice rooms.”

To Gibson’s examples, I would add Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, the Scholarly Commons at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia, the University of Kansas’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Gibson states: “In considering possible research commons models, we have to think about a continuum of research support services, from those more closely resembling the “standard” learning commons suite of services (reference/research support, multimedia production, writing center support) to those that add, in an eclectic fashion, more specialized research support services that align with various parts of the Knowledge Creation Cycle…” He then illustrates the key elements of this cycle in the following figure:

 

knowledge cycle
Figure 5: Knowledge-creation cycle
Source: Craig Gibson, “Figure 1” in “Overview of Research Commons in Academic Libraries: A White Paper.” Used with permission.
Note that this figure, used here with permission, is not included in the CC BY-NC 3.0 licensing terms that apply to the text of the post.

I borrow Gibson’s graphic of the knowledge creation cycle to illustrate how he has defined the core activities that a library-based RC might facilitate. But I would then go further to suggest that for the RC to properly address the problem of isolation and scattering identified by the NITLE report, two of the boxes in this cycle need to be “broken open”: the boxes labeled “consult” and “present results.”

[pullquote]a library-based RC would also bring two crucial elements of a library’s institutional culture into the DH arena to a degree that I am frankly not currently seeing in existing faculty-administered DH cooperative ventures … a culture of ongoing digital curation … and a culture of assessment that remains strategically aligned with larger educational and institutional missions and goals[/pullquote]

The Stanford DH webcenter is an example of a possible mechanism to break these boxes open. But I believe a fully implemented library-based Research Commons with an integrated Faculty Showcase component as both a physical and virtual core program activity could move both consultation and results-presentation well beyond what any website alone could accomplish. It could do so by:

  • facilitating the active and ongoing sharing of expertise, skills, and experiences across campus and beyond;
  • encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration;
  • realizing cost-savings for the university by promoting shared and collaborative utilization of high-end expensive physical hardware like display-walls (preventing unnecessary duplication of such hardware among existing scattered disciplinary silos, or so-called “boutiques”); and
  • in coordination with a Learning Commons oriented around the incubation of constructivist pedagogies,realizing cross-pollination between knowledge creation DH projects in the RC and project-based pedagogy in the LC.

Lastly, I would add that a library-based RC would also bring two crucial elements of a library’s institutional culture into the DH arena to a degree that I am frankly not currently seeing in existing faculty-administered DH cooperative ventures: a) a culture of ongoing digital curation (a vital need already proven by the fate of the aforementioned Blake Multimedia Project); and b) a culture of assessment that remains strategically aligned with larger educational and institutional missions and goals. But this vision also faces potential obstacles, of course, including those obvious limitations of space, budget, staff expertise, and the challenge of gaining faculty and administrative support.

The potential for expanding and customizing Gibson’s graphic for DH in the Research Commons can be found on the Development for the Digital Humanities (DevDH) beta site. As described in a recent HASTAC e-list release: “The site is the brainchild of Simon Appleford and Jennifer Guiliano, who collectively have spent more than a decade working in digital humanities project development, management, and grant writing.” The planning and project management schematic developed by Appleford and Guiliano is shown as a table in Figure 6.

 

Appleford Guiliano schematic
Figure 6: Schematic of downloadable lectures for DevDH.org (beta)
Source: Simon Appleford and Jennifer Guiliano, “DevDH.org: Development for the Digital Humanities.” Used with permission.
Note that this figure, used here with permission, is not included in the CC BY-NC 3.0 licensing terms that apply to the text of the post.

 

Of the twelve components in Figure 6, at least half can be found in the resource and service descriptions of the various Research Commons facilities listed earlier. In fact, half were discussed to varying degrees in The Information Commons Handbook (2006), sometimes under slightly different terms. For example, what Appleton and Guiliano describe as “Discovering the Digital Humanities: What are existing digital humanities projects, tools, and resources?” I described as part of a programming function called “Scanning the Horizon.” Further activities described under DevDH.org headings such as “Project Teams and Partners,” “Managing Your Project,” “Thinking About Data,” “Building Effective Budgets,” and “Evaluation,” all have substantive relationships to what library research specialists and Commons managers have long been exploring and mastering. To help clarify this and place my point in context, in Figure 7 below I have deconstructed the table compiled by Appleton and Guiliano and arranged its components around the cycle of knowledge creation:

 

Appleford Guiliano as KC cycle
Figure 7: Appleford & Guiliano’s DH schematic in context of Gibson’s knowledge creation cycle
Source: Author, based on schematics by Gibson (Craig Gibson, “Figure 1” in “Overview of Research Commons in Academic Libraries: A White Paper”) and by Appleford & Guiliano (Simon Appleford and Jennifer Guiliano, “DevDH.org: Development for the Digital Humanities”).
Note that this figure, used here with permission, is not included in the CC BY-NC 3.0 licensing terms that apply to the text of the post.

How many equivalent DH opportunities for creative re-application of software tools, multimedia, and supporting technologies across disciplinary boundaries and knowledge silos are currently being overlooked or under-utilized? One can only guess. But I would submit that a potential organizational model to accomplish these goals is already beyond the stage of guesswork—it is a Research Commons model that represents a logical enhancement and extension of the hundreds of Information Commons and Learning Commons facilities already installed, functioning, and successfully assessed on campuses across the U.S. and around the world. This brings my argument full circle, in a sense, as I have tried to describe in these posts how my initial work to develop an Information Commons was deeply influenced by my earlier work in developing a project in the digital humanities.

 

Editor’s noteThis post is part three in a three-part series. Recommended citation: Donald Beagle, “The Research Commons in 2014 and Beyond,” Part III in “Digital Humanities in the Research Commons: Precedents & Prospects,” dh+lib (January 30, 2014).

Addendum

As I have completed writing my draft of this post, a new DH project has appeared that I would suggest exemplifies the potential importance of shared expertise and cross-disciplinary use of applications. On November 7, 2013, Digital Humanities Now featured the project, “Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: A Digital Recreation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon,” as an “Editor’s Choice.”[5. Note: The project introduction states: “This Project uses architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software to give us access experientially to a particular event from the past – the Paul’s Cross sermon John Donne delivered on Tuesday, November 5th, 1622.” The key point to be stressed is that no DH scholar undertook the daunting task of creating the “architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software” necessary to bring John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Day Sermon to life as an immersive learning experience for modern students. Instead, “…These digital tools, customarily used by architects and designers to anticipate the visual and acoustic properties of spaces that are not yet constructed, are here used to recreate the visual and acoustic properties of spaces that have not existed for hundreds of years.” (emphasis added).]