0.16 The conservative culture of scholarship

The conservative culture of scholarship

In response to the Commission’s invitation for public comment on the draft of this report, Dickie Selfe(director of Michigan Technological University’s Center for Computer-Assisted Language Instruction) observed that the“challenge of cyberinfrastructure is primarily a challenge to our own academic cultures. This report is an opportunity to admit tothat challenge and to commit to cultural change.” The university is an ancient institution, so it is not surprising that its culture isconservative, especially in the humanities—one of the oldest faculties of the university. Robert Darnton, a prominent scholar ofFrench history, remarked at the Commission hearings that the structural elements of the academy have not changed, even thoughthe world has. A recent study of the state of online American literary scholarship identified several cultural features amonghumanists that seem to militate against change.

Many have contrasted this pattern to that found among technology-intensive sciences and engineering, in which“large, multidisciplinary teams of researchers” work “in experimental development of large-scale, engineered systems. Theproblems they address cannot be done on a small scale, for it is scale and heterogeneity that makes them both useful andinteresting.”

Most people the Commission interviewed expressed hope that an investment in cyberinfrastructure wouldallow humanists and social scientists to “conduct new types of research in new ways.” To take advantage of the technology, onemust engage directly with it, and one must allow traditions of practice to be flexibly influenced by it. One such tradition in thehumanities is that of the “individual genius.” Nevertheless, many of the examples cited in this report show us that humanists can behighly collaborative and that by working in groups, they can sometimes address research questions of greater scope, scale, andcomplexity than any individual—even a brilliant one—could address in isolation.