0.32 Scholarly information management: a proposal

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This paper will present some ideas about scholarly information management and outline the conceptual model of a digital research infrastructure for the humanities. An infrastructure is usually defined as a well-coordinated system of buildings, equipment, services, procedures, etc., that facilitates a certain activity. It includes physical and organizational structures and it refers above all to public works such as highways, bridges, airports, etc. It can be conceived as an underlying support as well as something that establishes a horizontal network of connections between different elements. In Italian the prefix infra expresses this duality very well because it contains both the sense of “under,” coming from Latin, and the sense of “between,” as used in the time of Dante. So what is the traditional infrastructure for the humanities and how it is made? In the traditional non-digital world a scholar consults primary sources in archives or libraries; in the libraries he also reads secondary sources like journals, monographs, and different published editions, which he can also find in bookstores; in the University he transmits this knowledge to students; while conferences give him the chance to share knowledge with colleagues; publishers sell his works on the book market in accordance with copyright law: all of these material and organisational elements—archives, libraries, bookstores, universities, courses, conferences, publishing houses, intellectual property law and others—constitute the traditional infrastructure for research in the humanities, and it has been developing over the course of two thousand years.

Our question is: is it possible to transpose scholarship into an electronic environment? That is, to reproduce the traditional infrastructure of the humanities in a digital medium? Can we switch to virtual to solve some of the problems with the traditional infrastructure without losing any of its virtues? By switching to virtual I mean not only accessing sources, as we scholars usually do in archives and libraries, but also publishing new work in ways that will stand the test of time and win prestige (as we’re always trying to do when we submit a manuscript to a publisher), and educating younger generations, as is the mission of our universities. In 2000, I posed this question in my book HyperNietzsche , HyperNietzsche. Modèle d’un hypertexte savant sur Internet pour la recherche en sciences humaines. Questions philosophiques, problèmes juridiques, outils informatiques , edited by Paolo D’Iorio, Paris, PUF, 2000, 200 p. (free digital version available at the address: (External Link) ). and my conclusion was “yes,” so I immediately began to develop it. Of course I was not the only one: you know better than I do that numerous different models and initiatives are under development in this field, and of course I couldn’t achieve everything that I wanted to; but from this experience I gained some valuable ideas, which seem to form a coherent model and which could be useful for future development.