Humanities and Computing at IATH
J.M. Unsworth and W.N. Martin
April 15, 2002


I.	IATH

I'm going to start by giving the basic description of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, in terms of budget and staff, and in terms of its fellowship program, and then I'll give some background on the Institute, describing how this unusual program came into being.  Last, I will sketch the larger university context that surrounds IATH, and on which, in various ways, it depends. Then I think Worthy will talk about some particular projects, and then together we'll field questions.  

Budget and Staff:

IATH costs the University about $400,000 a year, with an equal or greater amount coming in, in any given year, in the form of  grant funding.  We have nine full-time staff, and a number of students working part-time on IATH projects.  One of our full-time positions specializes in the configuration and deployment of XML publishing technologies; one concentrates on imaging and modeling applications; two are programmers with expertise in database design and deployment; one is a development officer; one provides administrative support and fiscal administration; three are faculty-level appointments (Worthy Martin, who serves as our technical director; an SGML and information systems expert from a library background—Daniel Pitti—who serves as our project director; and an associate professor in the English department—me—with research interests in publishing history and scholarly communication).  

The Program and the Fellows: 

The core activity at IATH is to support our fellows in residence.  At any given time, there are two of those, with one new fellow selected each year, for a two-year term, through a competitive application process.  Faculty in any humanities discipline are invited to submit 
proposals for long-term, large-scale research projects that use information technology 
as a research tool and publishing medium.  Fellows are granted half-time teaching 
release for one year (donated by their academic departments), and their departments also provide ten hours a week of student assistance during the academic year.  IATH matches 
those students hours, and picks up the slack in the summer, and also provides a $10K 
project budget, office space and equipment, programming, information systems 
design, and consulting for the life of the project.  We also work in less intensive ways 
with associate fellows (UVa faculty with no teaching release, no office space, more 
modest staff support from IATH), and networked associate fellows (researchers from 
outside UVa); intensive support of these projects is usually contingent on grant 
funding. 

IATH's History:

The early history of IATH is a series of unlikely and difficult decisions that were made by a number of people in different parts of the university, each critical to the Institute's coming into existence.  

Controversial decisions:

As I understand that early history, IATH was the brainchild of two computer science faculty--Bill Wulf (now president of the national academy of engineering) and Alan Batson (now retired, but then head of campus computing).  Bill was the one who responded to an RFP from IBM with the proposal that the University of Virginia should put high-end unix equipment to work in the service of the humanities.  Alan was the one who insisted that the focus should be on research.  Bill's reasoning was that the humanities departments were some of the strongest at the university, and that computing technology was getting powerful enough to tackle some of the fuzzier problems, and fussier requirements, of the humanities.  Alan's reasoning was that in a reasearch university, what people get rewarded for is, first and foremost, research, and if you want to change a faculty culture in a research university, your best shot at doing that is to change the way people do their research.  Both of these must have been controversial positions to take--Bill's altruism, in effect, diverted a million-dollar equipment grant from the college of engineering to the college of arts and sciences, and the school of architecture.  Alan's argument--which he held against all comers on the initial steering committee, until they all gave up and agreed with him--concentrated those resources in the hands of relatively few people, instead of spreading them around, and, even more shockingly, refused even to pay lip service to teaching.  

Risk-Taking:

There were some other key players in the planning of IATH, though.  Kendon Stubbs, associate university librarian, made the decision to devote several thousand square feet of space in the graduate library to the new Institute, displacing the microfilm department.  Dick Sundberg, an associate dean in the college of arts and sciences, agreed that it would be reasonable to ask the departments of faculty fellows to donate their release time (half-time teaching release for one year--equivalent to the best in-house research leave you can get in UVa's College of Arts and Sciences).  Jerome McGann and Ed Ayers, prominent scholars of literature and history, respectively, agreed to be the first research fellows of the Institute, embarking on research projects that would consume nearly a third of their academic careers.  The Provost decided to provide $150,000/year in operating funds, and Alan Batson loaned three people from his staff, full-time.  And last but not least, I left a tenure-track position in the English Department at North Carolina State University, where I was virtually assured of tenure, to take a tenure-track position in a more competitive department, with a half-time administrative appointment as the director of an academic start-up. 

In other words, a lot of people took a lot of chances just to get this off the ground.  And although the initial assumption was that the Institute would be self-funding in three years, when, after two, I presented the Provost with a business plan showing that we could generate enough income to carry about half of our original costs if we doubled the size of the staff and devoted at least half of our time to outside consulting, he made the last in this series of difficult initial decisions--he said 'forget about the consulting, just do research' and he made our temporary budget allocation permanent.  At about that same time, Alan's successor turned over the borrowed staff positions to IATH, for good, and we became a permanent and independent unit, under the vice-provost for research.  This means that IATH is 
outside the College structures at the University--not part of the College of Arts and 
Sciences, not part of any other school or department.  

Lessons:

Looking back over that early history, I can identify several things that were of critical importance:

--first, the emphasis on research.  This has clearly defined our mission, making it possible to say no to projects that don't actually envision using information technology as a research tool of some sort--those that really just need a publishing medium, or those that are really aimed at developing teaching materials, for example.  At the same time, experience has demonstrated that if you produce research materials, you can derive teaching materials from them, though the opposite is not true.

--second, locating IATH in the library.  Historically, the library is the laboratory of the humanities, and it is also a kind of intellectual commons, shared by the whole university.  Beyond that, the library's focus on the organization, retrieval, and long-term preservation of information artifacts has had a tremendous influence on IATH's orientation toward its projects.  

--third, the early participation of highly visible and highly respected scholars.  In one sense, these were people who could afford to take a chance, since they already had tenure and had established their reputations.  By that same token, they had more on the line--and in any case, a third of a career would be a lot for anyone to waste.  


The Wider Context:

I honestly don't think you can understand how the Institute works without knowing just a little about the context it sits in at the University of Virginia.  Most of this context was not there at the outset, but these activities, developing as they have over the period of the Institute's existence, have provided important indirect support to IATH, not least by helping to keep IATH's mission clearly defined, and many of them have provided important direct support to IATH fellows, by helping to prepare materials related to their projects.  They are also important in that they form, with the Institute, a larger labor economy, in which talented individuals, both part-time students and full-time staff, working within small units can advance and develop by circulating among those units, when they've run through the  possibilities for training or advancement within their particular unit.

The Electronic Text Center:  Established in the same year as the Institute and located next door to us, the Etext Center provides walk-in service and training to faculty and students interested in finding, creating, or using electronic text resources.  The Etext Center also builds electronic collections, and its staff spend a fair amount of time creating or enriching elements of these collections, either on their own or in conjunction with faculty.  

The Geospatial and Statistical Information Center: GeoStat provides a wide range of consulting, programming, and collections development services with respect to mapping software, statistical packages, and the visualization of statistical data.  It's also on the third floor of Alderman, right down the hall from IATH and Etext.

Digital Special Collections: This is a unit within Special Collections that focuses on digital imaging of rare materials, the provision of networked finding aids, and mounting the online components of Special Collection's exhibitions.  

The Robertson Digital Media Center: This Center specializes in digital audio and video: like the other library centers, its mission combines collections development, training, and collaboration with faculty and students in teaching and research; it is jointly staffed and funded by the Library and our campus computing organization, Information Technology and Communication.  

In addition to its centers, the library has an overarching digital library research and development group, charged with designing and planning the systems that will manage and deliver the objects in a unified digital library in the future.  We've worked closely with this group over the past two years, on a Mellon-funded project to explore the collection and preservation of originally digital scholarship produced by IATH fellows. 

Outside the Library administratively, but physically located in it, are two other relevant programs.  The first of these is run by ITC, and is called the Teaching + Technology Initiative:  This program, now about six years old, provides release time and technical support to faculty members who propose to integrate information technology in undergraduate teaching.   The second is the Virginia Center for Digital History, located next door to IATH.  VCDH is an outgrowth of an Institute project--the Valley of the Shadow, Ed Ayers' civil war archive; its staff work with faculty at UVa and elsewhere to support teaching and research of history in electronic form, and it is funded by and reports to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.  

And just recently, a new department (or "Imprint") has been established at the University Press of Virginia, funded partly by the President's Office and partly by the Mellon Foundation, and devoted to publishing originally digital humanities scholarship. Along with IATH and the library centers doing production, and the digital library project focusing on collection and preservation, this electronic publishing experiment completes the life-cycle of digital scholarly information, with a focus on peer-review, cost-recovery, and intellectual property issues.  

Clearly, then, the Institute is not an isolated effort, but is part of a much larger picture. Looking forward, I hope to see its context further enriched by the MA in digital humanities, three years in the planning, and just approved by our State Council for Higher Education.  With that program, we can offer formal training in humanities computing, as well as the informal training and practical experience that students have been acquiring for nearly a decade now, working on IATH's research projects and in the various digital centers. 


The Widest Context:

One other thing needs to be mentioned as being critical in shaping the Institute, and critical for its success, not only in the early days, but every bit as much today: the World-Wide Web.  When the Institute was first proposed, the grand plan for its research was that it would develop "the scholar's workstation"--an operating system, in effect, that would provide the individual scholar with a stand-alone computing environment designed to support research activities in the humanities.  Fortunately, we didn't get very far in this project. Just before leaving North Carolina State University for the University of Virginia I'd been introduced to the Web by my office-mate, a technical writer, who showed me Mosaic running on our brand new Sun workstation with the nifty paper-white monitor. It seemed to me that the ability to communicate--to publish, even in an informal sense--was more important than almost any effect or process you'd have to sacrifice to accomplish it.  The Web was obviously an important new channel for all kinds of communication, including scholarly communication, and although the stand-alone scholar's workstation would be able to provide more functionality (since you could predict the operating system, the compilers, and so on), you couldn't easily share the results, except with others running the same hardware and software.  The Web removed that barrier, and allowed at least basic sharing of text and image data, across different platforms, across the network.  And though in designing these projects and working with each of them in depth, as Worthy will describe, we tend to focus on the computational opportunities and requirements within the project itself, the most important technology is still always the network, and the most important outcome is always a successful, or even a provocatively unsuccesful, act of scholarly communication.