Software
Wetpaint released a new technology called "Injected" earlier this summer. For those unfamiliar with Wetpaint, they're a free hosting service for wikis. We use them for several class websites because they remove ads for educational sites and the version comparison is very good for collaborative writing.
What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal
arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution
building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this
agenda forward? David Green and Michael Roy share some ideas in the July/August 2008 EDUCAUSE Review.
Made possible by dramatic advances in networking technologies, cyberinfrastructure promises to combine new computing capabilities, massive data resources and distributed human expertise to enable qualitatively different creative product from new generations of "knowledge environments." Introducing this timely collection of observations on how this will affect liberal arts disciplines and institutions, David Green reviews the distance we've come in the last 15 years and identifies the main themes of the essays, interviews and reviews that follow.
In reviewing Our Cultural Commonwealth, the report on cyberinfrastructure and the humanities commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Gary Wells notes "both the allure and anxiety of radical and disruptive change," and wonders if the academy and the broader public will be up to the cultural and financial challenges.
John Unsworth chaired the ACLS Commission that authored Our Cultural Commonwealth. In a conversation with Kevin Guthrie, he offers his own well-developed definition of cyberinfrastructure, talks about why and how the needs of the humanities should be considered separately, and explains how the report's framework has been useful already in developing new implementation strategies.
This gripping account describes what the process and products of a new cyberscholarship might look like in the age of the Semantic Web, in which cyberinfrastructure’s potential as a "facilitator of a vast social process of meaning making" might be further developed.
Three art historians discuss how their most urgent needs might be addressed by cyberinfrastructure. While they hold themselves responsible for fostering new forms of scholarship as they appear, the bottom line, they agree, is that CI will be useless if it can not revolutionize image access and metadata management, and cannot help us think differently about vision and objects: "what kind of image work is the work that matters most?"
Todd Kelley takes Francis Starr's recommendations for pooling computing resources across campuses one step further by discussing the advantages of outsourcing managed cyber services: "Bringing institutions with common needs together in a shared organizational network and aggregating many of their common technology needs through cyber services [is] a powerful idea."
Many themes of this collection are encapsulated within this new facility in an old library at Bates College. Blending a 21st-century codification of Liberal Arts Education, with cyberinfrastructure-ready facilities, the Bates Imaging Center, in Professor Coté’s words, "presents the campus hub for collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, especially those that are computationally intensive, apply visualization techniques, or include graphical or image-based components."
We present here a collection of short profiles, specially written for
Academic Commons, on key service organizations and networks that will
be poised to assist and lead others who are working to bring a rich
cyberinfrastructure into play. Some are older humanities organizations
for which cyberinfrastructure is a totally new environment, others have
been created specifically around the provision of digital resources and
support.
