To talk about computing in the humanities is a lot like discussing a dinner of steak and tofu. The use of supercomputing and networked communications in support of engineering and scientific research has become so ubiquitous that it is taken for granted, like meat and potatoes; the use of the same technologies modified and extended for the humanities is considered somewhat exotic, and has experienced a slower (but steady) growth and acceptance. True, there are electronic text centers springing up on most major campuses and textual analysis by computer has been a long-running project in Europe, but humanities computing is still viewed along the line of "Physics for Poets" or computers with training wheels.
One source of dissonance might stem from the names by which we designate our area of work: Computing connotes counting and math, while humanists often consider the use of numeric analysis as the line of demarcation between their field and that of non-humanists. Electronic text centers more often than not are involved in housing images as well as textual information, and even the term information technology is suspect because the humanities seek to build knowledge, not merely collect and process information. But regardless of the name, we do know that computing's most exciting gift has been the birth of new communications technologies and their ability to open undreamed-of opportunities for extending the humanities knowledge base. What kinds of humanities projects can the new technologies facilitate? In particular, I want to focus on four areas: multiple language representations, high-quality images, three-dimensional representations, and desktop conferencing and collaboration tools.
Humanists build their work on material that transcends the boundaries of culture and language. After all, we in the humanities seek to understand the whole human condition. To discuss and understand different cultures, we must use our various languages to expand our horizons. Thus, the first problem confronting humanists working in textual areas is the lack of cross-platform multilingual font sets and distributed multilingual-enabling technologies. Many language groups have developed their own extended ASCII character sets to allow at least a base level of conversation - KOI-8 for Russian, Big-8 for Chinese, etc. These codings at least allow for electronic mail communications, but these extensions are stopgap solutions at best. Humanists need the support for several multilingual fonts within the same document, archive or conversation, which no ASCII encoding scheme allows. UNICODE may prove the most likely candidate for providing extensible multilingual support, but UNICODE is not yet fully integrated into browsers or presentation environments. And multilingual support needs to be built into more than browsers - it needs to be integrated into conferencing environments, annotation tools and other working environments.
Humanists overwhelmingly recognize the need for access to and use of high quality images and for tools designed for use in archival image annotations, as well as for search and retrieval functions. Image work requires not only the creation of images in a digital environment, but effective, non-destructive digitizing of existing, often rare, images that currently may be viewed only in physical archives, museums or even private holdings. Effective yet low-loss compression techniques are needed to help distribute images among working scholars, teachers and students. Scholars need to be able to see the brush strokes of Degas, the carving marks of the Greeks and Egyptians, the watermarks of various printers, as well as the large, clear images of the overall objects; but these images must be delivered in such a way that the colors and textures can be trusted on any computer screen. Reliable image reproduction requires calibrated monitors operating in much the same way that Kodak's Color Management System (KCMS) coordinates color representation among scanners, monitors and printers.
The most promising proposal on color consistency at the moment, other than KCMS, is the Portable Network Graphics standard or PNG. PNG was recently endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (see http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Press/PNG-fact.html for full details). PNG promises the no-loss compression of TIFF (Tag Image File Format), but with much smaller files; the color consistency of KCMS, but across all platforms and monitors; variable transparency as often seen in print design; easy inclusion of meta-data for search and retrieval by the use of hidden text files; and finally, but importantly for slow links, interlacing for fast preview of the images. PNG support has already been included in several viewers and image editors as well as a few browsers. Both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, as well as the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) community, have committed to PNG and provide immediate support through plug-ins or helper applications.
In order to provide indicators of scale, shape and spatial relationships, humanists need access to readily distributable 3-D environments. Recreations of art objects, battlefields, living quarters, tombs, temples and cities through easy-to-use 3-D development tools are immediately in demand. The ability to quickly, easily and effectively distribute these worlds is needed to make them useful in both classroom and scholarly contexts. At present the evolving VRML tools hold the greatest promise in this area. VRML allows for a full six degrees of freedom of movement in a virtual world. That means the student or researcher could see every surface of a Celtic caldron. She could hover above a battlefield as well as see it from the perspective of the soldier and general. VRML's latest addition, 2.0, allows objects within a virtual space to exercise a set of movements, adding motion to the virtual and a bit more reality. Still, without some sort of shared or collaborative space, these worlds appear as if a neutron bomb were dropped there.
Few, if any, universities or colleges have the humanistic equivalent of a Cancer Research Center, a Human Genome Research Group, or a Media Lab. In the humanities, you are more likely to find one isolated scholar working on the prints of William Blake in North Carolina, another in California, and another in New York State. Given the state of travel budgets in the humanities, scholars are eager candidates for testing and using shared work and conferencing environments. Humanists are concerned with the utility of shared environments for overcoming the limits of the humanistic diaspora in the service of specialty conferences, distributed seminars, teletutoring and small group scholarly research. Emerging technologies in this area of particular interest are 3-D worlds with avatars (visual representations of the participants), shared white boards (where several participants in different locations may take turns writing, drawing or even displaying pictures on a common "board"), multi-way video conferencing tools for various platforms derived from the Internet's MBone technologies and Cornell University's CU-SeeMe, and immersive technologies (those requiring 3-D glasses, helmets or very large screens such as CAVE at University of Illinois-Chicago).
The recursively named CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment is a virtual reality theater in which several researchers may inhabit the same virtual world at the same physical location by simply putting on lightweight 3-D glasses and stepping into the room (or CAVE). The VR world is projected on three sides of the room and on the floor for maximum immersion. CAVEs may also be linked together for real-time conferencing across distances, connected by very high-speed networks. Additionally, by using the Habanero software environment, CAVE sessions may be shared by people using the slightly less immersive ImmersaDesk, 3-D VRML worlds, and even 2-D presentation environments offering a widely distributable cross-platform - indeed, cross-environment - conferencing opportunity.
With Netscape and Microsoft both aggressively moving into the conferencing and groupware fields, we are seeing an integration of shared text conferences (or chat) as seen in iChat's new Netscape plug-in, Internet telephony (such as VocalTec's Internet Phone) for synchronous, and shared writing areas for asynchronous conferencing. The group work that we have long been urged to facilitate in the classroom will be easily available in the networked environment for researchers in distant locations as well as for students on the same campus. The skills that we have learned in the classroom to build and evaluate teams will be invaluable in this new working, teaching and researching environment. Soon the humanist struggling alone over a stack of books will become as anachronistic as the 19th century scientist working alone in the lab.
The four application areas mentioned above reflect possible solutions to ongoing problems in the humanities. There is a common theme to these solutions. They all are dependent on cross-platform, network-distributed collaboration tools and applications. They depend on easy access at low cost for high-end computers involved in image generation, conference management, archive storage and retrieval; and for lower-end desktop computers used by individual scholars, with some allowance for group conferencing via immersive technologies. They depend on scaleable, extensible, easily customizable software. Such software should be written in an open language such as Java, which was designed from the outset to suit these needs. Habanero from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications offers a reusable extensible collaboration environment within which standalone applications written in Java may easily become collaborative applications. When viewed at this level, Java and Habanero are essential building blocks for the emerging solutions for humanists.
Scholars in the humanities need not become programmers, but the solutions offered by Java and Habanero will deliver heretofore unseen power to scholars quickly and easily with very little intervention on their part. After all, the best work done on typewriters was not done by those who assembled the machines; the best plays not written, mounted or acted by those who built the theater. Still, humanities scholars should be aware of the power and freedom that the new communications technologies will confer, in the same way that the director is aware of the possibilities - and the limitations - of each theater. Various development environments for every application will allow the scholar to concentrate more on the material at hand, the exchange of ideas and the growth of our common knowledge rather than spending time teaching HTML, SGML or even a programming language such as Java.
As our research, evaluation and teaching become increasingly multimedia-oriented, we have an opportunity heretofore unseen since the invention of the printing press. The challenge is to seize these opportunities, to develop new ways of seeing and explaining our work. Advanced technologies in electronic communications like the printing press, paper and ink are awaiting for us to put them to intelligent, imaginative and exciting new uses.
Paul Jones is the technical director at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. [email protected]