Brown University Library News

A public lecture by John Unsworth
co-sponsored by the Brown University Library and Computing and Information Services:
3:00 pm, Monday, May 9, 2005
Smith-Buonanno 201
“Infrastructure…refers collectively to the roads, power grids, telephone systems, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy to function…The newer term cyberinfrastructure refers to infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information and communication technology. If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy.” (Report of the National Science Foundation Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure)
Traditionally, the library has been the shared infrastructure of the humanities and social sciences. Today, shared infrastructure needs to include not only the library, but also archives and museums, and it needs to reintegrate these repositories of the cultural record, as it reintegrates the academic disciplines devoted to it, and reconnects the academy with the public.
This talk will extend the discussion of cyberinfrastructure’s technical, content, and policy issues into essential areas that have been served less well than the sciences and technology, particularly the humanities and the social sciences, which are expanding their research horizons via information technologies to create large collections of complex digital objects and to develop computational methods. Computational power and new digital tools are being applied to such age-old problems as deciphering ancient languages, recording multiple layers of archeological sites in ways that enable new interrogations of data while protecting the authenticity of the record, and, through GIS, enabling place-based research in collections as diverse as historical maps of land ownership and biological specimen collections. Cyberinfrastructure also presents the opportunity, in these disciplines as in others, for
global-scale collaboration among domain specialists and the potential for advancing both research and teaching.
John Unsworth is the Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Formerly the Director of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, he has served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and Chair of the Text
Encoding Initiative Consortium. He currently chairs the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
For further information contact: Patrick_Yott@brown.edu