Project Bamboo, evening session
The meeting reception, complete with string quartet and tasty tidbits, featured Mellon’s Chris Mackie and Mark Olsen of ARTFL. My after-the-fact recollections follow.
Chris (dressed in, um, a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and conservative tie—and the mere fact that I of all people mention this might just be indicative of, um, something) answered a few questions about Mellon’s involvement with Project Bamboo.
Mellon has been asked many times to put a list of all their funded projects on their website, pour encourager les autres. Mellon can’t do that, because most of those projects don’t exist any more; they didn’t transition to a sustainable funding or support model after the Mellon money ran out. That is part of the impetus behind Project Bamboo: to put such projects on a firmer footing by having the right people (IT and librarians as well as scholars) in from the get-go.
Why were Chicago and Berkeley chosen as the first Bamboo institutions? Because they already had multiple stakeholders inside the institutions talking together about humanities-computing issues. Mellon’s paradigm for funding projects is to jumpstart programs with their money that then become sustainable on their own. Chicago and Berkeley looked like good places to start.
What Mellon wants to avoid is more unsolicited proposals (nota bene: they don’t fund unsolicited proposals!) corresponding to the pattern of the Canonically Bad Humanities Proposal. The CBHP goes something like this: “We have a bunch of stuff that at least one humanities scholar is interested in. We want to digitize it. We want to put it on the Web. We want open access—that is, we might want open access except open access sounds like a commie plot (I LOLed, I really did), but it might catch on, so we want to keep the option available. We want to completely reinvent the wheel; you’ll notice that our proposal takes absolutely no cognizance of anything that has ever been done before in digitization. Give us lots and lots of money, Mellon!”
Mellon has a unit that funds things like this (although they prefer that the projects be important to more than one scholar!). But the CBHP comes up so often that it’s dead obvious we need better models for getting this work done. Moreover, the reward structure in the humanities militates for the CBHP; to get a digital project valued at all by a tenure or promotion committee, the PI has to be the only PI, because these committees have no idea how to value less prominent contributions. This needs to change too.
Chris asked all participants to answer three questions: “How does Project Bamboo benefit me? How does it benefit my institution? How does it benefit my discipline or profession?” Altruism is not a sustainable base for this project. If it’s not perceived as personally and professionally beneficial, it won’t fly.
Olsen’s brief talk spoke of John Unsworth’s humanities primitives, and asked whether “similarity” might be such a primitive. He demoed the potential of n-gram comparison tests for establishing similarities among texts (I couldn’t help remembering that horrible project from the Department from Hell where we were doing exactly this by hand for various adaptations of La Celestina), and posited that similar statistical tests of similarity could work for images, videos, and sound as well.
I’m afraid I’m in a Thénardier hotel—one of those hateful places where everything, including the Internet, costs extra. I have a synchronous online commitment tomorrow evening, so I’m going to wait a bit longer and then buy one day’s access, so that it’ll cover my appointment. Then I’ll log on and post this.