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ニール・フライスタット ／ Neil Fraistat
THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES, LOCAL AND GLOBAL
Abstract
The emergence of the Digital Humanities as a coherent field in the 1990s was accompanied by and largely a result of the concomitant evolution of the Digital Humanities Center as an institution. Such centers have become important laboratories for the application of information technology to the humanities; powerful advocates for the significance of such work; crucial focal points for the theorization of the Digital Humanities as a field; and local nodes for what is being called in North America "cyberinfrastructure." I discuss the history and function of Digital Humanities Centers, focusing especially on their role in cyberinfrastructure and on the centerNet initiative, which seeks to create a truly global network of local digital humanities centers.
I. INTRODUCTION
The digital humanities center, like the field from which it has sprung, is still a relatively new phenomenon in the modern academy. In what follows, I'll be examining the significance of its emergence, its function as a local agent of innovation and experimentation, and a new network of digital humanities centers the potential to bring disciplinary change to the humanities at a global level. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's take a tour of a representative center to see what actually goes on there. Of course, our tour will have to be simulated primarily through words, much like such early text adventure games as ADVENTURE and Zork, which have become important objects of study at the digital humanities center that I direct, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, or, as it is more commonly known, MITH.
II. A TOUR OF MITH
Walk with me then, through the front door of MITH. Let's say hello to Chris Grogan, MITH's business manager, who sits behind the front desk working out the budget for a grant proposal that needs to get out the door in an hour. That probably explains why she seems to be grumbling quietly to herself. We'll turn quickly to our right and pick up something to drink in MITH's coffeehouse lounge, whose walls are a melange of early videogame motifs, retro 1960s multi-colored shooting stars, and, improbably enough, an exactingly executed rendering of a Sol Lewitt conceptual work of art-all but the last of which were produced during a graduate student painting party. The red loveseat is empty and no one is playing a game on the vintage Apple IIe perched on a low table, but sitting in two over-sized bean bags are Greg Lord, MITH's lead designer and software engineer and Grant Dickie, a junior programmer, intently discussing their work on the interface for the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, an electronic environment for the scholarly study of all known pre-1641 Quartos of Shakespeare's plays, living artifacts that tell the story of how Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, to name just a few, first circulated in print.
Taking our cups of coffee with us, we head back into the center aisle of MITH, where ten paces to our right Helen DeVinney, a graduate student in the English Department and the Managing Director of the Electronic Literature Organization, is readying a mailing of CDs containing the second annual Electronic Literature Collection, an anthology of born-digital literature. The most prominent international group devoted to the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature, the Electronic Literature Organization moved its headquarters to MITH almost three years ago.
Turning left as we proceed towards MITH's seminar room at the far end of the main aisle, we pass a workstation for the staff of Romantics Circles, a scholarly Website for the study of British Romantic literature and culture, and just before we come to two video-editing stations, we see to our right, Angel David Nieves, a faculty fellow from the School of Architecture, leaning over the shoulder of one of our technical staff as they collaborate on building a 3D model of the Soweto township, which is part of a multimedia archive dedicated to the events on that fateful day in June 1976, when Soweto students gathered to protest the use of the Afrikaans language as a medium of teaching and learning in black schools. Just beyond Angel, at one of the video-editing stations, sits Merle Collins, a faculty fellow from English and Comparative Literature, who is just completing a multimedia project on Saraka and Nation that traces connections between cultures of Africans in the Americas and sites of cultural memory in Africa.
About twenty feet further down the central aisle, we pass by the workstations of two MITH graduate research assistants, the first, James Hesla from the Theatre Department, is encoding texts for MITH's Electronic Broadway Project, dedicated to producing the first ever scholarly editions of musical theatre. The second, Rachel Donahue, from the College of Information Studies (iSchool), is preparing with MITH's associate director, Matt Kirschenbaum, to lead the weekly meeting of the MITH group working on a grant from the Library of Congress for the preservation of virtual worlds and born-digital literature, whose long-term survival is imperiled by inevitable changes over time in both hardware and software.
We now stand in front of three doors. To our right is Matt's office. To our left is the office of MITH's assistant director and lead programmer, Doug Reside, who is busy refining the code for AXE, MITH's web-based tool for "tagging" text, video, audio, and image files with XML metadata. Directly in front of us, at the end of our tour, is MITH's seminar room, which houses the Deena Larsen Collection, a rich archive of early-era personal computers and software for researchers interested in early hypertext and electronic literature and for MITH's own in-house research in digital curation and preservation. In the seminar room, we also teach classes, hold meetings and consultations, and host on every Tuesday afternoon "Digital Dialogues," a talk or presentation featuring either an invited guest to the campus or a member of our local research community. Since 2005, MITH has hosted well over sixty of these Digital Dialogues, featuring many of the most prominent names in the field. Audiences are often standing room only, and with the speaker's permission we record talks for podcasting. Retracing our steps, you say good-bye to Chris, who has finished the grant budget and is visibly happier.
This tableaux did not take shape overnight. MITH was made possible ten years ago by a major Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities under the joint auspices of the University of Maryland's College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology. It began with a Director and two graduate research assistants and over the years has to five faculty and full-time personnel as well as over a dozen full- or part-time staff members supported through grant funding, graduate assistantships, federal work study, and internships-by most measures a medium-sized digital humanities center.
Complementing MITH's research and intellectual mission are its public programs and events, most of which are free and open to the community. Beyond the weekly "Digital Dialogues" and the upcoming Digital Humanities 2009 conference, which is the conference of record for the field, these include our 2007 symposium on the "Future of Electronic Literature," an event that featured a day and a half of invited papers and performances which brought over one hundred attendees to campus from as far away as California, Quebec, Spain, Norway, and South America, and the 2008, "Digital Diasporas," the first conference dedicated to bringing together members of the African American/African Diaspora Studies research community and members of the Digital Humanities community.
I hope this extended sketch of MITH concretely conveys the diverse kinds of work routinely conducted at a major digital humanities center, with faculty and students from many different departments. We conceive of MITH as an applied think tank, a place where theory and practice meet on a daily and a broadly interdisciplinary basis. Located in McKeldin Library at the heart of the campus, MITH ultimately is a campus-wide hub for those interested in the digital humanities and new media--a destination, a place to drop in, log on, create, think, write, and above all, connect. Without question, a major key to MITH's success is its deep local roots within the University of Maryland community, including its close collaboration with colleagues beyond the College of Arts and Humanities and the Libraries, notably the Human Computer Interaction Lab and the iSchool. These new partnerships have yielded stimulating new opportunities for intellectual exchange, with humanists working alongside of archivists, computer scientists, information policy specialists, and colleagues in the social sciences. New partners also mean new work habits. We learn to operate with quantitative and other methodologies long out of fashion in the humanities; our collaborators learn what it means to deal in disciplines without ground truth, disciplines where ambiguity and provocation are the objective rather than the anomaly.
On the other hand, MITH also takes great advantage of local partnerships and consultations beyond the campus with such Washington D.C. area institutions as the Folger Shakespeare Library, George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, the National Archives, the National Gallery, the U.S. State Department, and the National Building Museum. Indeed, a great potential strength of digital humanities centers in general is their capacity for channeling, focusing, maximizing, contextualizing, and networking local knowledge, local resources, and local communities of practice within larger, globalized frames. While someone inspired by Archimedes might therefore be tempted to say that digital humanities centers provide the local with a place to stand from which it can move the world, the truth-as always-is more complicated than that. For that we need a little history.
III. INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY
The emergence of the digital humanities as a coherent field in the 1990s was accompanied by and largely a result of the evolution of the Humanities Computing Center as an institution, as could be found in such exemplary early centers in the United States as Princeton/Rutgers' Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (established in 1991), the University of Virginia's Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities (established in 1993), and Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group (established in 1994). They and other earlier centers at such places as Oxford and King's College London became important laboratories for the application of information technology to the humanities; powerful advocates for the significance of such work; crucial focal points for the theorization of the Digital Humanities as a field; and influential models for the host of other centers that appeared on the scene in the late 90s and the turn of the century, such as MITH (established in 1999), the Stanford Humanities Lab (established in 2000), and the University of Nebraska's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (established in 2005).
The importance of such Centers "as crucial seedbeds of innovation" and key nodes of American cyberinfrastructure was stressed in Our Cultural Commonwealth, a report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies and released in 2006 (Unsworth, et al). The American term "Cyberinfrastructure," much like the European term "e-science," can be defined as the linking together of computing systems, data storage systems, tools and data repositories, visualization and virtual research environments, people, and communities of practice by software, shared standards, and high performance networks in order "to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible." Greg Stewart, who provides the definition upon which my own is based in the Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure Newsletter for March 2007, elaborates as follows:
By analogy with the word infrastructure, "cyberinfrastructure" intends to convey both its importance in providing basic enabling tools supporting scholarly endeavors, and the idea that you eventually will be able to use it without thought - much as you assume you can plug an electrical appliance into a wall outlet without having to understand the intricacies of electrical generation and its conduction through power lines. (http://racinfo.indiana.edu/newsletter/archives/2007-03.shtml)
In response to the call in Our Cultural Commonwealth for increasing the number and networking of digital humanity centers as well as their public funding, MITH and the NEH co-hosted a national summit meeting in April 2007 that brought together the directors of 17 digital humanities centers and representatives from 14 major funders,
including NEH, NSF, IMLS, ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies); the Mellon, Getty, Luce, MacArthur, and Sloane Foundations; and both Vint Cerf and Dan Clancy, Google's chief evangelist and the lead engineer of Google Books. Our goal was to consider the possibilities of greater communication, coordination, and collaboration among centers, among funders, and between both groups.
In a keynote address at the summit, John Unsworth, who chaired the committee that produced Our Cultural Commonwealth, outlined several ways in which digital humanities centers could respond to the report's recommendations. Among other points, he noted that a national network of centers would offer the potential to provide a social structure for resolving social, organizational, and cultural issues in tandem with creation of technology-based services. Among his final conclusions, Unsworth cited some of the strengths that digital humanities centers bring to the field: the mentoring they provide for humanities scholars engaged in digital research; the staffing and long-term security they provide for individual research projects; and the opportunities they engender for humanities faculty and graduate students to work as part of a collective intellectual enterprise. While these benefits mostly accrued to the Center's local community, Unsworth's larger claim was that digital humanities centers could play a fundamental role in transforming the humanities as a whole if they acted in concert rather than as silos of experience and expertise, a point to which I'll return shortly.
IV. centerNet
What then did we learn at the summit? Overwhelmingly, the centers favored greater collaboration, seeing the potential benefits as far outweighing the disadvantages. While the funders were more reserved about the benefits of collaboration-in particular the private foundations--some of them also felt that there was much to be gained through collaboration. Spearheaded especially by Brett Bobley, Director of NEH's Office of Digital Humanities, a number of new collaboratively-funded grant opportunities have been initiated both within the United States and between the United States and other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany.
The most important decision of the summit group was to attempt to build a network of centers for cooperative and collaborative action that would benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. There were three associated mandates:
THE FIRST: Make the network international
We recognized that even though funding structures are primarily national, the base of the field, its accumulated and accumulating knowledge, is profoundly international.
THE SECOND: Make the network broad and inclusive
We should welcome cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts, and other related areas and include all those who think their center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, including humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. Our definition of "center" would only be slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence.
THE THIRD: Make the network free
There is no membership fee, although we are asking members to consider contributing some time or resource to the network. Of the three mandates that emerged from the summit, this is the one most under pressure as we attempt to provide the network with a sound and sustainable infrastructure.
Having established the goal of building a network, the summit group elected five people to serve as a start up committee: Julia Flanders, Matt Kirschenbaum, Mark Kornbluh, John Unsworth, and me. Katherine Walter, Ray Siemens, and Geoffrey Rockwell were added when the start up committee began operating as a North American steering committee in mid 2007. Currently, Kay Walter from the University of Nebraska and I co-chair the Steering Committee.
V. THE PROBLEMS OF LOCALISM
centerNet was born, then, from the conviction that centers could accomplish much more together than separately, that the local had to be in constant dialogue with the global. The timeliness of its birth was brought home recently in a report titled "A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States" prepared for the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) by consultant Diane Zorich (Zorich, A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States, Council on Library and Information Resources, May 19, 2008). In the Preface to this report, CLIR's Amy Friedlander notes that
In an environment where scholars identify with their disciplines rather than with their departments, and where significant professional affiliations or communities of interest may transcend the boundaries of scholars' colleges and universities, centers offer interdisciplinary "third places"-a term sociologist Ray Oldenburg has used to identify a social space, distinct from home and workplace. Third places foster important ties and are critical to community life. Familiar examples are barbershops, beauty salons, and coffee shops where, in the age of wireless, we see tables of students hunched over laptops, textbooks, and notepads. (http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub143/contents.html#fore)
For Friedlander, within the kind of "third place" typified by digital humanity centers, "technology is simultaneously a driver and an opportunity, and the centers, whether virtual or physical, effectively become safe places, hospitable to innovation and experimentation, as well as anchors from which to base the intellectual analog of civil society in which third places are vital parts" (http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub143/contents.html#fore). While Friedlander appreciates that many digital humanities centers have "incubated important research, fostered a generation of humanities scholars who are comfortable with the technology, devised creative modes of governance, assembled diverse portfolios of funding strategies, and built significant digital collections and suites of tools," she also warns that since most centers are "focused on their home institutions, they are at risk of becoming silos" and that such "institutional parochialism can inhibit the building of shared resources, like repositories, or of services, like long-term preservation, that represent a shared infrastructure where the impact of the shared resource is enhanced precisely because multiple parties contribute to and use it" (http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub143/contents.html#fore).
Friedlander's sobering assessment of the dangers of localism is developed further by Zorich in the main body of the report, which makes the following points: (1) "The silo-like nature of current centers is creating untethered digital production . . . [with projects receiving] little exposure outside their center . . . [that] are at greater risk of being orphaned over time"; (2) "The independent nature of existing centers does not effectively leverage resources community-wide"; (3) "Large-scale, coordinated efforts to address the 'big' issues in building humanities cyberinfrastructure . . . are missing from the current landscape. Collaborations among existing centers are small and focus on individual partner interests that do not scale up to address community wide needs" (pp. 4-5). For Zorich, a light in this tunnel is centerNet, which is "embarking on efforts to foster greater communication among one another nationally and internationally" (p. 41).
But the problems that Friedlander and Zorich cite demonstrate the difficult challenges facing centerNet, among them overcoming the inward looking nature of most centers, as the pull of local campus pressures works against external collaboration; the consequent insularity of many centers that leaves each ignorant about the work actively being done by the others; the competition among centers for relatively scarce funding resources; and the fact that directing most centers is usually more than a full time job in itself, leaving little time for networking. Added to these challenges is the sheer difficulty of creating a truly international network that crosses not only national boundaries, but cultural divides, and language communities.
As we all have learned in recent years, however, challenges are merely opportunities in masquerade. And centerNet is rising to the occasion through a number of initiatives, including the following in
- Public awareness. To educate humanities communities about digital humanities centers generally, the steering committee has sponsored a number of presentations about the network, starting with a panel at the Digital Humanities 2007 conference in Urbana Champaign. At this event, centerNet gained significant interest from the international community. Subsequently, steering committee members have presented two Coalition for Networked Information programs: "Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure" (Washington, DC, Dec. 1007) and "Models of Digital Humanities Centers"(Minneapolis, MN, April 2008). At the Digital Humanities 2008 conference in Oulu, Finland a centerNet panel discussion about the development of an international portal for the digital humanities again drew considerable interest, and the audience called for steps to strengthen the communities of centers. At the upcoming DH 2009, there will be for the first time a dedicated slot at lunchtime for a centerNet general members meeting.
- Membership building and networking. Since the April 2007 summit, over 200 members of digital humanities centers around the world have joined centerNet through its discussion list and have contributed to an online taxonomy and directory of digital humanities centers hosted by centerNet. Member centers are principally located in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Currently, membership is free and entitles a center to participate in the discussion list--the primary means of communication among the centers--and to add a description of itself to the online directory of digital humanities centers, the only such finding tool on the Web, which provides a wealth of information about individual centers around the world. Through the discussion list, centers have begun sharing information about such opportunities as event announcements, positions available in centers, and grant funding. The list has also been used to conduct environmental scans relating to issues of common concern.
- Working groups and workshops. So far centerNet working groups have emerged for public advocacy, for an international digital humanities portal, for digital tools, and for faculty/staff training. We plan to start a new work group soon for peer reviewing and credentialing the various types of work done by digital humanists. I've already mentioned that the international portal work group held a successful roundtable at DH 2008; the speakers for that session included scholars from Germany, Australia, Italy, and the U.S. Last November, members of the digital tools group from George Mason's Center for History and New Media and from MITH led a workshop entitled "Tools for Data Driven Scholarship: Past, Present, and Future," which was funded by the NSF, IMLS, and NEH. Based on discussions at that workshop, we will soon be issuing a public report on how tools can be better integrated with each other, with content, and with the scholarly communities that could make best use of them. This report will contain recommendations to the funders for a series of grant opportunities that we hope would dramatically change the landscape for the production, evaluation, and use of digital tools for humanities scholarship.
- Strategic alliances. Two strategic alliances are particularly important for centerNet: one with with CHCI, the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (http://www.chcinetwork.org/) that I will discuss shortly; and one with the Mellon-funded Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/), which was launched in April 2008. Bamboo is perhaps the most ambitious multi-institutional attempt yet to advance arts and humanities research through the development of widely shared technology services. Its silo-busting, large pipeline, community-building, big picture approach to cyberinfrastructure for the digital humanities appeals to centerNet precisely because it addresses all of the problems Friedlander and Zorich have identified in locally bound and insular centers. Digital humanities centers, on the other hand, are the quintessential humanities labs for the kind of exploration and demonstration, sandbox and support, in which Bamboo is deeply invested. They are, moreover, key nodes in the scholarly network of people, projects, tools, and services at the heart of Bamboo's project, as well as hubs and disseminators of best practices.
VI. RECENTERING THE HUMANITIES
Underlying these various initiatives is a strategic vision of the place of the digital humanities center in the institutional history of the academy. Over a hundred years ago, the current disciplinary structure of the humanities assumed its present shape, and though the world has changed much since then, humanities disciplines have not. New programs in such area as gender studies, race studies, cultural studies, and so on have often been relegated to the province of the humanities centers that started to appear in significant numbers in the final quarter of the twentieth-century, precisely in order to accommodate what the traditional humanities departments could not in the form of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary studies. More recently, digital humanities centers have sprung up to accommodate the challenges to the traditional humanities posed by new media and technologies and the particular forms of knowledge and interdisciplinarity they entail. Humanities centers of both kinds have thus been historically positioned to dream the future of the university, so to speak, to take the lead in scholarly innovation and disciplinary transformation. Their ultimate function at the present time is not just to help set the agenda for the new humanities to come, but to work in practical ways to help bring this transformation about. For centerNet that means collaborating with those who make common cause: not only Humanities Centers, but also University Libraries and Schools of Library and Information Studies (iSchools). Along with digital humanities centers, these three academic units are converging in powerful ways to constitute the digital humanities and to reconstitute the humanities.
Several recent centerNet initiatives have therefore been focused on facilitating that integration. These initiatives include a recent session on iSchools and the digital humanities at the 2009 annual ALISE conference of American iSchools and a successful IMLS grant that will for the next three years bring interns from iSchools at the University of Maryland, the University of Texas, and the University of Michigan to work at digital humanities centers at Michigan State University and the Universities of Nebraska and Maryland. This past January, Richard Lucier, Abby Smith, and Bethany Nowviski of the Scholarly Communications Institute (http://www.uvasci.org) convened a meeting between the leadership of centerNet and that of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes to discuss developing a common agenda for these two types of humanities centers. Our discussions at this meeting turned to concrete ways we could in concert help to promote scholarly innovation in the humanities as well as to effect meaningful disciplinary change, and I'd like briefly to describe one of our initial plans.
Although there is an active group of risk-taking mid-to-late career humanists engaged in the digital humanities, they constitute no more than 5 to 10% of the total population of senior humanists. One of the most intransigent problems we face is how to involve the remaining 90 to 95% in digital methodologies and research. These are the very scholars, at the same time, who have been warning younger colleagues with digital interests about the almost certain death by tenure denial that will await them should they pursue these interests. We need to engage and educate the first group and liberate the second if we are to see anything like the change we need in the humanities.
The recently published draft of the Digital Humanities Manifesto is right to identify the "need for teamwork as [the] new model for the production and reproduction of humanistic knowledge," adding, "Teams sometimes fail because they take risks. This is the heart of digital humanities: Risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation" (http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digitalhumanities/2008/12/15/digital-humanities-manifesto/, 9). To that end, our SCI-forged group has begun designing a proposal for funding a three-year pilot program that would model new research methods by supporting two cohorts of scholars (the first beginning in Year 1, the second in Year 2), each consisting of multi-institutional, multi-generational teams working together for two years on key topics in the humanities that are tractable with computational methods. For example, teams might be asked to come up with proposals for the study of the Middle Ages through visualization, or for the study of the Hemispheric Americas through geospatial methods.
It would be up to individual teams to specify precisely what problem within the larger topic they would pursue, but all teams would have the common goal of producing a joint virtual research environment for the study of the problem, replete with texts, tools, and datasets-and would be charged with documenting and rationalizing the methodological decisions they made over the course of the project. During the pilot phase of the project, selected centers of both kinds will be responsible for running three week-long summer institutes--at the beginning, middle, and end of the two-year process-that will bring the cohort of teams together for intensive discussion of methods, tools, content collections, lessons learned, and training, as well as to consider how individual team projects relate to one another. In addition, the teams would participate in a periodic online seminar, with real-time sessions, visiting speakers, and presentations by team members, run by one of the centers. Participating universities would also need to commit to supporting public lectures and programs related to the research project and methods pursued by their team, thereby engaging the local humanities community in the issues under discussion.
A crucial element in this model is the intergenerational nature of each team, which would include a mix of senior scholars, junior scholars, a postdoctoral fellow chosen specifically for this purpose, and graduate students. By engaging members from different stages of a scholarly career--many of whom would not be digitally expert--in a common project, we hope to socialize the entire group in new research cultures. By asking them all to contribute to the creation of a virtual research environment or methodological commons, we hope to foster a dialogue focused on the best methods for getting the research job done and instill an understanding of the limits and the capabilities of existing resources and tools, as well as making the knowledge that they gain and document of use to other researchers investigating similar problems.
From the point of view of individual team members, this will be an opportunity to cultivate expertise in working with computational methods and digital resources in order to see how we can transform the way we divide up and understand culture. For graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty, these teams present opportunities to look forward to the next stage in professionalization and understand how one engages emergent questions at that level, how a research profile evolves, and how a career develops. From the point of view of the department, or the university, this is a program that should help to transform the way departments hire, encouraging them to consider new faculty engaged in new methods for research with digital resources. By supporting and validating the research of the newer scholars, we can help change the culture in the humanities, where the new computational methods are often discouraged. Moreover, we will be supporting models of collaborative research that will energize humanities research for the next generation.
I have described this model program in detail because it is replicable in other countries and because I want to make clear that there are things we can not only talk about doing, but also actually do now to help create the kind of change the humanities need. In the words of the Digital Humanities Manifesto, "Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/ multidisciplinarity are empty words unless they imply changes in language, practice, method, and output" (4). These kinds of changes are social, cultural, and even economic, as much as they are technological. But they are also profoundly international in their effect and potential effectiveness and might therefore be called the "cosmopolitics" of the humanities, to adapt Kant's term (first used in his "Essay on Perpetual Peace") for the "universal community" that cuts across all national borders. While it would be difficult for a local digital humanities center to engage at this cosmopolitical level, it is precisely the purpose of centerNet to do so-which brings me to why I stand before you in Kyoto today, at the "1st International Symposium on Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures," which is being hosted by one of the premier digital humanities centers in the world.
centerNet has grown out of an alliance primarily of North American digital humanities centers, from which its present steering committee is drawn. It is now in the midst of internationalizing its governance structure to match the international spread of its membership by seeding regional steering committees in Europe, Australia, and Asia. The chairs of all the regional committees would sit on a centerNet Executive Committee that would be well positioned to coordinate collaboration among centers worldwide. At present one regional centerNet steering committee has just been formed in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and another will be formed soon in Australia. We very much want to start a regional committee in Asia. I hope that I have demonstrated that centerNet can be a powerful agent for change in the humanities and that it already is actively addressing several key issues involving this change. There is so much we have to learn from each other and so much important work we can do together. Won't you join us?