blog: Some notes on the "Network of Expert Centres" meeting, 22 Sept 2008

In these post-AHDS, apres-Methods-Network days, a small amount of
funding has been found to explore the possibility of
setting up a "network of expert centres", aiming to develop an effective
support infrastructure in the digital arts and humanities area. As a
former AHDS centre, Oxford was invited to join the network, and I went
along to this inaugural workshop of the network in place of Martin who
is busy frying other CLARIN fish. The workshop was the first of four,
to be held around the UK before the funding runs out at the end of
this calendar year. It was organised by Kings and held at the
Wellcome's subterranean conference centre on Euston Road.

Lorna Hughes welcomed us by saying that the goal of this workshop was
to investigate models of collaboration, and made the first of several
references to http://www.arts-humanities.net as being the vehicle to carry
forward the network's outreach agenda. Present were several of the
usual suspects, i.e. David Robey, Seth Denbo, Simon Tanner, Paul
Spence, Harold Short, Sheila Anderson, Charlotte Rouche, John Bradley,
Torsten Reimer, Heather Haskins, Lydia Horstman, and Elena Pierazzo
(all from Kings), Barry Ife (formerly at Kings, now at Guildhall),
Richard Deswarte (just taken over from Matthew Woolard at HDS), David
Sheppard and Mike Pidd (from HRI, Sheffield), Stuart Jeffrey from ADS,
Bronwen Hyde (Research Information Network), Joy Davidson (HATII), Aly
Comteh (BL), Amy Robertson (VADS), Paul Ell (QUB), Andrew Prescott
(Lampeter), and Alastair Dunning (JISC Digitization). Slightly bemused
outsiders were Simon Coles from the EPSRC-funded National
crystallography service at Southampton, and Ant Miller from the BBC.

Introducing the first session, Sheila opined that the network
represented "a very strong response" to withdrawal of AHDS funding,
though there were still a number of key projects enjoying continued
funding (she mentioned AHESSC, ADS, and A-H.net, as well as two
european projects, DARIAH and CLARIN). We should be aiming to
demonstrate the ability of the network's members to collaborate in
provision of services which were really needed by the subject
communities. The first session was intended to provide us with three
possible collaborative models, presented by Barry Ife, Andrew
Prescott, and Simon Coles. Barry's model was LCACE: the London Centre
for Arts and Cultural Enterprise, which is a "club" or pressure group
for nine London-based HEIs active in the cultural sector, some large,
some small. It's supported by subscriptions (a flat rate of 35k a
year) which the members apparently consider value for money as it
enables them to devolve many matters of joint interest, such as
potential commercial or academic collaborations, summer schools,
consultancy, input to public policy on access to the arts etc. An
interesting example: a school of nursing valued input from a school of
acting about improvisation techniques. Andrew's model was based on his
experience in Wales, where the political agenda of the One Wales
manifesto has had an extraordinarily galvanising effect on the
development of digital resources, aimed at enlarging access to digital
cultural resources by the public, mainly within the library sector,
and spearheaded by the national library. Support for individual
researchers is less conspicuously present; he cited the wonderful
www.dafyddapgwilym.net project as an example of something where
sustainability (it uses Anastasia) had not been thought through; and
also the Lampeter project on "Imaging the bible in wales", where a
full projec-to-service model has not yet developed. Simon Coles took
us for a refreshingly different canter through the ways in which
chemists, at least, now benefit from social networking technologies,
beating the drum very effectively for Open Notebook Science with
several provocative soundbites (e.g. "If I don't put my exam timetable
on facebook, no-one will turn up"). He did however say several very
interesting and well-informed things about the role of digital
repositories in supporting this new kind of science and the
transformative effects of web2 technologies on the publishing process,
as well as pointing to a number of URLs worth looking at. And that the
way in which science is now done is deeply inimical to the top down
way in which academic institutions are funded and organized. And that
research projects should be top-sliced to pay for the costs of
curating their data in institutional repositories. So I warmed to
him considerably.

After coffee, there was a brief discussion, focussing largely on the
organisational mechanisms underlying the three collaborative models,
which were largely unsurprising. David Robey remarked that
collaboration has to be incentivised in some way; Sheila Anderson that
mass digitization programmes did not necessarily meet the needs of
individual researchers, who tended to take such things for
granted. There was some dilatory discussion of possible business
models, but this seemed to be fairly well-trodden ground. Alastair
rather cheekily asked exactly what services the Network would provide,
but did not receive a very detailed answer. Harold said that we were
talking about infrastructure and that the AHDS infrastructure had
depended to a great extent on the support of host institutions, many
of which now felt a bit let down by the demise of the AHDS, which
though undeniable did not seem to get us much further. The lady from
RIN piped up that they had produced a report on data sharing we should
all read and we broke for a modest sandwich lunch, during which
Elena and I talked about genetic editing in the TEI.

After lunch we were supposed to be focussing on "pragmatics". David
Robey kicked off by summarising some results from a questionnaire on
sustainability of resources he'd commissioned, which mostly seemed to
confirm a general skepticism about the likelihood that institutional
repositories will take on the burdens previously shouldered by the
AHDS and the Methods Network. He did however point to the UK Data
Service project at LSE as being maybe an indicator of future
relevance. Harold followed this up with a rapid canter through an
astounding variety of digital projects at Kings, drawing out
particularly the collaborative nature of most of them. Charlotte
Rouche gave an entertaining talk about the near-impossibility of
getting elderly classicists like herself to understand the technology
and why it was useful, (saying en passant nice things about the LGPN
project); evidence of value was what was needed; maybe the learned
societies should be our target rather than the funding councils. She
is now something called the "e-strategos" of the Hellenic Society,
which is nice. Finally, another fast-talker, called Ant Miller tried
to explain how the BBC organizes its digital archiving, in the face of
insurmountable technical odds. (e.g. the functioning lifetime of all
currently surviving videotape players is inadequate to play back their
current backlog of undigitized videotape. By a factor of ten, or so.)
and an amazingly heterogenous internal structure, dividing itself both
by media type (news, tv, radio) and by region. I learned that they
have a wonderful conceptual model for all their data, which rejoices
in the name of SMEF/LDM. And that, following development of something
called a Target Operating Model, which focusses on business processes
rather than the existing organizational structure, the BBC has
apparently decided on a strategy which puts archiving of content ahead
of actually broadcasting it.

This was followed by a brief discussion about sustainability, and
business models, with several brief recommendations about "cards" that
might be played (e.g. the e-learning agenda, the implications of
resource availability and use for research quality assessments) in
making the case for the importance of the network. I can't say I
noticed much of any substance being articulated; maybe my attention
was wandering. In any case, the non-network participants at this point
made their excuses and left, and the (second, I learn) meeting of the
potential network partners proper began.

The meeting closed at 5.30 and I got soaked on the way home.