Patti Cossard wrote:
As I see it, standards based structural language or computer skill, is essential to the health of scholarly economy as it provides a sustainable model for scholarly communication. And, it goes beyond just the markup language or information technology skill itself. The TEI consortium provides a community in which tools and knowledge are shared openly.
I often think that the free "tools" aspect had been underestimated in humanities computing. Of course, there exist a couple of good examples like the TEI XSLT style sheets or some open source archival software etc. Nevertheless, the situation is not satisfactory and I wonder what are its causes and by which means it could possibly be improved. Briefly summarized the main causes, I can think of, are the following:
- Most software development in the humanities takes place in an ad hoc fashion: People have specific problems and develop specific solutions. - There is a lack of institutional support for developing tools for others. Tools are only by-products. - If there is institutional support for developing tools for others, these tools need to be sold in order to re-finance the work. - It is not advisable for a scholar trying to build an academic career on developing tools for humanities computing. - There exists no academic infrastructure *focused* on developing tools for the humanities, ie. a specific society, journal and annual conference.
Since one of my main research interests is considered with the development of tools for humanities computing, I would be very interested in the opinions of others on the above list of causes. Perhaps together we could find ways to improve the situation.
Dieter Köhler
Institute of Philosophy and Centre for Multimedia Studies University of Karlsruhe Germany
Web-site: http://www.philo.de