Innovation is Dead! Long Live Innovation!

It may be unthinkable to reconsider the concept and purpose of innovation and experimentation. In many sectors—including higher ed, corporations, the arts, humanities, and sciences—the creation of the Next New Shiny Thing can have its rewards, both financially and in terms of prestige. Experimental investigations are a key gateway to new knowledge; little learning and insight can happen without such developmental pursuits. At the same time, is there a way to recast innovation so that what is being built is not entirely new or has not been done before but, instead, makes adaptation, reuse, repair, recovery, and maintenance the overriding rationales for any “new” technology? If the needs of future users are at stake, particularly humanities scholars and students as users, then how should we in libraries, presses, archives, and information technology in higher ed re-think innovation, so that what gets built and what has been built—what gets used and what has been used—evolve and endure rather than fade away and expire? How do we make maintenance the Next New Shiny Thing? This presentation will delve into issues of experimentation, innovation, continuity, and maintenance in the context of digital library (DL) infrastructure and technology, writ broadly, for the humanities. It will highlight DL efforts that present opportunities for recalibrating the meaning and ethos of “innovation, “ and it will surface various current initiatives that may be considered models of maintenance.

Transcript

1. Innovation Is Dead! Long Live Innovation! Patricia Hswe | Program Officer | Scholarly Communications The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 4 June 2019 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries MELLON THE ANDREW W. FOUNDATION
2. Photo by Juliana Malta on Unsplash "Ripening corn" by David Lally is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 Not actually where I live I miss the Midwest!
5. The lineup •Prologue: The Scholarly Communications program •Part I: SC innovations in service to the humanities •Part II: Adaptability > Sustainability •Part III: The case for maintenance •Epilogue
6. But first: Thank you to — •Stephen Downie and JCDL organizers, hotel staff •themaintainers.org •GSLIS, librarian and technologist colleagues in the field •Foundation colleagues and funder colleagues beyond •Tara McPherson •Don Waters
7. An Epigraph “Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” —Mierle Laderman Ukeles
8. An Epigraph “Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” —Mierle Laderman Ukeles
9. What we do Prologue: The Scholarly Communications program
12. https://mellon.org/programs/scholarly-communications/
13. Besides Scholarly Communications — •Arts and Cultural Heritage (ACH) •Higher Education in Scholarship and the Humanities (HESH) • Includes Diversity program •In addition, Foundation’s president has grant initiatives Note: Mellon funds in the arts and humanities.
14. Mission of the Scholarly Communications Program — To assist research libraries, archives, museums, universities, presses, and arts organizations that seek to realize the potential of digital technologies to expand and equalize access to knowledge, and thereby to further our collective understanding of societies and cultures around the world.
15. We care about the “stuff” & the workflows engaging it Stuff * Description Organization Curation Discovery and Access Use in research and teaching New insights, new data Preservation Scholarly Publishing * the scholarly and cultural record Diagram by Helen Cullyer and Tasha Garcia
16. RESEARCH Stuff * Description Organization Curation Discovery and Access Use in research and teaching New insights, new data Preservation Scholarly Publishing Diagram by Helen Cullyer and Tasha Garcia
17. PUBLISHING Stuff * Description Organization Curation Discovery and Access Use in research and teaching New insights, new data Preservation Scholarly Publishing Diagram by Helen Cullyer and Tasha Garcia
18. PRESERVATION Stuff * Description Organization Curation Discovery and Access Use in research and teaching New insights, new data Preservation Scholarly Publishing Diagram by Helen Cullyer and Tasha Garcia
19. It’s all about the workflow Part I: SC innovations in service to the humanities
20. A GENERALIZED HUMANITIES RESEARCH WORKFLOW Gather Catalog Inter- pret Identify Tran- scribe Functions Publish Diagram by Don Waters
21. A “DIGITIZED” HUMANITIES RESEARCH WORKFLOW Digitization Encoded Archival Description TEI / Optical Character Recognition W3C Web Annotation Model LOD / Encoded Archival Context Digital Standards Gather Catalog Inter- pret Identify Tran- scribe Publish In Progress Diagram by Don Waters
22. A DIGITAL RESEARCH WORKFLOW FOR THE HUMANITIES Hidden Collections / Tropy Archivist’s Toolkit eMOP: Early Modern OCR Project Hypothes.is Mirador Scalar SNAC Enslaved Digital Applications Digitization Encoded Archival Description TEI / Optical Character Recognition W3C Web Annotation Model LOD / Encoded Archival Context Gather Catalog Inter- pret Identify Tran- scribe Publish In Progress In Progress Diagram by Don Waters
23. “Let me make a forecast: In the next 50 years, the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination.” — Jerome McGann (2002)
24. Selection of exemplar projects Part III: Adaptability > sustainability
26. Some features of exemplar projects •Organizational home •Mergers •Community •Support services
27. Challenges, too— •Financial health •Membership model, governance •Competition vs. collaboration •Changes in consortial goals •Integration into work of library Informed by Ithaka S+R report, “Restructuring Library Collaboration: Strategy, Membership, Governance,” by Roger Schonfeld
28. How do you balance innovation with stability? —Tara McPherson
29. Recasting the New Shiny Thing Part II: The case for maintenance
30. What is maintenance?
32. An Epigraph “Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” —Mierle Laderman Ukeles
33. Yes, this is maintenance, but . . .
34. “Innovate as a last resort. More horrors are done in the name of innovation than any other.” — Charles Eames
35. Some challenges •Can you name any incentives for maintenance? •How do maintainers get seen? •Are there any leaders who are maintainers? •How does maintenance get paid for?
36. On the flip side, or conventional outlook: •Can you name any incentives for innovation? •How do innovators get seen? •Are there any leaders who are innovators? •How does innovation get paid for?
37. “It’s easier to allocate maintenance money efficiently than money for new projects.”
38. Additional considerations •Gaps in sociocultural understanding •Governance of maintenance •Policymakers for maintenance •Who’s teaching maintenance? How should it be taught?
39. It’s not all gloomy Epilogue
44. Joint grant initiative between NEH and IMLS
45. Report sponsored by Ford and Sloan Joint grant initiative between Ford and Sloan
46. A humanities-grounded project!
47. Parting thoughts / questions •Where are the models for maintenance in academic libraries / IT? •How do we talk about “care work”—the work of maintenance—with administrators? •The cloud is increasingly the infrastructure of choice. In what ways are we / should we be preparing?
48. Keep in touch: ph@mellon.org | @pmhswe Thank you! Questions | Discussion