Date: 07/31/2006

The humanities and social sciences need to do more to build a digital infrastructure for their disciplines, according to a new report from the American Council of Learned Societies. The report, released Thursday, July 27, notes the sciences have already made significant progress toward creating a "cyberinfrastructure," which "means more than just hardware and software, more than bigger computer boxes and wider pipes and wires connecting them. The term was coined by the National Science Foundation to describe the new research environments in which high-performance computing tools are available to researchers in a shared network environment." The report recommends that universities and the federal government invest more in open-access projects for the humanities and social sciences. However, such work would require collaboration, which contrasts with the solitary scholar culture of these two fields. Read the report.