06/03/2020

Humanities Research Infrastructure is Great ROI

Will we sell it short?

Infrastructure is what enables, whether for education, sanitation or transportation for example, the development and movement of ideas and goods and services. It’s so obviously necessary that it is, perversely, regularly under-resourced. “Infrastructure week” has become a political joke in that it is always just around the corner of everyone’s best intentions but rarely garners the necessary attention or funding. The American Society for Civil Engineering’s Infrastructure Report Card, reports from the National Academy of Engineering, and more illustrate just how short-sighted it is to under-invest in physical infrastructure such as bridges and dams. The infrastructure for producing and sharing knowledge — research infrastructure — is similarly vital.

In the wake of COVID-19, which is decimating budgets everywhere, I worry that the humanities – including humanities infrastructure — may suffer when we need them most. For as much as we need science to help us comprehend and respond to this coronavirus, for just one recent resonant example, we need the humanities and social sciences to show us how and why its impact is differential and what the long history of pandemic inequalities should be teaching us. We need investment in the infrastructures that support advanced humanities research and help make that accessible research for the public good. But while there are organizations and groups of scholars attentive to humanities research infrastructure, in the wider scholarly communications industry there seems to be too little understanding of what it is, what it does, and thus why we should be investing in it.

Over the last year I’ve spoken at several conferences about the features of humanities research infrastructure, including the April 2020 Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) webinar on “Building a Sustainable Research Infrastructure.” Alice Meadows, who convened the group, followed up with a post summarizing the webinar and the shared sense that “a strong and sustainable research infrastructure — the tools, services and systems that support the research process — is vital.” We all focused on persistent identifiers (PIDs), though for my colleagues in the webinar this was primarily about increasing the discoverability and usability of scientific research, and reducing friction, overlap and incompatibility in systems and tools. (I’m summarizing a rich discussion here, and Alice’s post also shared the very interesting feedback from attendees whose responses to different questions about infrastructure were captured in word clouds.)

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.