Link: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/ThingstoDoWhileWaitingfor/46969

The current Educause Review contains a well-annotated case and recommendations for building cyberinfrastructure for the Liberal Arts.

The key premise of authors David Green and Michael Roy is the chicken-and-egg paradox of cyberinfrastructure and digital scholarship:

One of the biggest issues surrounding cyberinfrastructure and the liberal arts is that, overall, a major cultural shift in both the conceptualization and the practice of scholarship is required to take full advantage of what is being offered. Even though National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Arden L. Bement Jr. promises radical, even revolutionary, developments in computing, networking, and storage capacities—from grid computing to huge sensor arrays and data storage to new visualization capacities—individual scientists will not, in general, experience a major behavioral shift. True, more scientists may rely on vast data repositories like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (http://www.sdss.org/) or the GenBank database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/) instead of on their own research or experimental data, but for most, the transition will be a quantitative change. But for scholars in the liberal arts—those in the humanities and social sciences, for example, a major paradigm shift is required, both in intellectual outlook and in social organization.

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