Humanities: Cyberinfrastructure and Supercomputing Potential and Needs

Scott Poole, Kevin Franklin, Michael Welge

• HASS Computational Science will be a breakthrough area in the next ten years

• Illinois—I-CHASS and NCSA—positioned to be leaders

• NSF-NEH other agencies beginning to collaborate to fund HASS projects

• I-CHASS has $1.2 million funded projects related to Humanities

• Million CPU competitions have attracted numerous humanities related applications

NCSA Strategic Planning Presentation (April 20,2010)

Grand Challenge: Achieving a New Level of Understanding our Historical and Cultural Heritage Through Computational Humanities

• Huge corpora of documents, works of art, images, artifacts• Traditional scholarship focuses on limited sample and

relies on human discernment and insight• Can be supplemented by HPC and Supercomputing• Examples:

• Digging Into Data: Searching, Characterizing, and Mining Images• Networked Environment for Music Analysis• Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research

(SEASR)• HathiTrust Research Center (Google Books)• 18th Connect

Grand Challenge: Critical Analysis of Social IssuesThrough Computational Humanities

• “Culture Wars”, Disempowerment, Prejudice• Potential for Computational Humanities to Shed New

Light on Issues Traditionally Addressed by Critical Scholars

• Examples:• Clash of Civilizations

• CI-TEAM Proposal: Peace and Non-Violence through Classroom and Service Learning-based Cyberinfrastructure

Bottlenecks/Issues to Achieving Objectives

• Need to Develop and Scale Up Data Intensive Applications for Text, Audio and Image Analytics—Integrated workflows like SEASR

• Need to Handle Huge Amounts of Multimodal Data at all Stages: Ingest, Correction, Curation, Provenance, Analysis, and Information Visualization —Need high quality storage, cloud capabilities

• Virtual World Capabilities

NCSA Strategic Planning Presentation (April 20,2010)

Cyberinfrastructure Challenges in Reaching the Objectives• ability to compare and to conduct analytics on billions of documents, images,

artifacts, etc.• curation of data for centuries• analysis of diverse data sets• fusion of data from multiple sources (e.g. images, text, GIS)• linguistic analysis of large datasets of spoken language• ability to compare observations and modeling, • handling of real-time data streams• handling and analyzing complex data structures• workflow tools to handle complex processes• parallel analysis/data mining • visualization tools for understanding large and/or mutliple source data• persistent virtual worlds of massive complexity (both VR and Synthetic worlds • collaborations among humanists, technologists (for above technological

capabilites), and translators/project managers

NCSA Strategic Planning Presentation (April 20,2010)

References

• Recent ARCTA Conference in Washington DC• NSF, NEH people• Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital

Scholarship (CLIR-NEH Report)• HathiTrust Research Center RFP• Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research

(Mellon)• Geospatial Technologies in the Humanities (SCI)• The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud

Computing (Educause)• No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st

Century (IMSL)• Our Cultural Commonwealth (ACLS)• CATCH: Continuous Access to Our Cultural Heritage (NWO)