Towards a Systems Analysis of the Humanities
James Smithies · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2017
Millions of dollars in funding have been spent on global research infrastructure over the past decades, with considerably more required as computationally intensive work increases across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The trend has profound implications for the construction of knowledge and meaning. Questions are often raised about whether humanities infrastructure should be modelled on more dominant STEM infrastructures, given they have more mature examples but function in fundamentally different ways. More radically, a preliminary systems analysis of global humanities cyberinfrastructure suggests it is significantly larger and more complex than STEM infrastructures, and that management and development of it needs to be taken far more seriously than it currently is.