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SHOT: fundamental principles and techological imperatives

All work on this site is guided by three technological imperatives for openness: open data/open source material, openly accessible on the internet, based on open standards. Each technological imperative derives from fundamental principles of humanistic scholarship.

Since all scholarship depends on the open exchange of ideas and information, all scholars are obliged as a matter of professional ethics to open their work to others: to professional peers, to others interested in their subject, and (especially for scholars in the humanities) to the scholars and interested publics of future generations. We must think carefully about how we conduct our scholarly work since these decisions directly affect how well we satisfy these professional ethical obligations.

Open data/open source material. Opening our work to the peer review of others in our profession is the basis for validation in scholarship. Meaningful peer review tests scholars' results by replicating the full process of their work. Effective peer review is therefore not possible without access to all of the primary source material or data. When scholarship analyzes or manipulates information computationally, effective peer review requires full access to those computational procedures as well.

This principle of openness to peer review has direct implications for the technological implementation of a scholarly project: it must provide open data and open source code. Although focused on the natural sciences, the description of the relation of open source work and open science from the Open Science Project is generically applicable to scholarship in any discipline.

Openly accessible on the internet. While the community of professional scholars provides the primary system of review of individual scholarly works, the society that supports a community of professional scholars provides the ultimate review of the larger scholarly endeavor. It is especially urgent that humanists open their work to non-professional audiences. The tangible benefits to society of work in science and engineering may justify those disciplines in the eyes of many people, whether the underlying scholarship makes sense to them or not, but if scholarship in the humanities appears uninteresting or unintelligible to a non-professional public, scholars' claims that our work can enrich our lives with a fuller sense of what it means to be human will be justifiably rejected -- or simply ignored.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have an unrivalled opportunity to open our work to people outside the narrow circle of "like-minded, similarly trained, and similarly situated colleagues" (Ross Scaife, on the home page for his site Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World). The internet connects us today to a literate global audience that is unparalleled in human history, and would have been unthinkable only a decade or two ago. The technological conclusion is obvious: whatever other media a scholarly project in the humanities exploits, it should be openly available on the internet.

Based on open standards. Because the humanities' interest in cultures beyond our own encompasses the whole range of human experience in the past as well as the present, humanists have a unique obligation to preserve cultural traditions for future generations. When we study the plays of Shakespeare, Shang dynasty bronzes, or pottery sherds from Neolithic Thessaly, we assert not only that these are relevant subjects for us today, but also that they will be for future scholars as well. Past scholarship even becomes a subject of humanistic study: Galileo's notebooks are no longer relevant for research in physics, but they are central to research in the history of scientific thought. (See a prototype electronic publication of Galileo's "Notes on Motion" from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.)

No physical medium is permanent, but digitally encoded information has one crucial difference from all analog information: it can be reproduced unchanged, and therefore is not bound to a single physical medium. Research libraries the world over are wrestling with the problem of preserving crumbling books published on acidic paper in the nineteenth century because photocopied or microfilmed reproductions of those books are poor substitutes for the originals. The music industry is wrestling with CD users copying digital music on a compact disk to writable CDs, magnetic disks on computers, or MP3 players precisely because there is no difference between the original and the copy.

To preserve scholarly work for future generations, we are free to use different digital media, but must ensure that our digitally encoded work will remain legible beyond the lifespan of rapidly outdated software and hardware. Our only hope for achieving that is through our third technological imperative: reliance on open, non-proprietary standards for representing data and computational processes. You can be fairly confident that a document you create using a proprietary word processor today will be difficult or impossible to use in ten or twenty years, and as good as certain that it will be useless even if physically preserved in a century. You can be equally certain that a document structured with an open standard like XML or SGML will be legible in decades and beyond. Even when these standards are surpassed, the fact that they are open standards applied to a large body of material means that it will be both desirable and possible to translate their structures to whatever successors evolve.

From principles to their application. In the technologies section of this website, we offer a humanist's perspective on how to follow these technological imperatives using the open-source tools that are available today.