There is a growing recognition that effective CI cannot simply be produced by one field for utilization by other fields but that its very conception and production must be interdisciplinary: “No single academic discipline or point of view is sufficient to comprehend all the implications of cyberinfrastructure.”5 If CI participation is relegated to science and engineering fields, then important questions are going unasked, research is not being pursued, approaches not realized—not only in other disciplines, but in computer science engineering itself. HASS scholars bring a different dimension to research questions: not how to accomplish X, but why; who benefits, who doesn’t, what are the latent implications? Computer scientists working with HASS researchers can think in new ways about what data is valuable and how it can be accessed for comparative analysis. Bringing these fields together in the creation of CI is essential for preparing current and future generations of scientists, scholars, and educators for its use and design, and in training broader, more diverse constituencies for its expanded utilization.
2 Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities, 2006, p. 18-19 (25-26 in pdf). www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf
3 Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities, 2006, pp. 15, 19 (22, 26 in pdf). www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf
4 HOLC Division of Research and Statistics with Cooperation of the Appraisal Department, San Diego, October 20, 1936.
5 Berman, F., Brady, H. Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Final Report, 2005, p. 11 (9 in pdf). www.sdsc.edu/sbe/