A statement from the CDI conference

I had a "double take" moment when this came out of a conference speaker's mouth, but I'll have to think about it...

"Teaching is to research as confession is to sin. You really can't do one without the other."

More precisely, you really can't deliver the former with any credibility until the latter has been given form.

CI, CDI, and myopic disciplinarity

I'm currently attending the NSF Symposium on CDI (Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. We're coming to a close on the first morning's panel, and I'm already frustrated with the absent voices of the social science and humanities in this discussion. Even during the Q&A period, several audience members have started off their questions with, "I know that all of us here are computer scientists..."

The stated objective of the CDI agenda is to enhance American competitiveness by enabling innovation through the use of computational models, methods, and tools. Interestingly, one question arose about the comparative visions of CDI and Cyberinfrastructure (CI).The answer was that they are complementary. One of the CDI director’s goals is to maximize the utility of investments in CI. Projects that come out of CDI will both use and develop CI. “We see CI as the deployment of the things CDI creates.”

I can live with the idea that "cyber-enabled" has a strong computational component, and that there are particular fields or disciplines that are already computational in nature, or are easily expressed in ways that are manipulable by computing technologies. What I can't live with is the sense of dread that I get when I listen to the discussion, and hear the door being slammed on the social sciences and humanities. It's not that the computer scientists don't care (though I suspect that they don't)...these non-quantified fields never even occur to them as relevant. (To be fair, though, I think that the social sciences and humanities, by and large, have the same ignoring or dismissive attitude toward engineering and the natural and physical sciences in terms of relevance. The small community of social science and humanities scholars who are thinking about cyberinfrastructure and CDI haven't yet convinced their constituent communities of the on-the-ground importance, the connection to funding, and the fact that there is an important poker game happening and they are not at the table.

It seems that the larger humanities and social science communities, if they are paying attention to CI and CDI at all, are much like Frank Rhodes' quote about the future of the research university - “I wonder at times if we are not like the dinosaurs, looking up at the sky at the approaching comet and wondering whether it has an implication for our future."

I guess what I'm saying here is that I'm disenchanted with the attention, development, and resources - in short, the privilege - that the computer, natural, and physical sciences receive in the cyber-enabled world. The social sciences and humanities make noise that that they are not just relevant, but important to CI and CDI - but we must face the harsh reality that the social scientists and humanities scholars are not remediating themselves, not changing or evolving, and certainly not taking an active role in shifting the topology of CI- and CDI-based technologies to be more relevant to their own fields, data, and scholarship. And even if they are trying, they are not doing it quickly enough. They (we?) are being left behind, orphaned by the academic and reearch infrastructure that they are relying on to protect them.