Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) Interim Report on Planning Grant
I. Summary of planning meeting
A planning meeting for MESA was held May 2-3, 2011 at Johns Hopkins University. In attendance were representatives from the following organizations and projects (see Appendix for a full agenda and list of participants):
18thConnect
Council on Library and Information Resources
Digital Medievalist
e-codices
The Medieval Academy of America
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship
Parker on the Web
Perseus Project
Roman de la Rose Digital Library
Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image
Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts
The Walters Art Museum
The purpose of the meeting was to explore the feasibility of creating a federation of electronic medieval scholarly projects, as well as to articulate the needs of the community that such a federation should attempt to meet. We were particularly interested in determining whether the medieval studies community could easily adapt the technological and social structures of extant federations and aggregators, i.e., NINES and 18thConnect, or whether that model would need to be substantially rethought. Additionally, we sought to explore the possibilities of MESA partnering with extant peer reviewing bodies, including the Medieval Academy of America (specifically their Digital Initiatives Advisory Board) and Digital Medievalist, and of MESA being designed from the outset to connect to other period-specific federations or projects, from classics through the nineteenth-century and beyond.
There was widespread agreement that the field of medieval studies is in need of a federation of digital projects as well as an aggregator of content. Meeting participants expressed that the primary needs that MESA should address are peer review and branding of electronic scholarship and aggregated searching of content from one portal. A number of other possible goals were mentioned, including addressing problems within the tenure process (as concerns digital scholarship), fostering global relationships in the field of medieval studies (e.g., by including Arabic manuscripts and scholars), and addressing problems with sustainability and permanence of the data created by constituent members of the federation. While there was broad agreement that these are important considerations that will impact MESA and potential members of the federation, there was less agreement that they should be goals of MESA, as these problems extend well beyond the medieval studies community.
By the end of the two days of meetings, the group had agreed that the creation of MESA has the potential to fill many needs in the community, and defined a set of questions that would have to be answered before moving ahead with planning and implementing the federation. There was unanimous agreement that a steering committee should be formed to address the following questions:
- Should MESA use the technological infrastructure created by NINES and successfully adapted by 18thConnect?
- Should MESA model its social organization on that of NINES?
- How should MESA relate to other organizations in medieval studies, e.g., the Medieval Academy of America and Digital Medievalist? And should MESA align itself with initiatives to expand the federation beyond disciplinary boundaries; specifically, should it become part of the proposed Advanced Research Consortium and/or link to projects in the field of classics?
- What should the limits of MESA be in terms of time period, language, and content?
Additionally, the steering committee was tasked with creating a mission statement for MESA.
II. Steering Committee
Following the planning meeting, a message was sent to all attendees soliciting volunteers to serve on the steering committee. The committee currently comprises the following members:
James Cummings (University of Oxford, Digital Medievalist)
Christoph Flüeler (Universität Freiburg, e-codices)
Will Noel (Walters Art Museum)
Dan O’Donnell (University of Lethbridge, Medieval Academy)
Dot Porter (Indiana University)
Lynn Ransom (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image)
Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan)
Stephen Shepherd (Loyola Marymount University, SEENET)
Timothy Stinson (North Carolina State University)
The steering committee held a conference call on June 13, 2011 to address the above issues. To date, the following conclusions have been reached:
- There was unanimous support for creating an implementation of MESA utilizing the technological infrastructure currently employed by NINES and 18thConnect (i.e., the Collex platform). There are a number of reasons that this seems prudent: 1) both of these federations have a proven track record of aggregating content and facilitating simultaneous searching of multiple repositories; 2) this approach is efficient in terms of staff time and the fact that little technological development will have to be undertaken by MESA; 3) this approach reduces costly redundancy; 4) the success of 18thConnect in adapting the NINES architecture suggests that it is “plug and play” friendly; 5) this positions MESA to participate in the new ARC initiative. Adapting the NINES/ARC model would allow MESA participants to address immediately some core problems facing scholars using digital media in medieval studies (notably, robust and wide-ranging peer-review facilities), and offer a starting point for the development of facilities appropriate to medievalist scholarly communities not presently provided by NINES/ARC.
- NINES is headed by an Executive Council and organized into three areas – American, Romantic, and Victorian – each with its own editorial board that handles peer review. MESA will need an executive board, but we cannot as easily divide ourselves into editorial boards. Whereas NINES and 18thConnect primarily feature Anglo-American literary content, MESA’s content will be multilingual and the disciplines encompassed will likely include literature, theology, history, art history, music history, architectural history, and more. We hope instead to leverage the peer reviewing expertise of extant organizations and groups, such as the Medieval Academy and Digital Medievalist, and to continue to build partnerships with other extant organizations and communities that provide peer review for one another (e.g., Anglo-Saxonists, art historians).
- During the planning meeting, some proposed that MESA should become an autonomous committee of the Medieval Academy, and others that it should become a node of the proposed Advanced Research Consortium. The steering committee sees the potential of significant benefit from collaboration with both the MAA and ARC, but emphasizes that MESA should remain autonomous and self-governing. Because ARC focuses on mutual aggregation and discovery of content and does not propose overarching governance of nodes (i.e., each will remain independent as it now is), it is a good match for our goals. And because MESA is seeking expertise in peer review and brand recognition while at the same time the MAA is seeking to expand its commitment to and presence in electronic scholarship within the field of medieval studies, both sides agree that there is much potential for and promise in collaboration. Discussions with the MAA regarding what form such collaboration should take are ongoing.
- There was much discussion during the planning meeting regarding what the boundaries of MESA should be. These boundaries may be temporal (e.g., our shared borders with the fields of classics and early modern studies), geographical (do we include Africa and Asia?), and linguistic (both in terms of content and in terms of the language of the site and associated documents, support information, et al.). While we must make an administrative decision regarding the modern language(s) in which we conduct business and design our site (an English-language site alone may be sufficient due to its status as the leading international language of business and scholarship), the committee has not yet made any formal recommendations for other boundaries. We plan instead to invite a group of partners at the outset, most of which are projects centered on western European manuscript collections, and to allow the community to grow organically from that nucleus, with the appropriateness of each new project or resourced judged on an individual basis. Essentially, the community will be permitted to set its own boundaries regarding what constitutes our community on a case by case basis, just as it does with journals, professional societies, monograph series, and other scholarly practices and products.
After discussing these topics, the steering committee formed a subcommittee tasked with two things: 1) crafting a mission statement; and 2) developing a recruitment strategy
III. Mission statement and recruitment plan
The subcommittee (which comprises Christoph Flüeler, Will Noel, Dan O’Donnell, Dot Porter, and Tim Stinson) drafted the following mission statement:
“The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) is a federated international community of scholars, projects, institutions, and organizations engaged in digital scholarship within the field of medieval studies. MESA seeks both to provide a community for those engaged in digital medieval studies and to meet emerging needs of this community, including peer review of electronic scholarship, the aggregation of data, and the ability to discover and repurpose this data.”
As the statement makes clear, our plan for MESA centers on peer review and aggregation; while the committee recognizes the value of other goals for MESA expressed during the planning meeting, we also feel that these two goals form the core of MESA and meet the most salient needs of the community. We hope that MESA will evolve in such a way that it can contribute to other needs (e.g., the creation of new tools or advising on tenure policies), but at this time we believe that it is best to limit our focus to these priorities.
Having defined the mission of MESA and provided preliminary responses to some of the questions and issues raised at the planning meeting, the steering committee has now turned its attention to the recruitment of constituent members of MESA. A preliminary step to this is identifying the sorts of projects that MESA needs in order to succeed as well as those projects that would most benefit from MESA, as such partners will have a stake in the success of the federation. Ideally, we would like to see a mix of the following constituents:
Well-established projects that bring with them prestige, well-formed metadata, rich content, and project teams who will be capable of formatting data with the necessary RDF hooks to make aggregation possible. Examples include the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, Parker on the Web, and e-codices.
Individual scholars and small projects, including those that have not yet attracted significant external funding and/or are at institutions that do not provide adequate resources to support digital humanities projects. Such projects need broader exposure, and are usually in need of peer review.
Scholarly societies, which can provide brand recognition and expertise in peer review while benefitting from the technical expertise and understanding of how technology is transforming medieval studies offered the members of MESA.
Publishers, who provide access to both scholarship and surrogates of primary materials; both NINES and 18thConnect have demonstrated fruitful collaborations with publishers, such as the collaboration between Gale Cengage and 18thConnect.
The steering committee has been compiling a list of potential partner projects, and will invite a group of these to participate in the initial implementation of MESA. The work of identifying partners, as well as of refining our notion of what groups should constitute MESA and what their roles will be, is ongoing.
IV. Moving forward: Developing a plan for implementation
Since the steering committee approved the use of the NINES/18thConnect infrastructure for the implementation of NINES and expressed its hopes that MESA can be a node of ARC linked to these projects, Dot Porter and Timothy Stinson have been working in close collaboration with the project staffs of these organizations. Porter and Stinson will visit the campus of Texas A&M University on September 22-23, 2011 to meet with Laura Mandell, Andrew Stauffer, Dana Wheeles, and project staff from ARC, the development of which is being supported by Texas A&M’s Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture. ARC has volunteered the time of a programmer and project manager to help launch MESA, and the meeting will focus on the requirements of building an implementation using Collex.
After this meeting, Porter and Stinson will have a clear sense of both the planned community of MESA (which is still being discussed and defined by the steering committee) and the technological requirements, and will be positioned to seek a multi-year implementation grant to make MESA a reality.
Appendix: First Planning Meeting Agenda and List of Participants
Agenda for Planning Meeting
Day One
9:30-9:45 Opening remarks, welcome
9:45-10:30 Brief project reports and updates: Roman de la Rose Digital Library,
SEENET, e-codices
10:30-11:00 Break
11:00-11:30 Brief project reports: Walters Art Museum, Parker on the Web
11:30-12:00 Presentation
The Medieval Academy’s digital initiatives – Dan O’Donnell
12:00-13:15 Lunch break
13:15-14:00 Presentation
How NINES works: technology and social practice – Dana Wheeles
14:00-14:15 Presentation
Architecture for distributed scholarly work – Peter Robinson
14:15-14:45 Presentation
Classics and Digital Media – Greg Crane/Tom Elliott
Overview of the state of the digital classics on a high level, especially with regards to shared data and shared infrastructure. Advice and suggestions for what works and what doesn’t. Possibilities for connection the fields (Late Antiquity overlap with early Medieval)
14:45-15:15 Break
15:15-16:00 Presentation
Recent interoperability initiatives – John Haeger/Stephen Nichols
16:00-16:45 Discussion session
Technology requirements – Dana Wheeles/Mark Patton/Mike Toth
16:45-17:15 Break
17:15- 18:00 Discussion session
Sustainability -James Cummings/Stephen Shepherd/Timothy Stinson
19:30 Dinner – The Helmand, 806 North Charles Street
Day Two
9:30-10:30 Presentation
The future of NINES and the world library – A. Stauffer/Laura Mandell
10:30-11:00 Break
11:00-12:00 Discussion session
Peer Review – Hoyt Duggan/John Carlson
12:00-13:30 Lunch break
13:30-14:30 Discussion session
Rethinking NINES: What will medievalists need to do differently?
Dot Porter/Will Noel/Christoph Flüeler
14:30-15:30 Discussion session
Putting it all together: Libraries, Scholarly Societies, and Funding Agencies
Chuck Henry/Eileen Gardiner/Ronald Musto/Sayeed Choudhury
15:30-16:00 Break
16:00-17:00 Closing Roundtable: Where do we go from here?
Workshop Participants
Dot Porter, co-organizer (Bloomington), Associate Director for Digital Library
Content and Services at Indiana University, past research associate on several digital medieval projects, past member of the Digital Medievalist Board and past chair of the Medieval Academy of America’s Digital Initiatives Advisory Board
Timothy Stinson, co-organizer (Raleigh), Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University, chair of the Medieval Academy of America’s Committee on Electronic Resources, member of Roman de la Rose Digital Advisory Board, and co-editor of the Siege of Jerusalem Electronic Archive
Nadia Altschul (Baltimore), Visiting Assistant Professor, German and Romance Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University, Roman de la Rose Digital Advisory Board
John Carlson (New Haven), Digital Production Editor at Yale University Press, past associate with the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET), and co-editor of the Siege of Jerusalem Electronic Archive
Sayeed Choudhury (Baltimore), Associate Dean of Libraries and the Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, Johns Hopkins University, co-PI of Roman de la Rose Digital Library
Gregory R. Crane (Boston), Professor of Classical Studies and Editor in Chief of the Perseus Project at Tufts University
James Cummings (Oxford, UK), Senior Research Technologist for the Research Technologies Service (RTS) at the University of Oxford, and director of the executive board of the Digital Medievalist project
Timothy DiLauro (Baltimore), Digital Library Architect, Library Digital Programs, Johns Hopkins University
Gail Duggan (Charlottesville), Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts
Hoyt Duggan (Charlottesville), Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Virginia and Director of the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts
Tom Elliott (Huntsville), Associate Director for Digital Programs and Senior Research Scholar, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
Christoph Flüeler (Fribourg), Professor-in im Forschungsaufenthalt at the Institut d’études médiévales, University of Fribourg, and president of the Curatorium of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), which oversees the development of the e-codices project
Eileen Gardiner (New York), co-Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America, and Editor, Speculum
John Haeger (Stanford), Special Projects Director at Stanford University and Project Manager of the Parker on the Web project
Charles Henry (Washington, D.C.), President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, a dean of the Frye Leadership Institute, advisory board member of Stanford University Libraries
Laura Mandell (Miami, OH), Professor of English, Miami University, Director of 18thConnect, Associate Director of NINES
Ronald Musto (New York), co-Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America, and Editor, Speculum
Stephen Nichols (Baltimore), James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, co-PI of Roman de la Rose Digital Library
William Noel (Baltimore), Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum and Director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project
Dan O’Donnell (Lethbridge, Alberta), Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, former Board Chair and CEO of the TEI, chair of the Medieval Academy of America’s Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, and founding director of the Digital Medievalist Project
Jeanette Patterson (Baltimore), Doctoral candidate, Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures
Mark Patton (Baltimore), Senior Programmer at the Digital Research and Curation Center, Johns Hopkins University, programmer for Roman de la Rose Digital Library
Lynn Ransom (Baltimore), Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image, The University of Pennsylvania Libraries
David Reynolds (Baltimore), Manager of Scholarly Digital Initiatives, Johns Hopkins University
Peter Robinson (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan
Stephen Shepherd (Los Angeles), Professor, Department of English, Loyola Marymount University
Andrew Stauffer (Charlottesville), Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Virginia and Director of NINES
Mike Toth (Oakton, VA), manager of the Archimedes Palimpsest project
Dana Wheeles (Charlottesville), Doctoral candidate, McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia, project manager of NINES
Cynthia York (Baltimore), Project Manager, Library Digital Programs, Johns Hopkins University