A general tool for a special use: Supporting the arts and humanities with e-Infrastructures

By Danielle Venton, CERN, Switzerland

In its early days, the Web was primarily an exclusive, though not a closed, party. Its main attendees were elites in the physics and computer science communities. Today the bulk of the developed and developing world is involved. Every sector of society puts the Web to use: your local dance company, church and city council likely all have Web sites, allowing all-new levels of communication and sharing.
Similarly, the use of e-Infrastructures (such as distributed computing systems) to manage data was initially confined to specialised communities. Today, however, nearly all researchers, including those in the arts and humanities, can use distributed computing, and every year more do. And, like the Web, this technology is enabling research in ways that were previously impossible. While the application an archaeology researcher uses might be field-specific, the e-Infrastructure used to support that application is probably the same as that used by their colleague in the physics department. Consider the work of Nicolas Ray: a researcher at the Computational and Molecular Population Genetics Lab at the University of Bern, Switzerland, Ray reconstructs early human migrations using the genetic diversity of current populations. Ray says that new statistical tools, larger data sets and the robust computing power of computing grids mean he can now examine human migration in greater detail than ever before.
“This is a very exciting field right now—we have so much to study,” he says. “The technology required to obtain genetic data is much cheaper now. We can acquire a large number of genetic markers in many individuals, and obtain data much more rapidly than before.” In a similar case, Nick Malleson, a researcher at Leeds University, depends on the UK’s National Grid Service (NGS) to power a computer model he has designed to forecast burglary rates. While an imperfect science, Malleson’s model attempts to identify general trends based on a neighbourhood’s social structure, geography, proximity to public transportation, and the presence of security systems. Malleson hopes this will help neighbourhoods to predict and prevent crime. The computing systems used by both Malleson and Ray are also used by physicists, computational chemists and geologists. The best way for a national e-Infrastructure to support researchers is therefore by supporting general e-Infrastructure.
Existing infrastructures present a good starting point for the next crop of large-scale research infrastructures. Many of these infrastructures, detailed in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap, will concentrate on human culture and preservation. For example: The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) will interweave digital archives across Europe with language data and tools for computer-aided language processing. The European Social Survey, initiated by the European Science Foundation in June 2001, monitors social values in Europe over time and is now seeking continuation and expansion. This project is improving the rigour of comparative sociology in Europe and beyond.
The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) will collect and support digitally enabled documents and images for research across the humanities and arts. Each of these initiatives is examining Europe’s existing public grid infrastructure in closer detail.
“These existing platforms automatically fulfill the vast majority of a new research community’s needs, and the remaining requirements can be customized and tailored individually,” says Steven Newhouse, EGEE technical director and EGI.eu16 interim director.
“This is a huge advantage for projects in all fields looking to fill their data needs. Plugging into existing systems allows the next generation of research projects to focus on their science rather than on infrastructure provision.”