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Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory
Developing humane technologies and technological humanism

HASTAC (“Haystack”) is a consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, and engineers from the nation’s leading institutions dedicated to working together to develop innovative computing and information systems that support interdisciplinary research and teaching in the humanities and arts and that stretch the possibilities and applications of existing computational technologies.

HASTAC’s vision of the humanities is problem- or issue-based and collaborative in nature. This is an expansive, interdisciplinary version of the humanities which demands the incorporation of goals of “knowledge for its own sake” with the goals of “knowledge with a purpose.” HASTAC insists that we understand not only the product but also the process of collaborative invention, its applications and environmental impact. For we believe that by analyzing social and environmental impacts of past and present technologies, we can help create better technologies for the future, and better users of those technologies.

This vision seeks to extend the specialized knowledge produced by the traditional humanistic fields across disciplines, historical periods, and regions. It demands innovative information and communications tools and analytical methods. Under the guidance of leading researchers, HASTAC collaborations will identify major research projects that have broad impact and draw on key issues and cutting-edge knowledge in literature, history, art, music, archeology, classics, languages, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science as well as the interdisciplinary formations of religious, ethnic, gender, and cultural studies.

Inspired by the questions that humanists and artists ask, projects will be structured to design new, innovative automated data acquisition, synchronization, registration, retrieval, and communication tools and integration portals. These new tools will allow the integration of data never before brought together, extending far beyond traditional texts and images to include buildings, caves, landscapes and archeological sites, sculptures and other representations of three-dimensional objects, paintings, recordings, movies and oral history videos, as well as all other forms of human creativity. The sheer volume of materials being produced and archived since the rise of media such as photography, film, television, recorded sound, video, and the like renders untenable the traditional, purely “accumulative” approaches to conservation and study . The media in question are themselves often volatile and not everything can be saved at the same level of conservation. Well-informed and farsighted judgments regarding such challenges must be made and will be an integral part of the work on each project.

Researchers will be able to fuse information about the environment (climate, topography, watersheds, vegetation) to archeological, linguistic, and sociological evidence of migration patterns and trade routes (whether by camel, ship, or internet). Military and social histories could also be overlaid onto the emerging picture, as well as achievements, and artifacts, the development and dispersion of religions, and literary, philosophical, and artist productions. These new technological developments will enable both pinpoint specificity and overviews that could be generalized to parallel or contrasting circumstances with profound implications and in ways not even imaginable to previous generations of scholars. Whether studying Machu Picchu or ancient Hyderabad, the Old Silk Road or Middle Passage, Renaissance Florence or contemporary L.A., the biblical Near East or the modern Middle East, researchers will be able to make new inferences about how cultures have evolved, test theories of why certain cultures, regions, or religions have flourished and others fallen throughout time, and to determine the consequences of this historical understanding for the geopolitics of the way people live and behave today.

The next phase of cyber-humanities we envision here will change how we know and teach the humanities, how we create and preserve artistic works and all our cultural heritage, how we conceive of the next generation of computational science, and most crucially how we understand the nation’s relations to the complex world and its regions in which we are embedded. It will also see fundamental transformations in the ways in which knowledge is produced. Whereas humanities research and training have long been based upon and individualized model of scholarship, the digital present and future call for new models of collaboration, multiple authorship, and hands-on training that will contribute to a closing of the gap between disciplinary practices in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

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