RESPONSE TO THE STEWARDING EXCELLENCE PROJECT TEAM
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE ILLINOIS INFORMATICS INSTITUTE (I3)
John Unsworth
Director, I3
Dean, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
We would like to thank the Small Centers and Initiatives Committee for their hard
work in putting together such a comprehensive report. In general, we believe that
I3 is fairly portrayed by the committee. We would, however, like to take this
opportunity to address a number of points that the committee makes in their report.
We will start by responding to general comments about and recommendations for
I3 and will then address some errors. Finally we will address comments specific to
the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS)
and the Community Informatics Initiative (CII).
Illinois Informatics Institute (I3)
Summary Points:
 We support a framework for centers and initiatives and want to work with
the Provost to develop an explicit agreement for I3.
 Interdisciplinary and campus-wide initiatives are necessary for innovations
in research and education that do not fit neatly in established disciplinary or
administrative structures.
 I3 needs a full-time director and needs to enfranchise more interested
faculty.
 There are areas of confusion related to I3 and I-CHASS that are reiterated
below; these issues are crucial for a good grasp of the current situation.
 I-CHASS is a research incubator and network builder rather than a tool
developer
 Individuals and organizations in partner communities are as crucial to any
campus-based engagement efforts as the faculty involved. Thus community
informatics offers rich possibilities for teaching and research about the
university and its publics.
 Campus-wide interdisciplinary community engagement must be informed by
ongoing evaluation by students, faculty and community partners.
Response to Comments/Recommendations:
* We think it's a good idea, going forward, to have a framework for initiatives and
centers such as the one proposed in the report, to help understand what kind of
effort is being made, what's expected, and what the conditions are under which
support might be extended or terminated, after the initial period of funding. We
think it is both possible and desirable for existing centers and institutes to work
with the Provost's office to develop an explicit understanding of where they fit in the
proposed typology of centers, and of the terms on which they will be evaluated. I3
and its constituent elements would be happy to work out such an agreement with
the Provost, and we hope that it would include a path to sustainability that is
connected to activity I3 generates and supervises on the educational and research
fronts.
* We think it is necessary for campus to support some interdisciplinary and campuswide initiatives at the Provost's level, because the problems that face the world, and
that require innovations in research and education, rarely nest neatly in the
administrative or disciplinary structures of the university. Informatics is clearly a
case in point, and we note the report's affirmation of the importance of this
endeavor and the need for continued, even increased, funding. Further, as some of
the public comments demonstrate, there is an unfortunate tendency to think
narrowly about where such initiatives should be based, with the usual answer being
"in my College, and not elsewhere." At the same time, initiatives that are perceived
as belonging to one College or School are perceived as unavailable and unwelcoming
to others. This is another reason (political rather than intellectual) for having
campus-level centers and institutes.
* We agree that I3 needs a director without other administrative duties, who can
focus on developing the Institute to its full potential, and we have started the
process of posting that position for an internal-to-campus search, to be carried out
early in the fall semester.
* We agree that I3 needs to do more to enfranchise interested faculty, and it needs
to make better use of its steering and research advisory committees. We also agree
that it needs to do things to become more visible on campus such as funding more
symposia, brown bags and workshops. In I3's defense, though, we did put funding
into a number of symposia, speakers, and workshops around campus, in partnership
with other units; also, this past year involved major renovations and a move, a
dramatic decrease in available resources, and a focus on developing some research
and educational initiatives that will bear fruit, and become much more visible, in the
coming year.
Areas of Confusion:
* Considerable confusion and some errors remain in the report, despite our having
called many of these things to the attention of the committee in the fact-checking
phase of the process. In particular, the report remains confused about the proposed
informatics major. On page 7, it says that the proposed Major "raises fundamental
issues around the capacity of a university major to operate outside a formal
academic home" -- and yet in our interviews with the committee and in our
response to the draft report, we made it clear that I3 itself cannot grant degrees, and
that the proposed major was to be offered in one or more colleges, not "outside a
formal academic home." That confusion is compounded on page 29, when the
report says "While there were tensions around the perception that the proposed
major was to be housed in GSLIS, there is now greater receptivity since it is clear
that it is to be a major housed under I3. There are challenges in coordinating
educational initiative such as Informatics that stands independent of existing
colleges and departments and that take place in multiple units."
The proposal that went before the Faculty Senate was for a major in GSLIS, as the
first instance of a major that could also be offered by other colleges on this campus.
The academic programs that are supervised by I3 (the bio-informatics Masters, the
incipient Informatics Ph.D., and the undergraduate informatics minor) all involve
multiple colleges, as they should, since informatics is widespread on campus. The
graduate degrees are granted by the Graduate College and not by I3; in the case of
the minor, no degree is granted (the minor is simply transcripted). A problem
arises, though, when we come to undergraduate majors: here, degrees must be
granted by a particular college, and the Educational Policy subcommittee of the
faculty senate has found it unthinkable that degrees with the same name should be
offered in more than one college. I3 would be an appropriate entity to coordinate
curricula and admissions for informatics majors in multiple colleges, as it now does
for bio-informatics, but it will not be granting those degrees: students will be
admitted to and advised by some college. We sincerely hope that campus leadership
can find a way around the "one and only one college" approach to majors, because
we believe this campus has the potential to offer a unique and compelling
undergraduate experience to students we are now losing to other universities.
Less consequential errors and confusion include:
* the statement on page 28 that Informatics has offices in the library and in GSLIS.
I3 staff who moved from GSLIS, to Siebel, then back to GSLIS, have now relocated
permanently to the Library, a central and neutral location intended to indicate the
independence of I3 from either GSLIS or CS. There are GSLIS staff who work on CII,
but they have never been in Siebel, nor have they relocated to the library.
* on page 29, the report says "With the exception of the Committee that developed
and oversees the minor (which meets multiple times a semester) and a few Steering
Committee meetings, the other I3 committees have not met for more than a year."
The bio-informatics steering committee, which is coordinated by I3, has met
regularly throughout the year last year. The faculty committee that put together the
proposal for the Ph.D. also met regularly, up until that proposal was presented to
the faculty senate: from that point on, administrative details of advancing the
proposal through the approval process have been handled by I3 staff: it would have
been a waste of people's time to reconvene the entire faculty committee for this part
of the process.
* the report notes on page 31 that while two demonstration projects undertaken by
I3 "do demonstrate the ability to bring products to completion, they do not fully
illustrate the vision of products that bridge information technology with the
humanities and the social sciences." The report fails to mention the postdoctoral
fellows that I3 has funded or is funding in History, French, and Communication,
despite our having called this to the attention of the committee. It also seems to
forget, at this point, that I-CHASS, which is part of I3, is aimed specifically at the
humanities, arts and social sciences.
Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS)
Although the committee’s report focuses on our success at digital tool building, we
believe that this is only one aspect of our core mission of positioning the University
of Illinois at the forefront of computational humanities, arts, and social science
research and education at the national and international level. Indeed, we have
established ourselves as a world-class center to which humanities, arts, and social
science researchers both on the University of Illinois campus and beyond turn when
they are beginning work on projects that incorporate advanced computing
technologies. As such, we have also had considerable success creating
interdisciplinary research teams and large scale complex inter-department, interinstitutional and international collaborations" in support of new HASS research and
knowledge exploration and production. We view ourselves as thought leaders on
how these complex research collaborations get done and how HASS research should
be framed in the 21st century. We believe that the comment by Dianne Harris of
IPRH in the public comments represents the true mission of I-CHASS as a research
incubator and network builder rather than a tool developer.
I-CHASS has worked hard to develop a diverse portfolio of research, attracting
external funding from a variety of sources.
Although the report characterizes our current research as primarily addressing
“concerns such as health, crisis, the environment, etc.,” we have in fact created and
sustained communities of scholarship that link technology specialists with faculty in
the humanities, arts, and social sciences both on the University of Illinois campus
and at other institutions across the nation. We have worked closely with scholars
interested in using digital technologies in disciplines as varied as English, Landscape
Architecture, History, Communication Studies, Germanic Languages, Library and
Information Sciences, Music, Biosciences, Economics, Anthropology, and Art and
Design, while also hosting a number of high-profile conferences and workshops that
give Illinois faculty the opportunity to be exposed to the work of other scholars
engaged in cutting-edge research. These activities currently fall into one of three
primary categories:
Research
Campus Our first priority remains engagement with, and support of, faculty and
research at the University of Illinois. In addition to projects initiated by I-CHASS, we
work closely with a growing number of faculty on the Illinois campus on a wide
scope of projects that range in complexity from support of web development to the
creation of customized data analytic solutions and computational modeling. We also
provide seed funding and in-kind work to researchers to support, for example,
graduate research students or the time of dedicated programmers. Many of our
grant submissions to external funding agencies have directly grown out of these
collaborations. The appendix of our originally submitted report to the review
committee shows that in its rather brief history, I-CHASS has worked with more
than 120 faculty and staff at Illinois in a wide range of units.
External We have, however, also worked to build connections with researchers at
other universities who are either already engaged in digital research or are
interested in exploring the possibilities that these technologies present. Our
outlook is not just internal, but external as well and we have consequently striven to
establish I-CHASS as a “world-class” center that impacts the entire humanities, arts,
and social science communities around the world. The report seems to recommend
that I-CHASS primarily focus on promoting scholarship on campus, and while we
will do that, we believe I-CHASS will be most useful if it continues to build
collaborations among scholars at the interuniversity and international level and also
among funders. We have built collaborations with scholars at universities across
the nation, including the University of Texas, California State University, Los
Angeles, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, and the
University of Minnesota to name a few. Additionally, we have worked with
researchers in multiple countries including, but not limited to: Canada, the United
Kingdom, Germany, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil. We have also
partnered with NCSA and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS)
at the University of Tennessee to offer a total of 3 million supercomputing CPU
hours to researchers engaged in humanities and social science projects that require
computationally intensive work.
Education and Training
We are committed to providing access to digital technologies and to training both
the current and the next generation of scholars engaged in advanced research in the
humanities and social sciences. To this end, we have hosted a number of workshops
and larger conferences at the University of Illinois that have showcased research at
the bleeding-edge of digital humanities, arts, and social science scholarship. In
spring 2009, for example, we hosted the third annual conference for the Humanities,
Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) “Traversing
Digital Boundaries”, an event that was attended by over 300 participants from
across the world. In April 2010 we organized the first all virtual HASTAC
Conference with partners in Germany, Singapore, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and
across the United States. We have also provided training opportunities in
technologies such as Geographic Information Systems, Social Networking Analysis,
and Image and Text Mining. Our successful training and research development
program, the Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (funded by
the National Endowment for the Humanities), saw teams of humanities scholars
traveling to supercomputer centers around the country to participate in mini-
residencies in order to receive training and consulting from technology experts on
their projects. Finally, as the report notes, we consider engagement with
undergraduate and graduate students crucial to our efforts and strive to help train
the next generation of scholars and I-CHASS staff are exploring ways in which we
can train students in humanities computing. We will continue these efforts moving
forward and will work closely with our colleagues in I3 to ensure that these
resulting courses are fully integrated under the INFO rubric.
Public Service and Engagement
Public service and engagement has been at the core of I-CHASS’s work since its
founding. Amongst the goals of one of our earliest initiatives, founding director
Vernon Burton’s RiverWeb project, was to engage with the community of East St.
Louis in exploring and making accessible through innovative web-based
technologies that city’s history and heritage. This commitment to public service
continues through many of our activities today. Examples have included our work
with both the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and
the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and collaborations with public
institutions such as the Newberry Library in Chicago. We have been engaged in
environmental conservation and preservation, working with the Costa Rican
authorities to provide them with web-enabled access to large size airborne imagery
of their country that allows them to make more informed policy decisions on such
diverse topics as urban and regional planning, land-use, and emergency
management planning.
Our newest initiative is as the founding partner, along with the Costa Rica United
States Foundation, of the Advanced Research and Technology Collaboratory for the
Americas (ARTCA). ARTCA promotes interdisciplinary, international, and interuniversity cooperation and enhances advanced and applied research, the
development of human resources and advanced technologies, including
technologies for the sciences, engineering, humanities, arts and social sciences.
Topics as varied as: tropical biology and ecology, the study of disease and disease
outbreaks, disaster management, cultural heritage, and social activism all fall within
the purview of ARTCA’s interests. As such, ARTCA has become a consortium of
thinkers working on together to improve research, teaching, education, and the lives
of the peoples of the Americas. The stakes of ARTCA are steep: Stakeholders as
varied as governments, universities, individuals, and community groups have
benefited from the collaborative efforts facilitated by ARTCA. For example, the
ARTCA emergency management systems project, a partnership between the
University of Illinois, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the
Government of Costa Rica, will prototype a coordinated hospital management
system that will allow for centralized control and distribution of resources in times
of national emergency. With potential to expand throughout the hemisphere, the
EMS project is just one example of how technology leveraged by I-CHASS on behalf
of the University of Illinois can directly engage and impact the lives of people on the
ground. I-CHASS and the Organization of American States are now partnering to
more fully integrate and coordinate the ARTCA agenda throughout the Americas.
Funding Structure
The report accurately reflects our current funding structure. However, we would
like to highlight the critical role that NCSA played in supporting I-CHASS’s formative
period, which is currently not noted in the report. We would also stress that the
majority of our staff positions are fully supported by grant funds and that it is
critical to our continued success that we continue to receive a core budget from the
University of Illinois to allow us to continue to do innovative scholarship that
benefits the university.
Governance
I-CHASS agrees with the report’s authors that a steering/advisory committee should
be established at the earliest possibility.
Community Informatics Initiative (CII)
The Community Informatics Initiative (CII) focuses on the space between two concepts,
community and informatics. Reciprocity must characterize relationships that emerge
out of these concepts. There is a critical need to understand not only how communities
access, create, organize, and share information, but also the types and qualities of
connections between and among communities.
This executive summary emphasizes the role of communities in initiatives such as
Community Informatics. The “C” in “CI” would not exist without real people who live
in real communities, apart from the UI campus, who collaborate with on-campus
researchers and course participants to understand real-world dilemmas. Thus,
while it is true that CII is embedded in GSLIS, it is also embedded in north
Champaign, Chicago, and East St. Louis, among other locations, due to campus-wide
faculty and staff activities in those locations, in partnership with organizations and
individuals based there. The latter individuals and organizations are (or should be)
as crucial to any campus-based engagement efforts as the faculty involved. Closing
these circles of trust and action, nurturing the relationships within the circles (even
as they may grow), are at the core of community informatics. Paul Adams, retiring
this month as CII’s director of Community Networking noted, “CII has the broadest
base of community partnerships of any unit on campus (after Extension.) The
communities of Humboldt Park (Chicago), East St. Louis, Sao Tome and C-U all have
and are willing to continue partnerships with CII based on the collective work and
relationships among [CII staff].”
That said, the circles of trust in relation to the University of Illinois are seriously
damaged, given the legacies of “drive by” research, partially fulfilled promises, and
continued disparities between the communities and the campus in their midst.
While a “mini-research board” is perfectly appropriate for a faculty-led
dissemination of funds for community-engaged research, UI leadership needs to
commit resources to ongoing, self-reflective evaluations of community engagement.
Unless that aspect is integral to the seed funding, there will be no overall analysis of
impacts and benefits to the communities we purportedly serve, and whether these
impacts are also positively influencing campus research and teaching. To repeat
from the April report: This examination of the university and its publics is an
enormous and generative opportunity. These examinations integrate research and
teaching, and may fully realize the potential benefits of grappling with key
challenges of contemporary life.
There is an inherent contradiction in the recommendation to integrate educational
activities of the centers with departments and colleges, and a recommendation to
create mini-research boards, which seems to separate research and teaching
further. As currently configured, the CII seed funds support both curriculum
development and research projects, and a combination of the two. Thus, we urge a
review of the successful application for the Community Engagement elective
classification awarded to UI by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, as well as the Civic Commitment Task Force report, both issued in the last
two years. The Imagining America report on public engagement is also valuable.
These documents suggest, among other things: a well-supported communityuniversity advisory group with sufficient power to direct policy and funds; and an
institutional resource "to evaluate and document community partnerships and
public projects thoroughly, regularly, and using a range of appropriate methods."
(Imagining America) Further, new initiatives related to civic commitment should be
aligned with the revisions of Provost Communication No. 9 related to outreach and
public engagement.
With these ideas in mind, CII this year has committed funds to help the Ethnography
of the University Initiative (EUI). We have supported the hiring of a 50% graduate
assistant to work with the faculty and students in EUI courses, who actively study
the university and its publics. We have also provided a research stipend to a
doctoral student to examine the user interface of EUI web presence and assess the
functionality of the EUI materials in IDEALS. In addition to the seed-funded projects,
then, we believe the EUI support is a step toward ongoing evaluation and
assessment of community/university relations.
As was mentioned in the CII portion of the I3 report as well as in the SE report and
comments, meta-level community involvement could be located in several entities,
apart from CII: the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Engagement; the Center
on Democracy in a Multiracial Society; Extension; The Odyssey Project; or the East
St. Louis Action Research Project, to name some options. Clear disposition of ICR is
also important, though for most community engagement efforts, the available
external funding is minimal, which is why campus-level support is so crucial for
these activities. Echoing the earlier CII report: If UI is truly committed to diversifying
its faculty and student population, meaningful, reciprocal engagement is critical to
attract local young people and retain and promote underrepresented faculty. These
goals are best addressed on the campus level, because the fundamental values that are
at stake need support at the highest levels.