Net Prophets IATH IS ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD -- SO WHY DON'T YOU KNOW ABOUT IT? by Megan Lisagor photo by Mia Mooney The sense of open exchange that Thomas Jefferson envisioned on the Lawn has made its way to the third floor of Alderman Library. Amidst the shelves of ancient books and dog-eared periodicals, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) attempts to drive the university into the next century. Focused on increasing the potential of information technology as a tool for humanities research, the Institute buzzes with the creation of text- and image-based archives. Just as Jefferson pictured the university as an "academical village" in which faculty and students worked together as a community of scholars, IATH strives to improve the exchange of information among a community of humanists. Today the complex world of the Internet "serves as another kind of village," according to Professor and IATH Fellow Michael Levenson. "It has a powerful virtue as a communicator." Founded in 1993, the Institute has worked with faculty at the university and elsewhere to bring computing research projects within the humanities to fulfillment. "We're about five years old. We were established as a research computing organization to support computer-mediated humanities research projects," IATH Director John Unsworth said. The Institute provides consulting, programming, and data services to a variety of organizations. IATH has built websites for groups such as the Bayly Museum, the Ford Foundation, the National Museum of American Art, the Association for Investment Management and Research, and the University Press of Virginia. The Institute focuses on developing software useful for humanities computing. "The university proposed the humanities as the source of what they thought would be some of the most [serious] computer science research problems in the next century," said Unsworth. While humanists have been involved with computers in the past, the innovation of sharing research results on the web gives humanities scholars new opportunities. Unsworth explains, "In a university, research is what really drives the classroom. We must support the research efforts that will produce these resources." Although IATH has sponsored several large-scale projects, many students don't know about the Institute's work at the university. "We haven't devoted a lot of resources to publicity," Unsworth admits. "Probably the reason that students don't know about us is that we're not a degree-granting program. We don't offer courses." The university, however, does offer a handful of IATH-related courses at the graduate level; Unsworth teaches an upper-level graduate lecture on contemporary American fiction. While both undergraduates and graduates take advantage of these courses, few students realize their dependence upon IATH publications and materials developed in IATH research projects. "Students probably do know about some of the projects without knowing that they come from here," he adds. Students enrolled in Professor Ed Ayers' American history class encounter one of IATH's most prominent projects hands-on. Working with the Institute, Ayers created the Valley of the Shadow, an interactive history of two American communities in the era of the Civil War. The project allows students to "confront the materials of the past with a new kind of thoroughness and directness," Ayers wrote in a summary of the Valley project. "We're bringing the history classroom into the twenty-first century ... [The project] changes history from a spectator sport to a participant sport." "It makes it possible for people to have a new relation to the history," Levenson adds. He began a fellowship with IATH this semester working on a collaborative computer project concerning all aspects of London. "You can read and read forever, but no book could ever contain enough. It can't give you a sense of the vastness of a city," he said. Levenson emphasized the comprehensive quality of his IATH London project by incorporating a quote by David Cannadine from "London History" into his project proposal: "There are at once too many books on London, and too few -- too many tourist guides, city biographies, and suburban chronicles; too few studies of its politics, economy, society, and government; and almost nothing which addresses the great metropolis directly, in its totality, as the world city." Levenson suggests that Internet research projects in the humanities represent "the sociology of knowledge." In addition to members of the Institute at U.Va., just under 40 scholars in England and America are playing an active role in the London project. "This is the most wildly collaborative project I've ever heard of. We're all exchanging freely; there's no competition," he said. Unfortunately, many students have never heard of Levenson's nor any other IATH-sponsored project. As U.Va. students, we have a wealth of resources at our fingertips; it is high time we begin to appreciate IATH's technological advancements. Although these resources are lesser known at U.Va., they are taking off at universities around the nation. IATH computer projects continue to increase the interaction between scholars and students, enlivening the pursuit of knowledge. "There's a community of academic departments found in the computer," Levenson said. It appears that Jefferson's concept of the "academical village" has leaped off of the Lawn and launched into cyberspace. Through its exploration and expansion of the Internet as a tool for humanities research, IATH has successfully ushered Jefferson's ideals into the twenty-first century. The IATH homepage can be found at http://www.iath.virginia.edu.

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