Happy Anniversary, IATH

A bit later this week I’m headed down to Charlottesville for a symposium celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). IATH was the fruit of a generous gift from IBM to the University of Virginia. A committee of faculty was convened to determine what to do with the money, and remarkably and wonderfully several members of the computer science department argued for using it to fund a dedicated humanities research center. The reasoning was really twofold: that the humanities needed the technology more than the sciences did, and that it was far better to concentrate the resources into a “center” than to sprinkle computers around faculty offices without any real plan of how they’d be used. The emphasis on research was also critical: not to the exlcusion of teaching, but with the assumption that teaching would inexorably benefit if faculty had an environment that encouraged them to push the limits of the new technology.

IATH was one of the earliest academic adopters of the World Wide Web, a direct result of the prescience of John Unsworth, its founding director (remember this was back in the Voyager days when many were predicting the CD-ROM as the future of publishing). John, however, saw the network as an intrinsic aspect of IATH’s activities in scholarly communicaton. Today IATH supports over forty faculty projects, including many of the most distinguished on the Web. More than that, though, it’s a place that will, I’m certain, go down historically as one of the great intellectual centers of its times. Perhaps more than any other single institutional entity IATH offered a vision and practical model for how new media could really change the way the humanities did business. And while my own degree is in English, much of my graduate education came from the people at IATH: both faculty working on projects (who were excited to talk to graduate students since we were all doing our best to figure this stuff out) and the staff members who the Institute was (and is) very lucky to have, people who not only have the requsite technical expertise but also the patience to communicate back and forth between the two cultures.

It’s a time of transition now at IATH: John Unsworth is now dean of the library school at Illinois and there’s a search for a new director; and like so many places elsewhere it’s good works are being hampered by a state budget crisis. But the people behind IATH have an intellectual vision and commitment that have seen it through rough patches before, and they will this time too. So happy anniversary IATH, and mazel-tov to all who made and make it work.