Northwestern’s Vesalius website is an example of how a library and a research team have collaborated to create a scholarly product that crosses traditional academic boundaries and presents a historic work of Renaissance science in new ways.

Such puzzles require the collaboration among diverse fields. The OYEZ Project <www.oyez.org>--supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation--is a collaboration with computer scientists, computational linguists, psychologists, and political scientists. One aim is to create a complete archive of U. S. Supreme Court audio (about 6000 hours) and enable listeners to annotate and share commentary, bookmark and save subsets of the collection for their scholarly and pedagogical objectives. The tools created from this enterprise apply with equal or greater force to disciplines that rely on video and images as part or all of their disciplinary canons. Such tools will form the basis for research in any number of fields, especially when all the knowledge of humankind will be available from any networked computer.

Professor Goldman has received the Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in the week of August 29, 2004 in Chicago. Congratulations!

Scholars work with documents containing text, and whatever else they do or use, working with texts is what all scholars do much of the time. There are tools for working with texts in a manuscript or print world, and we are so familiar with them that we may not think of them as tools or as part of a technology. For the past few decades, and with increasing rapidity, the documentary infrastructure of scholarship has gone digital. Whether we like it or not, this has begun, and will continue, to change the way we read and write. A digital text file is a very different thing from a printed page, and it comes with tools that lets you manipulate hundreds or thousands of them in seconds. These tools cannot be mastered in minutes or hours, but one can acquire a useful command of them in days or weeks. For many projects, it will pay off to learn something about these tools. It is certainly helpful to have a rough idea of what is there, because it expands your calculus of the possible.

We have reached the point when the Internet has proven itself to be an indispensable archival resource for humanities and social science research. Vast amounts of information, much of it previously available only to those who were able to travel to certain repositories, are now accessible anywhere and at any time to individuals with a network connection. In addition, much of this information can be conveniently searched and queried in ways previously not readily possible.

But what are the possibilities of the Web as a medium for original scholarly analysis, i.e., beyond making traditional print scholarship available in digital form? This presentation will reflect on this question in relation to a small group of recent projects done at Northwestern.