This post is part of a series. Please also check out the first part What is the Web 2.0.

Now, while in this post I will not go into the details why the humanities can learn from the Web 2.0, let me discuss a number of central problems of humanities today. The key problems of humanities as I see it are regarding availability of knowledge, accessibility of knowledge and the probability that knowledge is made available at all.

For a scholar working on a certain Roman document at a large and rich university availability of knowledge and publications is not an issue. And the same can be said about many other scholars working in Oxford or another big and rich university. And therefore the problem of availability is often an underestimated problem. Your antiquities professor does not only have all important books and journals available in a library close by, even the sources he is using are all in the same library. However already your average modern history researcher is not as privileged. His sources are usually in an archive he has to travel to. And if he is “only” a BA or MA student, it is not very probable that he has the time and resources to go to this archive and therefore he will most likely work only with sources other people have used in their research. But the number of books and journals is rising and publications are getting more expensive and therefore even averagely well funded universities have problems to buy all relevant publications. A problem, which I should remark, has been worsened by the price hike for journals in the field of natural sciences and medicine. Now even that might still be acceptable for a student or researcher in the West. However for a researcher in poorer countries, this usually means that he has no access to most of the relevant publications and at least in area studies, non-european history and anthropology this is a problem. We tend to have a knowledge production in Europe about areas like Africa, but “the object” of our research is unable to become “a subject” of research. In a field like African Studies, this results in a serious gap of knowledge production, as it is not debatable that a Western researcher will always have a Western view point in his research. But even in other fields research is not as good as it could be because every researcher has limited resources and therefore can not travel to every archive he would want to travel to. Nevertheless compared to the problem of accessibility, the issue of availability is minor.

Let us for a moment imagine a world in which availability is not a problem. All publications, all sources, in short all material which is of any importance to you, is available in a huge library in the cellar of your building. As you can imagine, this is a huge cellar. But you are lucky. The books are not unorganised, piled up, but neatly categorised and put into specific shelves. Your librarian who worked this wonder can look back on centuries of practical research on how to organise a library. I never wondered about this before, but even the old library of Alexandria must have had a thoughtful system to organise its many hundreds of thousands of scrolls. But the sheer volume of knowledge which is available to you now, makes it difficult to access it. It is believed that this is part of studying humanities. It is believed that after you specialised you get a sufficient knowledge of literature in your specific field to navigate. But there is a couple of problems to this belief. Foremost every researcher touches many topics while working on his specific topic. And when you get to a point, where you would have to invest a lot of time to confirm a little detail, which you are nearly sure of anyway, you just let it slip. Books in humanities are full with these border points to other topics. I would guess you can find one on every second page of an average book. But here, even your most knowledgeable researcher will always reach his limit, because you simply can not know everything. Secondly the necessary but simplistic and artificial creation of specific subjects has created a situation where a historian is not aware of publication in political sciences and vice versa. Thirdly a majority of publications is simply not published prominently enough to be noticed. I guess many researchers have once found a MA or PhD thesis which was very helpful to their work and kept wondering how many more such theses exist. If you have a prominent book bringing up a certain number it is very likely that this number will continue to be quoted even though someone has proven it to be wrong on page 73 of his PhD thesis. And even the most detailed index as we know them from our libraries will not be able anymore to solve these problems – especially because an index has to be general and can not be optimised for the needs of one specific researcher.

The third central problem of humanities is the possibility that certain knowledge is produced and published. This has a lot to do with the size of the field you are working in, but I guess that if you think about it long enough, you will find a good example in every possible field. But let me try to explain this with an example. For Germany and the German speaking areas of Europe you can find a encyclopaedia with biographies of more or less relevant individuals. This encyclopaedia is called the “Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie” and its successor the “Neue Deutsche Biographie”. These two encyclopaedias have 56 and currently 22 volumes. Thankfully the number of researchers who profit from this is large enough to make such an undertaking possible. However if you are working on Africa, you will not be able to find something comparable. There is older country specific volumes and there is multiple online attempts, but all of these projects are either outdated or must be considered as failed. There is two main issues, why this is the case. First of all the production of books is surprisingly expensive. Many books we buy are cheap, but only because they are best sellers. A book which is only produced in 1000 copies is very expensive and if you think of an encyclopaedia with many volumes, the problem is even more dramatic. If the market for a book is too small, it will not be printed. The maths is rather simple. The smaller the market is, the more expensive the book will be and in consequence the market will shrink even more. If no balance can be found a book will not exist. Secondly there is a problem of funding. Certain subjects or problems can easily be funded. Other projects have no chance at all. It is not surprising that the German government will be more easily convinced to fund a German Biographic Encyclopaedia than an African Biographic Encyclopaedia. Therefore the possibility of knowledge being produced and made available depends on the distribution channels and funding. However it is important to note that a lot of knowledge is theoretically available, but it is not being collected and published. The reason for this is that old media, that is the book, depends on a centralised structure and this central structure is naturally failing when serving the long tail.

These problems are intensified by the fact that the volume and breadth of research is increasing. And in humanities where older research is not necessarily replaced by new research the available material is rising even if the yearly production would stay the same. In consequence, if the problems of availability, accessibility and probability are not solved humanities are jeopardised to stagnate.

In this post I tried to give a short overview of what I consider the main challenges to a new generation of humanities. In the following posts I will try to outline, why I believe that certain concepts from the Web 2.0 environment, which was the topic of my last post, can be auxiliary to overcome these challenges.

Below you see an image of the new library of Alexandria.