Information technology, Ed Ayers, and a new president for the University of Richmond

November 11, 2006 information technology No Comments

In my November 7 Twilight Librarian post, I commented on the continued dominance of the research paper as the vehicle through which students explore knowledge and demonstrate mastery of research. I surmised that Perhaps it is the hold print/online journals have on scholarly communication and the tenure process that blinds most faculty to the possibilities of multimedia “papers,” both in student work and their own work. This same week, the Chronicle of Higher Education carries an article titled “With Digital Maps, Historians Chart a New Way Into the Past.” The Chronicle's information technology blog summarized it thus:

Historians are great at telling stories, but they're lousy at pictures, asserts Edward L. Ayers, a history professor and dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.

While other disciplines have found ways to represent complex phenomena using illustrations that overlay many types of information, Mr. Ayers says, history has for the most part focused on written narratives, linear stories that set forth an overriding argument. But since life is messy, and the lives of so many individuals are sure to be influenced by a variety of forces in ways that are hard to describe, pictures might prove to be historys next frontier.

Imagine, he says, a social weather map plotting the movements of people as multiple historical forces come into play. And like the weather maps on television-news broadcasts, perhaps the data could be set in motion, so that effects of various social warm and cold fronts could be observed.

I think of the past as at least as complex as anything in nature, and yet we restrict ourselves to analog means of describing it, says Mr. Ayers. So I thought, if this works for physical natural processes, why couldn't we be able to see social processes as well?

Ed Ayers, currently a professor of history and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, is widely known as a pioneer in applying digitization to historical documents. His renowned Valley of the Shadow project has drawn more than 4,000,000 visitors.

The Chronicle article describes yet another new initiative Ayers has launched, this in collaboration with his former UVa colleague Will Thomas, a professor of humanities at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The Aurora Project: A Dynamic Atlas of American History applies GIS and other tools to create dynamic maps that show relationships between selected phenomena in history (e.g., the expansion of railroad networks and the growth of population in Nebraska). The visualization techniques that allow scientists to study complex phenomena such as weather systems can, says Ayers, help us study the past and make discoveries not possible through linear and purely textual approaches.

Imagine, then, my delight yesterday when I learned that the Board of Trustees of the University of Richmond has appointed Prof. Ayers the university's next president! I was at the Virginia Library Association conference when I learned this. Over the course of the day I heard UVa colleagues express their regret that, come July, Mr. Jefferson's University will lose one of its most creative professors. (Even with the responsibilities he has as a dean Ayers still teaches and works with graduate students.)

Welcome to the University of Richmond, Dr. Ayers!