The Center for Advanced Research and Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CARTAH) supports and promotes computer-based research and creative work in the arts and humanities at the University. Geri Bunker recently interviewed its director, Professor Richard Karpen, about CARTAH and the Digital Library. The lab facility is located in Room 35 Thomson Hall and serves faculty, graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Karpen may be contacted at karpen@u.washington.edu, or see CARTAH's Web site for more information.
GB: Would you tell us a bit about how you see the use of digital technologies in the arts and humanities?
RK: The use of digital technologies in the arts and humanities is natural, normal, and happening. It's not a prediction of the future. It's no longer radical. It's happened already. Technology has always been part of how we create and record knowledge. It provides the means to the externalized expression of our creation, whether that be writing on papyrus, on stone with hieroglyphics, in fine arts, through the type of paint which best adheres to canvas, or with plaster or mosaics. Technology and science helped provide the tuning systems for our musical instruments. Even advances in metallurgy made changes possible to the piano frame enabling an increase in the degree of string tension the instrument can sustain. These technologies significantly enhanced our ability to create and record new ideas leading towards new knowledge.
GB: How do you see CARTAH's relationship to the Libraries?
RK: The Library helps us to display and archive the recorded knowledge we create. Imagine CARTAH as a studio where the canvas is painted; the Library is the archive, museum and gallery for the paintings. (And if you've ever visited a working artist's studio where cherished works may pile up in disarray, you can appreciate the stewardship role of curator and librarian.)
GB: How do you see CARTAH's role in the building of the Digital Library?
RK: New technologies in use at CARTAH and on campus allow us to explore new media. As we create works in our studios, the Library is able to keep originals or copies for preservation, to organize them for access, and to manage and display them as parts of collections. Thus the Library really serves as a clearinghouse for and major disseminator of our cumulative knowledge. This has always been true for printed text, maps and pictures, and is now extended to digital images, sound recordings, even moving images.
GB: CARTAH is collaborating not only with the University Libraries in this effort, but also with other Digital Library builders on campus. Care to comment?
RK: The best collaborations are those where you can play to the strength of each party. Artists at CARTAH cooperating with archivists and librarians is a great start. Content*, the multimedia database system developed at the CISO (Center for Information Systems Optimization in Electrical Engineering), is a great resource for us. We're very excited to be collaborating with Professor Zick, as this allows us to focus our creative interests while engineers provide us with a state-of-the-art presentation and management system for our works. The most important part of this partnership is interest in all concerned to share ideas giving the artists and scholars input into the look and feel of the archiving systems. It's a much more positive way to develop advanced technologies than to have hard and fast divisions of "content providers" on the one hand, and technologists on the other. This needs to be a concerted effort where we learn from one another how to navigate through this new landscape. And CARTAH's work with the CISO group and the Libraries is just a perfect model for this kind of partnership.
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