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How Computers Are Changing Academe
It’s not just word processing and spreadsheets anymore. The machines are altering the way researchers think about their work.
November 1993
by Bruce Fellman
In 1697, two years after the death of an obscure Virginia clergyman named Thomas Teackle, an estate inventory filed at the local county courthouse revealed that he had accumulated an impressive library amounting to 333 books. The collection was soon scattered, but nearly three centuries later, a University of Illinois at Chicago historian named Jon Butler learned of the list and set out to locate the books as a window on 17th-century thought. As Butler remembers the quest that started in 1976, the books became something of an obsession, but after seven years of looking, he had found only 125 of them.
“I was on the verge of giving up,” he admits.
In the mid-1980s, Butler arrived at Yale, just as the University was joining several other research institutions in this country and abroad in developing computerized library catalogs. At about the same time, it forged a link with the international electronic-information highway called the Internet. Without leaving his terminal in New Haven, Butler, who now heads the American Studies department, soon found every one of the remaining Teackle books. The last was the elusive Tabulae Analyticae, written in 1593 by Hungarian theologian Istvan Szegedi Kiss. The book had come to rest at the University of British Columbia.
Butler is hardly alone among senior scholars in recounting such sagas of accelerated research, but even undergraduates are finding the advantages of computer-aided study to be irresistible. With good reason: Electronic mail, computerized telecommuting, access to data bases, and on-line books and journals have consigned the academic future to the well connected. “The machines have fundamentally changed the way we work,” says Butler.
According to Richard Ferguson, director of computing and information systems, Yale is a particularly good place to profit from the change. While other institutions have grabbed headlines with the introduction of the highest of high technology equipment, Yale has “focused more on the delivery of services to individuals,” Ferguson explains, noting that last summer, the University completed a project to enable everyone in the residential colleges to link up to Yale’s own computer network. Plans are currently in progress to connect the Old Campus. “If you look at how many people are doing useful things with computers, we rank high,” says Ferguson.
To be sure, most of this work involves word processing and number-crunching, both of which are now such commonplace activities that they no longer raise eyebrows. “With the exception of applications, nobody types on a typewriter anymore,” says Shelley Golden '94, a Pierson biology major, who uses her computer to keep in touch through e-mail with friends both here and at other colleges, as well as to search for information in Orbis, the library’s on-line catalog, and in a variety of science-oriented data bases.
But the increasingly sophisticated machines found in nearly every faculty office and residential suite are not only making work easier, they are making new kinds of work possible. Consider, for example,an emerging scientific discipline called “artificial life.” At a desktop computer in the Greeley Memorial Laboratory, Oswald J. Schmitz, an assistant professor of forestry and environmental studies, examines food webs, the networks of connections that describe how energy flows from the sun to plants to plant-eating animals to hunters. Scientists have long attempted to build mathematical models of these interactions, and in this age of environmental degradation, having the ability to predict the impact of a particular action on the ecosystem could be invaluable to planners. But until recently, notes Schmitz, computing power was so limited that to get the models to work,they had to be filled with all sorts of simplifying-and often rather simple-minded-assumptions, which frequently rendered the results suspect. “The real world is a complex place full of plants and animals that are adapting and evolving,” says Schmitz. “There’s lots of variability.” Dealing with such multifaceted problems may overwhelm the human brain, but computers are now more than equal to the task of recreating a believable, although artificial, ecosystem that can then be poked, probed, and perturbed to provide information about our impact, both short- and long-term, on the planet. “We can ask general questions like, 'Why is the world green?' or specific ones about the effect of removing a predator or introducing a toxin,” notes the researcher, who also is running outdoor food-web experiments using real plants, grasshoppers, wolf spiders, and birds to ensure that the equations mirror reality. “This kind of study is still in its infancy, but it’s already proving very exciting to an interdisciplinary group of both scientists and policy-makers.”
Ironically perhaps, an ancient discipline—classics—was among the first to embrace computer technology. One reason, says classicist Victor Bers, was necessity. “In the old days, there were secretaries who could type in Greek-but no longer.” Fortunately, there are now programs, and keyboards, that are multilingual; their existence has helped save scholarly publishing in these times of tight money. “We'd have been dead without the computer,” says Bers.
The machines also changed the way the field could go about its basic research. Six years ago, a computer system called “Ibycus” made a significant part of classical Greek literature available on compact disk (a single cd can easily store the contents of 250 books, each 200 pages long). “I sat at the keyboard and blissed out,” Bers recalls, adding that the system enabled scholars to search vast amounts of text for such things as word associations and patterns of style and rhythm, endeavors that would have been nearly impossible in the pre-cd era. “For humanists, the accumulation of information and experience is important-as scholars, we get better as we get older,” Bers explains. “With this technology, we can get better faster.”
Many other academic disciplines, in both the humanities and the sciences, are benefiting from the increasing availability of data on CD and via the Internet. Besides the obvious reference tools like the encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, and sources of familiar quotations, there are specialized sources of information like the Patrologia Latina, a CD compilation of the 221 volumes of early church theology, and an exhaustive collection of English poetry from a.d. 800 to 1900.
To take advantage of the explosion of this kind of material, Sterling Memorial Library this fall opened an electronic text center. Almost everything that’s currently published on paper also exists in electronic form. To demonstrate what the center can do to provide access to a specific piece of information, Paul Constantine, coordinator of computer-assisted reference services, recently sat down with a reporter at one of the terminals. His first move was to order his computer to connect to Yale’s Multi-Protocol Gateway Services. Next, he typed “yaleinfo,” hit the return key, and when the Yale Info Main Menu appeared, he entered the number 5, which quickly linked him to the Internet. After a few electronic zigs and zags, Constantine found his way to the Center for the Computer Analysis of Text at the University of Pennsylvania, ordered up Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and typed in the phrase “kiss me, Kate.” The computer at Penn searched through the play and displayed where—Act V, Scenes I and II—the words that inspired Cole Porter appeared. Constantine then had the results of his search sent to his e-mail account at Yale.
The whole process took less than five minutes, and in the same amount of time, he could just as easily have explored a data base called “Nexis” to find all the recently published newspaper articles on the North American Free Trade Agreement or examined the moss catalog at the Australian National Botanic Garden. By contrast, the simple act of locating a book or a journal article in the Sterling stacks would have taken considerably longer. Performing by hand the kind of analysis Constantine did by computer would have taken weeks at the very least.
In the case of a graduate student acquaintance of Jon Butler's, it took more than a decade. To complete his dissertation, the persistent student had to comb through thousands of pages of newspaper copy looking for references to 19th century labor practices. “A newspaper contains enormous amounts of information, but it’s a source historians are loath to work on, because to get anything good, you have to read from cover to cover, and 99.9 percent of what you find is useless,” says Butler. If the information had been available through today’s technology, the work might have been accomplished in a fraction of the time.
Imagine, for example, having every issue of a publication on CD, as recently occurred with the Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper published by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century. Someone curious about, say, prevailing attitudes toward witchcraft during the Consti-tutional Convention could simply enter the keyword “witchcraft” and the appropriate date. The computer would quickly find and display every occurrence of the word.
While such efficiency is admirable, it raises a vexing question: Is technology making scholarship too easy, and thus, perhaps, sloppier? “Absolutely not,” declares Butler, who, like many of his colleagues, praises the computer’s ability to separate the research wheat from the chaff (to say nothing of its skill in adding footnotes to scholarly manuscripts). And he rejects the suggestion that the quick-and-clean approach eliminates the virtues of meandering through apparently unrelated material, a process that often prompts unexpected ideas. “No doubt, you miss a lot of peripheral stuff,” he explains, “but there’s a lot of serendipity that the computer makes possible. You can discover all sorts of wonderful things.”
Librarian Paul Constantine fears that one thing students aren’t discovering is the Sterling card catalogue, an impression confirmed by Shelley Golden, who uses only Orbis. And in eschewing the cards, says Constantine, “Students are not exploiting the full richness of our collections.” Of the six million titles in the Yale library system, only 2.5 million, which includes everything acquired since 1977, are in the electronic catalog. “Scholarship didn’t begin in 1977,” Constantine points out.
Even so, there’s a problem with conventional print media, for while words are imperishable, the paper they’re written on is often less than immortal. With an increasing amount of material disintegrating because of the acid content of the paper, and with a number of library holdings already too fragile to use, translating information into electronic form offers a way to preserve it and make it accessible to a wider audience.
Both preservation and accessibility lie at the heart of a program started last year to build a computerized dat base of the 11 million-plus objects in the Peabody Museum of Natural History. “The computer is a boon for collection management,” explains Larry Gall, a curatorial affiliate in entomology at the Peabody and head of its computer systems unit. “Our staff possesses an enormous institutional memory of what’s here, but it isn’t necessarily written down anywhere, so by putting it all in a data base we don’t have to worry about possible breaks in the curatorial chain.”
The ability to know what’s located where will, says Gall, “enable more people—professional researchers as well as students—to use this museum.” And, thanks to what is popularly known as “net surfing,” scholars won’t necessarily have to be in New Haven to mine the Peabody’s riches. “Among researchers who use museums, there’s a culture of presenting oneself at the door and having a curator provide access to the specimens,” says Gall. But by the spring of next year, the Peabody should be on-line, and so anyone armed with a “gopher"-a new search-and-retrieve program-will be able to tap into the Internet and “net surf” through the museum to determine whether or not it contains appropriate specimens.
If the collections hold the right stuff, a visit is still in order, but rapid developments in technology may in effect create an electronic museum. For it is now possible, says Gall, to include relatively high-resolution images of specimens alongside their text-based descriptions. Sound and video can also be part of the mix.
The artistic possibilities of such a mix have not been lost on Yale’s architects, graphic designers, dramatists, painters, and sculptors. Fred Koetter, dean of the School of Architecture, says that his own discipline has been transformed by computer-aided design and drawing, tools which enable architects to study a dizzying array of potential buildings and sites, manipulating their form, size, and color almost at will. Today’s designers can even test the look of their plans at various times of day and under different weather conditions. The Architecture School’s computers have proved so flexible that they are attracting students from other departments to the basement of the Art & Architecture Building, making it what Koetter calls a kind of “artistic melting pot” for people interested in exploring the new technology. Koetter and his colleagues in the Art School have recently proposed creating a Yale Center for Visual Imaging. “I see it as the equivalent of an experimental theater,” says the dean.
The technology is having an impact on the Yale University Press as well. According to Mary Coleman, the special projects coordinator at the Press, experiments are already under way for a “new kind of scholarly publication” involving “native electronic texts.” A “chapter” of one such publication, Bird Anatomy II, displays the important bones and muscles of a particular bird on a video screen, and then follows with a video sequence of various birds on the wing. The viewer can slow these down or stop them to see how the body parts in question work to keep the animal airborne.
Another Yale Press undertaking is Perseus 1.0, an ancient Greek culture database, which won the 1992 educom Award for innovative software in the social sciences. It uses a similar marriage of sight, sound, and text contained in a cd that offers a staggering amount of information. With it, a user can “follow trains of thought in ways that would be frustrating and impossible” with traditional book-based methods, says Coleman. It is possible, for example, to start out reading about some aspect of history, switch to a view of a historical site or object-perhaps a temple or vase-and then explore a related text in its original language.
This a-la-carte approach is certainly engaging, but the jury is still out on its validity. “There’s simply not enough information out there to know how successful computers are as teaching tools,” says Douglas Kankel, chairman of the biology department. Nevertheless, Kankel himself has worked to create a kind of electronic classroom. “All my lectures are given from a computer,” he says. “It’s replaced the slide projector and the VCR.” To ease the pain of learning developmental biology, Kankel laboriously crafted animated sequences of cell development into a multimedia presentation that he beams into his lecture hall through a sophisticated video projection system. Armed with a computer mouse and a laser pointer, he can speak to members of the “television generation” in a language they understand. “The students get a big kick out of this kind of presentation, and my gut feeling is that they learn better,” Kankel says.
But while there’s considerable interest in such high-technology teaching methods, few professors have as yet followed Kankel’s lead, partly because the process is both time-consuming and technically formidable, and also because many would confess to a lingering technophobia. “It’s still a slightly foreign presence,” admits University Librarian Millicent D. Abell. But she expects that to change fast, if only because tomorrow’s scholars are today’s computer-literate students, and they, at least, have no fears of the machines. “If you have a factual question, there’s probably an answer out there somewhere,” Abell says. “The computer has made the detective game, which has become more complex, vastly more interesting and satisfying.” Adds Richard Ferguson: “Fundamentally, we’re not talking about technology that’s going to change the nature of this place. Rather, it will enhance the experience of being here. What the computer can do is help students and faculty connect to each other and to the rest of the world.”  |
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