The hub of research at Trinity

It has been a long time coming, but Trinity College's new research centre has finally got a home of its own, writes Karlin Lillington

IT HAS been a long wait, but Trinity College Dublin’s arts and humanities research centre with a strong technology bent, the Long Room Hub, finally gets a home this week.

Conceived four years ago and seeded with a start-up grant of €10.8 million from the Government and the European Regional Development fund, the Long Room Hub has been a bit of a nomadic entity, using available space to offer a wide range of unusual lectures on areas where technology and humanities research overlap.

All along, though, it has been waiting for a space of its own and for the real research to begin.

A striking new four-storey building sitting at the top end of Fellows Square will provide it, enabling the Hub to bring together up to 10 international scholars and 44 postgraduate researchers at a time.

Much attention to detail has gone into the building, a beautiful blend of stained wood and glass interiors. “We wanted this to be a building worthy of the 18th-century buildings around it, a building for the next 100 years,” says the Hub’s Danish director and professor of environmental history, Dr Poul Holm, an expert on Viking Dublin. “And now we can actually be in place and do some real work.”

As one would expect, the building is full of technological wizardry. A digitisation suite allows the Long Room Hub to process and archive images taken from items in Trinity’s collections, such as priceless manuscripts held in the Long Library.

The conference floor has a large meeting room space with advanced digital video conferencing facilities that are “as open source as possible” – there are no industry standards for video conferencing, notes Holm, and an open-source approach guarantees the widest compatibility with others’ systems.

Seven different schools within Trinity are attached to the Hub and will select the postgraduate students to study there on one-year appointments. Visiting fellows will rotate in and out for periods from one to several months and will each give a public lecture at some point during their tenure, as well as work with some postgrads, thus ensuring a sense of research community.

Fitting with the Hub’s digital remit, considerable research support has come from some of the major IT companies in Ireland, Holm says, including Google, Intel and Microsoft.

“What we really want to do is put arts and humanities on a digital platform and train the next generation of scholars. It’s where research is going but also it’s where business is going.”

Technology is enabling humanities researchers to develop new techniques and methodologies for research – for example, they can search a huge body of information and look for patterns that would never before have been obvious.

“Digitisation has enabled the humanities scholar to not have to limit themselves to reading perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 books in a lifetime,” Holm adds.

“Now, they can access millions of books – but they can’t read them all, so they need to be able to command search tools. As a result, there will be whole new ways of approaching material that before you could not access at all. Not just books, but artworks, objects and mental constructs.”

‘He points to areas like literary studies that “will change because of something that was never available before – geographic studies. This means scholars can depict literally any landscapes to understand what a mental world was like.”

Historians are also “making huge strides”. Along with being able to analyse and seek patterns in massive databases of information about particular events, places or periods, digital archives mean historians can study, for example, a collection of 100 years of restaurant menus held in the New York City library.

“With something like that, you can do economic analysis, you can analyse the change in tastes – all sorts of amazing stuff that would be impossible if you had to access the physical menus.”

There are also direct applications for business for these humanities-based approaches to digital tools and analysis.

“I think there’s a tremendous push but also a tremendous pull from business. The IT companies are very interested in developing digital content, as so much information moves online, and they see this as an enormous untapped resource that will have huge potential in the next five to 10 years.”

Companies increasingly want people who are knowledgeable about managing, accessing and analysing content rather than just working with the technology itself.

“After all,” Holm says, “people are not attracted by the technology on the internet, they are attracted by the content. Digital scholars are the ones at the cutting edge of working with tools and search techniques that will underlie the way people access data online well into the future.”

Holm quotes from former IBM chief executive Lou Gerstner, who noted that the kind of employee IBM wanted was someone who thought in intelligent ways, not necessarily people trained as programmers.

The IT connection is important for funding, too. While the centre will continue to have university and likely some European funding, it is also reliant on the support of private and corporate donors. Almost all the Hub’s corporate support has come from the IT sector.

Holm says there are many research areas the Hub can explore that would link with IT business interests. Two high-potential areas are medical humanities – medicine with a human input, an area “not that forceful in Ireland” at the moment – and the whole area of environment and global change, where there needs to be a better understanding of how to get people to change old habits and attitudes, rather than just throw new technologies at them.

The challenge for anyone running a centre like the Hub is the paradox that people of an older generation who are not digital natives are trying to figure out how to train a new generation who will use technology all the time, but it is a problem he enjoys tackling.

“We need to train the next generation of what I call digitally born humanists,” he says. “That means we need to train people who will be conversant enough to know they need to talk to other scholars.

“It is changing the whole way of doing humanities. Right now we have the way of the lone scholar, still, but they cannot master all the technologies available, so we need to open up to become more collaborative. And that teamwork will also be better in the job market.”