I have just been involved in a new committee that will advise on national research infrastructure in Norway. I guess my appointment to this committee is partly based on my experience with building up a medium-sized infrastructure on my own, the fourMs Lab. In addition, I lead the infrastructure board of the Department of Musicology and am a member of the e-infrastructure committee of the University of Oslo. The following text is based on some thoughts on infrastructure needs from a humanities perspective that I presented in a meeting.

Infrastructures vs E-Infrastructures

When we began setting up the fourMs Lab fifteen years ago, nobody spoke about e-infrastructures. On the other hand, few people talked about infrastructures either. We mainly talked about building a lab. A lab is a physical place where research is done. However, over the years, more and more of the work we previously did in the lab is done on servers. Motion capture sessions still need to be run in the physical lab, but after the recording is done, the data is moved to a server and accessed from virtual machines for processing and analyzing. So over the last years, we have focused on developing an e-infrastructure part of the lab.

It has been common to separate e-infrastructures from infrastructures. For example, at UiO, I am a member of the e-infrastructure committee. That may have made sense at some point, but today I see that most physical infrastructures also need an e-infrastructure. At some point, we should probably stop talking about e-infrastructure as its own thing and just accept that any infrastructure has both a physical and a virtual component.

The Humanities (and the Arts)

In Norway, we seldom talk about the concept of arts and humanities. Rather, it is more common to separate the arts and the humanities. For example, I work in the Department of Musicology, which is situated in the Faculty of Humanities. One could have thought that the faculty could have been named Faculty of Arts and Humanities, given that we also have literature and art history in our faculty. But I guess that since we do not cover the arts more broadly, it is better that we are organized under the humanities.

In any case, the humanities typically have different infrastructure needs than other faculties. Many people work with text, so there is a lot of focus on corpora and databases. We (music researchers) are different in that we care a lot about sound, video, and also, increasingly, sensor data. Still, there are other humanities researchers that are curious about such media as well, so I would argue that humanities infrastructures need to be designed differently in the future.

There are two topics that I find particularly tricky when dealing with infrastructure questions from an arts and humanities perspective: privacy and copyright.

Privacy Issues

People in the arts and humanities research people and their “products.” As opposed to researchers in the social and natural sciences, humanities-oriented scholars do not work (much) with experiments and hypotheses. Rather, observation and introspection are common methods. The number of “subjects” is typically small. It is perfectly fine to carry out a study on an individual. In artistic research, it is common to study oneself and one’s artistic practice. Of course, you don’t get much statistical significance out of that, but that is not really the point either. The aim is to make a deep dive into individual (human) experiences.

As can be imagined, research in the arts and humanities leads to all sorts of privacy issues. After all, the whole point of the research is to scrutinize the life and works of individuals. Fortunately, in many cases, the study objects are already publicly available. Artists typically display their work publicly in one form or another (books, paintings, concerts, and so on). This makes it easier to study these objects from a privacy perspective.

However, many arts and humanities researchers are also interested in understanding more about how the artworks are used. Then it is necessary to move into the realm of the social and natural sciences. For example, in the MusicLab concert series, we try to see how people respond to music during real-world concerts. As we have seen, it is challenging to collect data in such a way that we adhere to GDPR while at the same time trying to be as little invasive as possible.

Another challenging topic for arts and humanities researchers is legal issues related to copyright. The rights held by the creator of an intellectual work include the exclusive ability to control the reproduction, distribution, adaptation, and translation of the work. In Norway, copyright is governed by the Copyright Act, which generally protects a work for 70 years after the end of the year in which the author passes away.

The Copyright Act safeguards literary and artistic works, distinguishing them from facts, principles, methods, and mathematical concepts. For a work to qualify for copyright protection, it must involve a practical, creative effort and demonstrate individual intellectual activity. This protection extends not only to the original form of the work but also to altered forms, translations, and adaptations. Many copyright disputes arise over whether a new intellectual work has achieved a “threshold of originality,” meaning it demonstrates sufficient literary or artistic independence from the original work. This is particularly relevant in cases of reuse, where it must be determined if the new work infringes on someone else’s copyright.

Researchers also hold copyright over the materials they produce, such as articles, books, and presentations. However, the situation becomes more complex when dealing with datasets and databases, especially when these are derived from or incorporate the work of others. Many researchers are unaware and/or ignorat about copyright and licensing. Moving forward, we need to find ways to understand more about (1) What am I allowed to do with material created by others? and (2) What are others allowed to do with the material I create?

Libraries and Museums as Research Infrastructures

It is somewhat strange to have to remind people that libraries and museums are important research infrastructures. In fact, these are probably some of the most important infrastructures for people working in the arts and humanities. Still, for some reason, the libraries and museums are often “forgotten” when it comes to talking about infrastructures these days. That needs to change.

Sometimes I question all the time I spend on various committees related to Open Research and infrastructures. However, this is the backbone of everything else we are doing. In fact, without solving issues related to privacy, copyright, storage, and archiving, we won’t be able to move our research forwards. At times, I see that my contributions in various committees actually end up in strategy documents. That keeps me motivated to continue!