New research methods and subjects
In addition to peer review, the ACLS has organized committees to research promising fields of study. The concept of organizing expertise around a cultural region grew out of the council's early work in Far Eastern and Slavic studies. After World War II, when the practical need for such competence was evident, the ACLS and the Social Science Research Council developed African, Asian, Latin American, Near and Middle Eastern, Slavic, and East and West European studies.
In 1927 the ACLS Committee on Research in Native American Languages, under the leadership of Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, began in 1927 to "secure an adequate record of Indian languages and dialects." The Committee on a Journal of Medieval Studies, begun in 1924, founded the journal Speculum. The Committee on the History of Ideas, which included Richard McKeon and Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, created the Journal of the History of Ideas. Lovejoy wrote in the journal's first issue, "The processes of the human mind, in the individual or group, which manifest themselves in history, do not run in the enclosed channels corresponding to the officially established divisions of university faculties." At the founding conference of the Committee on Negro Studies in 1940 Ralph Bunche said, "We cannot ignore the importance of making clear to ourselves the scope of our interest in terms of the very broad social implications of our deliberations and resources."
Since the introduction of new research technology, the ACLS has helped scholars explore the impact of new technologies on their fields. In 1964 the council developed a grant and fellowship program to encourage computer use in humanistic research, which continues in its Digital Innovation Fellowships. Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report by the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, recommended digital humanities using new forms of research, reading and writing.
The ACLS has an interest in the problems of scholarly publication and has conducted a survey of publication needs, established a publication service to advise scholars on communicating research and aided scholars with subsidies and publication. The ACLS-sponsored National Enquiry into the Production and Dissemination of Scholarly Knowledge investigated all aspects of the dissemination of humanistic scholarship from 1974 to 1979. In 1979 it presented a report, Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Enquiry, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press and operated its Office of Scholarly Communication and Technology in Washington, D.C. until 1984. Today, the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection focuses on how digital innovations can enhance scholarly communication.
