How to get through time, money, and institutional constraints
One of the questions raised earlier on mentioned the following emerging issue: the DH part of a project should become an integral part of the coherent narrative of the larger work (article, dissertation, PhD thesis, etc.). The problem surrounding this is linked to time (e.g. how to convince that taking two months to build up a database will benefit your project) and money (humanities scholarships are not necessarily allocated for a digital project, CS ones are not always encouraging connections with particular topics in the humanities). In this circle, we all acknowledge the importance of DH projects: but how do we do it now?
1. How to reach efficiency in a given time constraint?
Most academic projects having strict deadlines (PhDs are more and more being given the limit of 36 months), deciding to include a wide DH dimension may bring substantial risks regarding the completion of the project on time. Building the database is a heavy process which does not even deliver a finished and visualisable product. Afterwards, analysing that database inevitably highlights the need to revise and rectify the database. This is the part of the project which might become time-consuming and hard to estimate. Therefore, throughout a new type of collaboration and teamwork (which is more hybrid and wasn’t possible 15 years ago) we have ways to minimise this.
2. How to convince institutions of the relevance of a DH project?
A research project is surrounded by institutions (supervisors, examiners, funding bodies, commentators, publishers…) who all have influences and expectations of results. They are actors who have approved your topic but have not necessarily allowed the emergence of a digital part – which cannot add up to a word count or allocated budget. For the researcher, the DH side is not a mere embellishment but a genuinely integral part of the academic output: this is the institutional constraint that has to be pushed back.
Once this is legitimised, DH workshops could be compared to academic writing workshops (where skills are acquired), and to a greater extent, data building would be seen as equally important as a literature review for instance. We could picture the appearance of ‘Digital Humanities’ in humanities curricula or in research guidelines.
