Turning back to the sustainability of the individual project, I will describe my own experiences to date, which indicate that institutional support, both financial and administrative, as well as federal support (in terms of funding) are still very much at a new stage and will continue to benefit from further education, planning, and development over the next number of years.
Jerome McGann begins “Our Textual History” with a question: “Why does textual scholarship matter?” The question of how (or whether) textual scholarship matters is playing itself out in my own university, where its importance is apparent but not well understood by administrators who can clearly see the value of medical science, ecology, public policy, and so on. We are currently advertising for a prestigious Canada Council Tier I Research Chair for outstanding researchers acknowledged by their peers as world leaders in their fields. This year our Digital Textuality proposal was well received by the university’s oversight committee, but the committee decided to make the competition ultimately between applicants for the position in three areas rather than advertising in a single area: thus the university is oddly interviewing for a single position that will be in Digital Textuality, Water Policy, or Innovation Policy. In some way or other, a committee of members from a variety of disciplines will decide on the relative merits of one over the others. So, a very interesting question will be answered here, I suspect: how “valuable” is text compared to water or to business? An unfair question, perhaps, but it points to some of the challenges when it comes to educating our colleagues and others about why textual scholarship matters.
This is not at all to say that the university here is not supportive of digital humanities scholarship, but we have many challenges as we build not just our discrete research projects, but also a systematic framework for support. Identifying and communicating needs is the first. There are three key groups at the university level that would ideally develop a system to foster successful digital scholarship and long-lived projects in the digital humanities: (1) for the intellectual content and long-term oversight, the scholars intent on conducting and disseminating their research in a digital environment; (2) for the long-term storage and serving of data, Information and Technology Services (ITS), the unit that supports research and educational IT infrastructure on campus; and (3) for the long-term cataloguing (and potentially for archiving digital works), the library. The case here at my institution is not a lack of support or enthusiasm for digital humanities projects at the top levels of administration: indeed, it is through the efforts of support in the Dean’s office in my college that I have been fortunate to not only have access to a dedicated space, resources, and assistance in the Digital Research Centre but also to startup funding (normally considered less essential to the humanities) as in-kind contributions toward external funding. And while the funds available are significantly lower than generally available in the sciences, (External Link)&provSel=Tous&typeEtabSel=0&etabSel=0§eurSel=Tous&discSel=0§euraaSel=Tous&dom_appSel=0 shows the results of a search for all CFI Leaders Opportunity Fund grants for infrastructure alone. My grant, for the sake of comparison, is $40,610. This must be spent within a period of eighteen months and cannot be used in any way for research. it is a good start. CFI infrastructure funding provides 40 percent of budgeted costs. The rest is provided by the researcher. In general, the mechanisms for startup funding and other sources of infrastructure funding is well established in the sciences as compared to the humanities, and thus the need to establish funding sources for both infrastructure and ongoing research and maintenance is potentially a significant impediment to a large project’s longevity. However, what we face is a matter of developing nonexistent policies and systems for continued financial, material and human resources. Every aspect of digital research seems to come down to a matter of education and building, long before one gets to actual research. The startup grant provided by the university, for example, required a reversal of decision by a top-level administrator, since my application had been turned down in the apparent assumption that a startup grant of $12,000 was unnecessary to literary research. It will take some time to establish a milieu where it is well understood that literary scholars will need more equipment than a word processor, a few books, and some chalk!