0.2 The grub street project: imagining futures in scholarly editing  (Page 13/14)

The CFI grant covers the costs of initial programming and database development, but not for the research itself. This funding, in turn, is very difficult to come by. The main source of funding for humanities research in Canada is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and up until relatively recently, it has not specifically allocated a grant to digital humanities projects. Image, Text, Sound and Technology grants were initiated in 2000 but offer significantly lower amounts for a shorter duration than the traditional Standard Research Grants. Moreover, the program does not support digitization of collections, routine computer applications, creation of stand-alone major research tools, or development of technological infrastructure ^{(External Link) .} —all necessary to the sustainability of most projects in digital humanities. ^{A promising change for larger projects is the new Digging into Data Challenge sponsored jointly by the Joint Information Systems Committee ( JISC ) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities ( NEH ) and National Science Foundation ( NSF ) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada. (External Link) .}

Mostly, small research projects in this area have been reliant on Standard Research Grants, relatively few of which are awarded to textual or literary scholarship (see Appendix). These have tended to be projects traditional in scope: indices, concordances, and editions. Without knowing the relative numbers of applicants and their research histories, the reasons for this are hard to gauge. My own experience of applying each year for the past five years has been discouraging and, though the reasons for this range from my own newness and inexperience as a scholar to the way I have described the project, certainly some bias in the traditional humanities against digitization has resulted in very odd criticisms of my proposals. For example, one assessor last year asked, quite as if Google Maps, other digital mapping technologies listed in my bibliography, and basic keyword searching had never existed, “How can verbal comments be mapped on a map of London?” and commented, “It would be helpful to explain how the user would find information. For example, if one wanted to find Ivy Lane on the map? If one wanted to find the Gun in Ivy Lane? If one had simply a reference to the Gun, without mention of Ivy Lane?” The simplest explanation is that in some ways the interface will resemble Google Maps, where short annotations can be overlaid on the map, and can link to much longer texts in new windows. Much as in Google Maps, searching for “Gun” results in several hits; from these the viewer will select the most likely option, and click on provided links to more textual information about the place, or to the precise location or street on any given map. It is hard to know, indeed, how much basic education about computer interfaces must displace rationale and methodology in any grant application that is not dedicated to digital projects. We cannot rely solely on the tenuous possibilities of grants to build sustainability for either a group of researchers pooling resources or for any individual project, especially those that challenge traditional notions of “doneness” when a monograph or edition is published.