0.31 European elephants in the room (are they the ones with the  (Page 7/9)

Yet, like many digital humanities projects, the DHO was funded for three years without a clear business model or sustainability plan. There was the expectation that further rounds of PRTLI would allow for repeat funding or that European monies would be made available to fund core activities. But PRTLI is not designed to be a funding stream for the long term, and does not extend funding grants or give repeat funding to successful projects. Instead, projects are expected to have somehow become “sustainable” after a limited number of years’ core funding. This should be achieved either by being mainstreamed into their host institution or by making a research breakthrough that leads to licenses, patent and unlimited cash. Even for the sciences this model is a pipe dream. What happens instead in these cases is that core funding is replaced with piecemeal project funding, which is far more burdensome to administer and diverts staff from “core activities” the infrastructure was designed to carry out. While the DHO has made a significant impact amongst humanities scholars in Ireland (with over five hundred people attending our events in eighteen months and some one hundred fifty project consultations), its future is uncertain, although a business plan is currently being developed. In the eighteen months since the announcement was made about the withdrawal of funding from the AHDS, as well as the current difficulties of the DHO in the wake of the demise of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, it is at best shortsighted and at worst irresponsible to fund national digital humanities platforms that have preservation mandates on uncertain funding streams. 

The French, however, have taken a different approach. In 2007, TGE Adonis was funded under the auspices of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CRNS) to support access to digital documents in the humanities and social sciences. Its priorities are three-fold: building a partnership between the various actors in research on human sciences; the digitizing of archives; and the digital publishing of scientific journals in the field. 4   Its activities thus span the digital life-cycle from digitization to archiving. It is an integral part of the TGIR, a national infrastructural research program funded by the Ministry through 2014, crossing all disciplines. 

Although this humanities infrastructure is nascent, there is reason to believe that funding will be available for the long term. A similar physics infrastructure has been funded for over twenty years. Additionally, twenty percent of TGE Adonis’s staff are public servants who are not on short-term contracts, further indicating government commitment. There is evidence that the French government is committed to the need for a national infrastructure in support of the human and social sciences as per their announcement last December in which they committed to funding four new initiatives (http://www.tge-adonis.fr/?Trois-nouvelles-grandes&decoupe_recherche=TGIR). More significantly, there appears to be a clear intention on the part of the government to somewhat reconfigure the research landscape, in particular the “balance of power” between the CNRS  and other players in higher education (such as the Universities and the Grands Ecoles). This in turn means that questions about digital infrastructures are high on the agenda and questions of appropriate governance and funding models are under active consideration. The model that seems to be emerging is characterized by “mutualisation,” i.e., sharing and partnership beyond the CNRS, rather than centralisation. 5