Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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development of susta<strong>in</strong>able digital scholarship rather than accept<strong>in</strong>g the fragility of the
structures we create due to short-term or soft fund<strong>in</strong>g; resources that once created are situated
outside the traditional fund<strong>in</strong>g and <strong>in</strong>stitutional structures <strong>in</strong> the humanities. Moreover we need
to f<strong>in</strong>d long-term fund<strong>in</strong>g strategies for support<strong>in</strong>g the personnel and resources needed for these
projects despite the fact that they are more typical of a science lab than a humanities project:
programmers, servers, web developers, metadata specialists, to name but the most obvious
(Edmond and Schreibman 2010).
In their work with the Digital Humanities Observatory, Edmond and Schreibman stated that that their
organization was currently funded through 2011, with no clear bus<strong>in</strong>ess model or susta<strong>in</strong>ability plan.
Mov<strong>in</strong>g from “core fund<strong>in</strong>g” to piecemeal fund<strong>in</strong>g secured through grants, they noted frequently,
“diverts staff from “core activities” that the <strong>in</strong>frastructure was designed to carry out.” The authors also
criticized the fact that almost exclusively project-based fund<strong>in</strong>g had encouraged the creation of digital
silos rather than <strong>in</strong>tegrated resources, a trend that projects such as Bamboo, CLARIN, and DARIAH
are seek<strong>in</strong>g to address. Nonetheless, Edmond and Schreibman were not certa<strong>in</strong>, as Peter Rob<strong>in</strong>son has
commented before, that such large <strong>in</strong>frastructure projects were necessarily go<strong>in</strong>g to be successful.
“Generations of big projects, Europe’s DARIAH and Project Bamboo not excepted,” they reasoned,
“seem to struggle with the notion that the right tools will turn the scholarly Sauls to Pauls, and br<strong>in</strong>g
them <strong>in</strong> their droves <strong>in</strong>to the digital fold. Others put forward the notion that generational change will
br<strong>in</strong>g us along regardless of our efforts for or aga<strong>in</strong>st changes <strong>in</strong> modes of scholarly communication”
(Edmond and Schreibman 2010). But as was illustrated by the CSHE report (Harley et al. 2010) longterm
changes <strong>in</strong> acceptance and susta<strong>in</strong>ability of digital scholarship will likely require far more than a
simple chang<strong>in</strong>g of the guard.
Although many humanities scholars may feel that <strong>in</strong>frastructure and technical questions are the
preserve of librarians and technologists, Neel Smith has conv<strong>in</strong>c<strong>in</strong>gly argued that questions of
openness, digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure, and susta<strong>in</strong>ability must be at the forefront of any humanist discussion
of digital scholarship:
Humanists can with some justification feel that the dizzy<strong>in</strong>g pace of development <strong>in</strong>
<strong>in</strong>formation technology leaves them little time to reflect on its application to their area of
expertise. And, after all, why should they concern themselves As long as digital scholarship
‘just works’ for their purposes, isn’t that enough Here, as with software, the problem is that
digital scholarship never ‘just’ works. The Homer Multitext project has focused on the choice
of licences, and the design of data models, archival storage formats, and an architecture for
network services because those decisions determ<strong>in</strong>e what forms our scholarly discourse can
assume <strong>in</strong> a digital environment as def<strong>in</strong>itively as code determ<strong>in</strong>es what a piece of software can
accomplish (Smith 2010, 136–137).
The Homer Multitext Project chose to use open-data formats and free licenses so that their material
could be both preserved and reused, two key components to susta<strong>in</strong>ability. Similar arguments
regard<strong>in</strong>g the relationship between the ability to reuse materials and long-term susta<strong>in</strong>ability have been
made by Hugh Cayless (Cayless 2010b). Cayless has recently proposed that study<strong>in</strong>g how ancient texts
have survived may provide us with some idea for how digital objects may be preserved. As he
expla<strong>in</strong>s, texts have typically been transmitted <strong>in</strong> four ways: accident, reuse through <strong>in</strong>corporation <strong>in</strong>to
other entities, republication, or replication and durability of material (e.g., stone <strong>in</strong>scriptions). Through
an overview of manuscript transmission and textual criticism, Cayless detailed the vary<strong>in</strong>g fortunes of
Virgil, Sappho, and the Res Gestae across the centuries. He then touched upon a theme illustrated