Discussion Points

  • How do we choose historic written material for digital humanities projects? What types of material do we choose, and what audiences are we aiming at?
  • Are Digital Resource creation and traditional scholarship mutually exclusive? Are both equally valued? Should they be? How do assessment exercises such as the REF (and university departments’ internal, REF-influenced decision-making processes) engage with these issues?
  • Which models for funding Digital Humanities work have proven successful? Are they repeatable / extensible or one-off? Which kinds of institutions should be responsible for making funding available?
  • Much Digital Humanities work and funding so far has been invested in resource development. Does more thought need to be given to sustainability or to wider exploitation of digital resources (e.g. in teaching)? (For an EEBO-TCP-focused exploration of some of these issues, see this report emerging from the University of Oxford study, SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition).