What can you share about your DH project? – Survey Results.

This post is prepared together with Tilman Schalmey (Trier University).

Right before going on summer hiatus, we launched a survey asking our readers to share their experiences in DH projects. Now, we are back with the results.

With a total of 20 respondents over a period of three months (some chose not to answer all of the questions), survey participation wasn’t overwhelming, but still allows us to observe some tendencies that we’d like to share. First, let us look at who our responders are. 

Most participants worked with textual analysis, other popular topics included curation of digital collections, visualization, and geospatial and network analyses. “Other” project types included cultural analytics, deep learning, digital curation, high-performance computing, and philology.

The sizes of the teams were distributed rather evenly among one-person projects, teams of 2–5 people and larger teams.

Eleven of the respondents are leading their own projects (six of them were a one-person project, the rest were in charge of teams).

The technical level and complexity of the projects our respondents work on are very diverse. We had a lot of those who work with XML-TEI and different types of textual archives, but also several people who write original code and train their own language models, so we can assume that although the number of responses is small, it represents a great variety of jobs and research topics in digital humanities.

Results

We tried to keep the questionnaire as open-ended as possible, so there were only a couple of multiple-choice questions. Here is the summary of respondents’ satisfaction with different aspects of their work. 

How will you evaluate…

The opinions on support from non-academic staff vary widely but are otherwise pretty consistent. Also, although it is not so visible on the graph below, among those who worked as assistants on multiple-person teams, the opinions about the visibility of junior members were divided. Two of the four junior-level participants evaluated it as average and below.  

The most prominent trend visible in the bar charts is that researchers are highly interested in their projects, but often do not find adequate funding. This was, however, not surprising – despite speculations that Digital Humanities are a funding haven, it is often not so, especially when it comes to the research of the pre-modern periods. 

Only four of our respondents indicated that they had a kind of long-term funding for their project. Four of the respondents have to rely on their work in the industry to support themselves, eight are or were employed in academia without additional funding for their project, the rest either had different types of short-term funding or none at all. In total, less than half of the respondents indicated that they enjoyed funding specifically for their DH project. Unfortunately, lack of long-term funding or poor planning may even mean that the results of years of work, be it data or applications, become no longer publicly available after a short period of time

Open-ended questions

Probably the most interesting results came from the community comments to our open-ended questions. Here are some things that went well with the DH projects, according to the participants.

Unsurprisingly, many were happy with the successful research outcomes of their project, but there were many replies that talked positively about the organizational side of things: PI’s support of junior members was among the top frequent answers, along with the ability to collaborate with researchers from different fields that was enriching for each of the team members and helped better their research. 

Several respondents stressed that they really appreciated the absence of strict hierarchy in the DH projects they worked on – given the diverse fields the team members were coming from, they found it important that everyone was free to bring their ideas and actively influence the outcomes, or to use parts of the project to pursue their own research questions.

The sustainability of the project and the pedagogical application were other topics that were important to multiple people, and some found it helpful having the basic infrastructure of the project set up by professional IT specialists who can ensure a longer life for the project.

The things our respondents are unhappy with in their projects fall into just three groups.

1. A lot of answers talked about large difficulties related to planning and project management. Many respondents talked about how their project failed to define any specific (or SMART) goals and deadlines, which in turn led to failure to accomplish original plans. In many cases the PIs underestimated the amount of time, number of team members, and necessary funding required to accomplish their goals. It can be related to the PI not having enough experience in setting up such projects, or to the next point.

2. Inadequate staffing. DH projects are often understaffed – at times because the difficulty of the project is underestimated at the planning stages, or because it is hard to find the right kinds of specialists for the tasks. In the end, many respondents said that they ended up doing work they were not originally hired for – in many cases it is people with a background in the humanities who end up working on programming and technical sides of the project since there are not enough IT specialists in the projects. But sometimes it works the other way around: specialists hired to write code end up being responsible for the interpretation of the research outcomes or high-skill team members end up being responsible for the simple tasks on the projects.

3. Coordination between the team members: several replies mentioned that their teams are international which makes it hard to coordinate. In some cases, the IT specialists and the humanists comprise separate teams in different locations which makes collaboration tricky.

In the end, despite the limited responses, we can already see some trends. Many researchers hope to have more IT specialists involved – from project planning and setup to long-term support. But as it seems, many people with programming skills start working in the industry and, due to the general lack of funding, often join DH research “for fun”. This, alongside insufficient funding, makes projects high-risk as they rely on the volunteer work of people who have no obligation to see things through and ensure the projects are sustained over longer periods of time. Planning is another major point of tension – failure to estimate the complexity of a task leads to the wrong staff being hired, deadlines missed and goals not being met.

A big part of team projects is communication: when done well, team members find their work very gratifying and see opportunities to develop professionally. A lot of the respondents value the relative equality within the team and the creative freedom some of the DH projects offer.

Although the number of responses was not ideal, we still gained some useful insights. Is there a practical outcome of such a survey? We think there is – while increasing funding is not always possible, based on the results there are still many things to improve and expectations to manage. If the motivation for many is interest in the topic and freedom to explore it, taking it into account may help project leaders retain people for longer, despite the lack of funding. And talking about planning in general – all of us need to improve our skills. The failure to recognize how important non-academic skills are in organizing larger projects is a big obstacle. We often can’t afford to hire a full-time manager and an IT specialist for a project – but having a workshop on how to do it or a part-time consultant is more realistic and may be very helpful. If we recognize a problem, we can start looking for solutions. And, in the end, if such a survey gets more responses in the future – why not use it as a starting point to negotiate better terms for DH projects?

Disclaimer on including non-academic staff
We have to mention that there was a respondent who wished that the survey had paid more attention to the non-academic stuff in the DH projects – we would like to point out that excluding specific types of participants was not the intent of our survey and we are always happy to discuss the experiences of everyone involved digital projects (this summer’s conference had librarians, editors and independent researchers talking about their interactions with academics). If you feel like you have something to contribute – do contact us, Digital Orientalist is always open to guest posts!