Information Practices in International, Collaborative, Publicly-Funded, Data-Driven Digital Humanities Projects

Path-breaking in theory and practice, digital humanities (DH) not only secures a larger public audience for humanities and social sciences research, but also permits researchers to ask novel questions and to revisit familiar ones. Publicly-funded, interdisciplinary, distributed, and collaborative research programs in digital humanities explore new methods, further institutional research missions, and produce data and tools that enrich globally networked knowledge. The Digging into Data Challenge (DID) is one such initiative.

Launched in 2009, DID’s international founders (The National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Joint Information Systems Committee, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) foregrounded data-driven computational research in the social sciences and humanities. They have granted $21.1 million dollars to 50 projects over four challenges, each two years in duration. Scholars from the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, library science, archival science, information sciences, mathematical and statistical sciences, and engineering have all participated. Key outputs include code, algorithms, digital tools, data sets, White Papers and other reports, scholarly publications, research notes, and websites. Funders mandated that such outputs be made openly accessible and by extension, reusable.

In this webinar, we examine five areas of information dynamics that animate Round 3 of Digging into Data (DID3) (2014-2016) that involved four nations, ten funders, and fourteen projects. Our topics include, first, the value of librarians’ and archivists’ skills in data-driven research; second, the grant’s project management requirement versus researchers’ actual implementation of work plans; third, mechanisms of scholarly collaborative and interdisciplinary work; fourth, the interplay of pedagogy and researcher skills on projects; and finally, the funders’ data management requirement, the most challenging hurdle researchers encountered. We recommend the involvement of information professionals at once to enhance collaboration among researchers, provide structure for outcome sustainability, and improve project accountability in the use of public funds.