The Graceful Degradation Survey: Managing Digital Humanities Projects Through Times of Transition and Decline

Transition and decline are pressing issues
for scholars in the digital humanities, as our
projects tend to be both collaborative and
open-ended. Project staff relocate, reestablish
themselves in new areas, or retire, even as
funding and institutional support comes and
goes. How are projects to be designed so that
they can be maintained, or maintain themselves,
through periods of change? How might projects
be designed in a way that takes periods of
transition and possible decline into account
from the very start?
These are some of the issues we sought to
explore in undertaking "Graceful Degradation:
Managing Digital Projects in Times of Transition
and Decline," a wide-ranging survey of the
digital humanities community, in the summer
of 2009. Our intent was to investigate how the
community currently deals with these problems
and, using our survey data – which also included
some demographic information and measures of
perceived levels of support and impact of various
kinds of change – to make recommendations
on how we, as a community, might improve the
current approach.
This presentation will provide a detailed
look at the outcomes of the "Graceful
Degradation" survey, and propose some initial
recommendations. (Full recommendations will
be published in a separate article.)
The survey was designed in consultation with
statistical analysis staff at the Scholars' Lab,
University of Virginia Library and unveiled
at Digital Humanities 2009 in College Park,
Maryland and at Digital Resources for the
Humanities and Arts (DRHA 2009) in Belfast,
Northern Ireland. It was conducted online
between July and September 2009. There
were 102 completed surveys, representing 114
discrete projects. Some of our findings are
presented below.
The vast majority (76%) of Graceful
Degradation respondents come from "large
universities with a research emphasis,"
but teaching colleges, cultural heritage
institutions, and commercial ventures were also
represented. Most respondents have worked
in project management or digital research
and development efforts in the humanities for
2-10 years, but 35% of respondents have been
engaged in this activity for more than a decade.
Respondents were asked to rate perceived
levels of support for the digital humanities
at their home institutions, including (as
separate queries) general support, support
for collaborative activities, local funding
and cost-share opportunities, support by
higher administration, department-level or local
support, and support for project management
and grant-writing.
64% of respondents had experienced the decline
of a project or had weathered a period of difficult
transition. 29% of respondents indicated a sense
that digital humanities projects are more likely
to decline or suffer these difficult transitions at
their institutions than at others.
Participants were asked to respond in detail
regarding their experiences with a particular
project that suffered decline or a difficult
transition. The following percentages apply
to the primary or to the single project
which survey participants addressed. 37% of
respondents identified themselves as project
lead or principal investigator (PI) for the
project they discussed in depth. 29% of
respondents self-identified as project managers,
and other respondents fell into categories such
as "dedicated, project-specific support staff,"
"support staff on loan from other units,"
"graduate or undergraduate research staff,"
"post-docs or faculty collaborators."
38% of projects discussed fell into the category
of "content creation, digitization, and archive-
building," but other categories (including

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software development, online community-
building activities, online journals and
other publications, and creation of support
infrastructure for digital scholarship) were also
represented. Predominant disciplines and time
periods addressed were literary and textual
studies and digital history, from the modern or
early modern era. More projects (31% and 24%
respectively) identified an academic department
and a library or museum as their primary
institutional home, with 23% primarily housed
in a digital humanities center.
Of projects that had experienced decline or
difficult transition, most were identified as
still "ongoing and active" (51%), with 26%
abandoned or dormant, and 15% and 8% either
complete or "just getting started," respectively.
Participants were asked about funding sources
for these projects (generally via institutional
support or "external public funding") and
understood length of funding or support.
Projects treated were generally funded for 2-3
years, with no possibility of renewal, but often
(in 21% of cases) the length of funding or support
was "unclear." That said, 75% of respondents
considered their project's funding to be "reliable
and clear in scope."
Most respondents undertook the treated project
with clear plans for supporting it beyond an
initial funding period, but most projects also
ultimately "differed in scope or definition from
early plans." In 68% of cases, participants
had identified both short-term and long-term
goals for their projects, but conscious use of
"specific project management techniques or
tools" and "risk management strategies" was a
rarity. Anecdotal responses treated the impact of
varying levels of planning or lack of planning on
digital projects.
The majority of projects (55%) experienced
no negative impact due to staff overturn
whatsoever. For projects that did, we asked
participants to rate the negative impact of
overturn of six different categories of staff
members and collaborators. Survey participants
also rated the broad impact of their projects
in a dozen areas, such as "scholarly inquiry
in a particular field," "my own pedagogical
practice," and "the professional advancement of
my collaborators."
Participants were additionally given the
opportunity to respond to several prose
prompts, and to add more contextual
information to many of the questions for
which we had devised statistical measures.
They summarized the reasons for the project
decline or difficult transitions they experienced,
and offered formulae for their successes.
Some respondents identified nuanced issues
with intellectual property and open source as
contributing factors. We plan to summarize
these rich responses and reveal the results of
qualitative data analysis at the conference.
67% of respondents indicated that their personal
views and practices have evolved as a result of
experiencing a period of difficult transition or
the decline of digital humanities project, but in
only 32% of cases did they feel that the views or
practices of their local institutions or the larger
academic community have evolved in response
to such experiences like these.
67% of respondents also indicated that they had
experienced what they would consider a "phase
of successful transition" in their digital projects,
and offered anecdotal advice as to what made
that possible.
At , we will summarize
and offer some visualizations and analysis
of these findings and others, and we will
address the extensive qualitative data that
were collected from participants in free-form
text responses. (Several participants granted us
permission to quote their responses directly.
We will anonymize and summarize responses
from others.) We will also draw conclusions
about avenues for future research and – more
importantly – identify areas for future action
on the part of institutions supporting digital
humanities projects and professional societies
representing the digital humanities community.
References
Matthew Kirschenbaum et al
. 'Done:
'Finished' Projects in the Digital Humanities'.
Digital Humanities.
Urbana-Champaign,
Illinois, 2007.
Daniel Pitti
(2004). 'Designing Sustainable
Projects and Publications'.
A Companion
to Digital Humanities.
Susan Schreibman,