DH Awards: Possibilities and problems of an openly-nominated and openly-voted DH awareness-raising activity

This long paper explores the annual Digital Humanities Awards, run as an openly-nominated and openly-voted DH awareness-raising activity at http://dhawards.org/, through a history of their development and consideration of a number of problematic aspects concerning them in assessing their future. Although often praised, there has been a variety of criticism of them. Presented by the founder and main instigator of DH Awards, this paper opens up discussion on these issues, while benefiting from a privileged position of having access to all of the confidential raw nomination and voting data for the entire run of DH Awards (2012 to present). Additional feedback will also be collected during the DH Awards 2019 round of voting (in early 2020). This paper does not seek to dismiss criticisms, but to engage with them to discuss whether the DH Awards are a positive force and the best ways to ameliorate any issues raised.