Ensuring Software Quality and Sustainability of DH Projects

Many Digital Humanities projects involve the development of software or scripts. However, the development of software is often not understood as proper academic output that counts towards academic performance. In addition, software developers in DH often lack formal software engineering training, although not all concepts from the software development domain can be fully applied to DH research projects. This often leads to unmaintained or poorly written software that is hard or impossible to reuse by others. We propose a forum centered around the question of how the DH community can ensure code quality and sustainability beyond the limited and often temporary funding of DH projects. The discussion would be focusing on questions such as how the community can provide proper credit for coding related work, procedures to improve code quality and code sharing, and how scholars entering the field can receive training and support in programming related topics.