0.2 The grub street project: imagining futures in scholarly editing  (Page 9/14)

As Jerome McGann reminded us in his recent article, “Our Textual History,” there are “two very broad obligations that scholars have by virtue of their vocation as educators. We are called to surveille and monitor this process of digitization. Much of it is now being carried out by agents who act, by will or by mistake, quite against the interests of scholars and educators—and in that respect, against the general good of society. So we must insist on participating.” ^{Jerome McGann, “Our Textual History,” TLS (20 November 2009): 13–15.} However, the challenges are many, ranging from the intellectual complexities and presumptuousness of any small individual project by a new scholar imagining new ways to edit, read, publish, and share scholarly editions, to getting funding at the national and international level, to the particular administrative assumptions and infrastructures at the departmental and university level. What is involved in making this happen? The following pages will assess some of these challenges aside from the issues of copyright I have been discussing, particularly in the context of a new scholar working in a mid-sized university in Canada.

Preserving and sustaining the life of digital projects: institutional obstacles

The University of Saskatchewan has been active in digital publishing and research initiatives since the 1990s. However, the economies of doing this kind of work have meant that, until recently, we have remained a number of independent scholars building standalone projects or editions that have only occasionally been peer reviewed, and are housed on the English Department webserver space. These early projects were done on PCs in offices with the minimum of necessary hardware—student-owned scanners did at least some of the graphics work—and they were completed on shoestring budgets. As the digital humanities have become more complex in orientation, the need has grown for material infrastructure, programming assistance, and continued revisions and updates to the resources as web standards change. Ongoing efforts over the years have resulted in a number of important initiatives, notably the creation of the Digital Research Centre (DRC), a space nominally reserved for research, with a projects room, a performance room, and three A/V booths. ^{(External Link) .} Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) infrastructure funding has helped to ensure that the space, in much demand, is truly reserved for digital research and training. The DRC was first imagined and promoted by Peter Stoicheff, now the Vice-Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, in the 1990s. Without his ongoing commitment and efforts to educate university administrators and promote the potential for such a space, it would not have been achieved. Others, of course, were invaluable to the creation of the DRC, now operating at capacity. The financial support of the university and the College of Arts and Sciences in dedicating the space to digital computing has meant that researchers now have access to good equipment, some limited programming assistance if they have funding, server space, and a community space. However, the centre and its staff are likely to continue to be dependent on external funding and will need committed endorsement and financial support from the university.