0.2 The grub street project: imagining futures in scholarly editing  (Page 12/14)

Ideally, we need a separate server for experimental work so that there is no potential for a security hole on the larger system. We need an institutional repository that is not based merely on archiving electronic versions of printed articles and books (as important as that is). Even at the most basic levels, we need a reliable capital funds allocation to buy and upgrade servers and desktop computers, and (however unlikely, given the economic constraints all universities are facing right now) hire a dedicated programmer / sys admin whose job description is to support faculty research. Presently, each digital project is required to provide its own funding for markup and programming. This has often amounted to hiring students in the past, but without a dedicated research support programmer / sys admin, smaller projects without access to external funding must be planned to require little by way of updates to code; they are also jeopardized by the fact that programmers and student assistants hired for the short term will move on, leaving a researcher (sometimes with little expertise in the necessary techniques) with the problem of not being able to easily upgrade or modify the existing project.

I have been fortunate to receive startup infrastructure funding through a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grant to create a Computing and Media Studies Research Lab within the DRC, which has been both enormously beneficial and enormously time-consuming. Aside from the very complex and demanding application process that has generated roughly eight hundred email messages between me and various constituents at the university, I find—even with assistance from research services—that research time is eaten up with budgeting; determining, or negotiating, with various levels of administration concerning who does which job (one cannot, I find, purchase a camera without the involvement of several separate units); finding programmers who can actually do the work and will answer my emails; filling out and photocopying forms; justifying my expenses and sending identical documentation to both Research Services and Financial Services Division, and so on. Because the CFI traditionally funds innovative research in the sciences and social sciences, applying for funding in the humanities and fine arts has entailed a huge learning curve both for applicants and research services. One most memorable exchange arose from the stipulation that books are not an eligible expense for infrastructure. Because I wanted to scan original eighteenth-century editions and maps, I found myself arguing that, for the purposes of my studies, these books could be considered “core data,” which is an allowable expense. The example I gave was Strype’s 1720 edition of The Survey of London . Given their formal structure, with “tabular data” (consistently organized short entries categorized under headings and subheadings) the textual entries in this text, I argued, are in fact an early form of a database: for example, each subheading corresponds to what I have designated a “placename” field, and each description corresponds to a “notes” field. I am very grateful that Research Services and CFI conferred on this to ultimately conclude that books in this case could indeed be considered data. These issues, humorous in retrospect, show how much negotiation and education must go into the inserting of literary scholarship—traditionally requiring minimal financial support—into funding and support structures built on models of the sciences and social sciences.