Talk to the CRASSH Early Career Researchers Workshop, 'This Project Will Self-Destruct in Five Years: the beginning, middle and end of a digital humanities project, and how to keep it alive', University of Cambridge, 8 June 2012

1. Does My Project Look Big in This?
Projects and the Digital Humanities
Andrew Prescott, King’s College
London

2. The word project dates from the
fifteenth century. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the word
frequently indicated shady dealings –
attempts to tie up monopolies and
inflate prices.

3. The eighteenth-century projector: an untrustworthy object of suspicion and ridicule,
ripe for Swift’s satire

4. This video from the Institute of Project Management illustrates how the
modern view of the project is diametrically opposite: modern history and
achievement is defined here as a series of grand and successfully managed
projects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQK4QN-NqgM

5. The Project: a keyword for our time
• The New Labour project
• The Euro project
• The Obama project
• A term for a body of intellectual work:
- ‘Foucault’s project can be seen as a series of not necessarily connected
attempts to let disqualified and subjected discourses and forms of
knowledge speak’.
- ‘In The Specters of Marx, Derrida characterizes the project of
deconstruction as a political one’.
• Applied retrospectively:
- ‘We can identify the Enlightenment project as the attempt to identify
and explain the human predicament through science’.
- ‘The Renaissance: a cultural project’.
- ‘The pursuit of the Newtonian project also led to a strikingly different
conception of the world’.

6. Political projects are likely to be ephemeral and shortlived,
even if monumental in their ambitions

7. The ‘Grand Projet’: the monumentality
of the project
Not only France, but also
Olympics, Shard,
Gherkin, Canary
Wharf…..

8. Humanity as a Project, and an app
Join a viral conversation on the future of humanity (providing that you speak
English, have an Amazon account, use an iPad and have access to the internet).
But where is the project here: in the app, the conversation, or the outcomes?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR4Zr3DL_Q0

9. The Paradoxes of the Project
• The term ‘project’ stresses the personal and
provisional character of human endeavour
(Foucault project, Newton project), but it is used
to imply the possibility of a fixed and settled
conclusion (the completion of large buildings,
implementation of single currency)
• The term ‘project’ implies risk and possibility of
failure but for many larger projects (EU, New
Labour) the criteria for success are not clear

10. The Paradoxes of the Project
• We look for permanence and stability from a
project, but by definition projects are often
hazardous and risky.
• We are impressed by the scale and ambition of a
project’s vision, yet good project management is
about practicability, identifying practicable stages
and reducing risk. How do you project manage
the Enlightenment or the French Revolution?
• Does my project look big in this? Are we really
impressed by the project or by the scale of
ambition?

11. Project managing the Shard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lBBUxVvNV0&feature=relmfu
Despite our ubiquitous use of the project as a social and cultural metaphor, grand
projects like the Shard require concrete project management skills. But these skills are
concerned with translating the visions of others. Are they the sort of skills required for
innovative academic research?

12. Lessons from the Shard for Digital
Humanities
• Some lessons can be read over:
– Importance of communication
– Need to understand how project is built
– Need to grasp detail
– Working within time constraints
– Clear roles
• But in other areas there are differences:
– Who owns the vision in an academic project?
– What are the criteria for success?
– ‘Avoid getting too involved in the process’. But isn’t
process precisely what research is about?

13. • The Digital Humanities is inhabited by projects
• To keep the Digital Humanities mysterious, we
shroud our projects in acronyms, whose true
nature is known only to the priestly caste of
practitioners of the digital humanities
• The welter of Digital Humanities projects is all
too often a way of preventing and
discouraging engagement with the digital
• A mysterious litany of acronyms shielding
projects whose value or rationale is not
immediately obvious

14. Guess the Acronym
DARIAH:
Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities
CLARIN:
Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure
PLANETS:
Preservation and Long-term Access via NETworked Services
NeDiMAH:
Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities
LAIRAH:
Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities
IDP:
International Dunhuang Project
or Integrating Digital Papyrology
ADHO:
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations
CHAIN:
Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks

15. Why is the Digital Humanities
populated by projects?
• Conventional academic departments are funded from teaching
income with additional allowances and grants to support research
• Projects are comparatively small in number and are often central to
the intellectual aspirations of an individual academic
• Digital Humanities Centres are generally supported almost entirely
from research income and staff are paid from research grants
• Grant making bodies are focused on supporting research (not
teaching or access)
• Grant making bodies require projects with clearly defined goals and
milestones to ensure their money is properly spent
• In order to keep staff on the payroll, digital humanities centres are
on a treadmill of project applications and project delivery
• The results is project slavery – a sort of intellectual sharecropping

16. What are the effects of projects on the
digital humanities?
• The pressure to maintain research income leads to a high
proportion of projects which reflect intellectual agendas of other
researchers and lack genuine innovation
• Much of the work undertaken by early career researchers is service
and delivery rather than genuine academic research
• The pedagogical agenda remains under-developed because of the
pressure of research projects
• Research projects offer the only job opportunities for early career
researchers
• Early career researchers do not have time to develop their own
digital activities or publications
• Early career researchers cannot secure academic researchers and
remain dependent on research projects, creating a vicious cycle of
dependency

17. What are the effects of projects on the
digital humanities?
• Early career researchers locked out of academic
posts
• Digital humanities underdeveloped as an
academic area
• Digital humanities locked into an academic ghetto
of ad hoc centres, institutes, etc.
• No academic dialogue develops around the
digital humanities which focuses on modelling
and building
• The digital humanities remains as no more than a
software factory

18. Are We Really Building a Shard?
• The Shard (or any other engineering project) is our
governing metaphor for work in the digital humanities
• Is it the most appropriate metaphor?
• Does academic discourse build a monumental
statement? Should digital humanities scholars seek to
realise the visions of others? What is our definition of
concluding an academic project?
• Is academic discourse a continuing process – the
antithesis of the project?
• Does the concept of the project inherently restrict the
digital humanities to a subsidiary role?

19. Is there an alternative to the project?
• Change our business models so that they are more like those of
conventional academic departments. More teaching!
• We can focus less on building and more on being. We
increasingly live and communicate in a digital environment. Do
we need to build defined projects anymore?
• We no longer need to show that the digital can be done; but we
do need to show how the digital can transform scholarship.
• Twelve books would be a lifetime’s work; yet junior researchers
frequently juggle four or five projects of monograph complexity.
• We can start to explore the implications and interconnections of
digital work in just the way that we did before computers came
along. We need to stop feeling anxious about the status of the
digital.

20. A library catalogue is not a project (although particularly
stages in its life such as card conversion might be projects).
What is it? A space? A cumulation? Maybe we need to think
more about spaces and interconnections than projects.
Scholarly communication through blogs, tweets and
Facebook will soon become very similar in its character to a
library catalogue

21. A very early experiment in imaging a burnt manuscript under ultra-violet light.
Kevin Kiernan: ‘These images seem to portend the start of something really big,
expensive, and earth-shattering.
Should we thinking more about connected experiments rather than projects?

22. The Electronic Beowulf: three editions in twelve years. Is this a project or an
exploration? But how do we keep it going for the next fifty or a hundred years? Can
projects exist outside an institutional framework?

23. Iain Sinclair on the grand project – the razing of London by the
Olympic Project in a war of images:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GThXUiOfvAE&feature=related
Sinclair’s view is that these are issues of space and localities.
Computer images are manipulated in such a way as to sequestrate
localities through imaginary projects.
Is space the area in which we redefine the project and extirp its
baleful influence in the Digital Humanities? Can the Digital
Humanities imagine new spaces of interaction which will free us
from project slavery?