Failure in self-funded projects

A grant application is almost never the beginning of a project, except in classroom contexts where writing a grant is a pedagogical activity. A digital humanities project almost always grows out of a person’s own interests, passions, frustrations or problems. It is because of this personal connection to the project content that many digital humanities projects come into existence in the absence of funding, running entirely on a person’s own labour in the margins of their lives and whatever financial resources they can dedicate to the work. These projects are arguably the most fortunate, despite the constraints they face: allowed to develop in their own time and manner, without a predetermined path that has been committed to the page and shared with a broader audience. Outside of the context of research-intensive institutions, self-funded projects may be the only feasible mode of project development, with initiatives taking a distinctly different shape in the absence of institutionalised structures for project development and support (Risam 2021).

This is not to say that there is no accountability in self-supported projects: collaboration of any sort generates a network of entanglements and obligations. As soon as you involve other people – be it through working with their materials, or accepting their labour (all the more so when it is volunteer labour, as is often the case in unfunded projects) – you take on the weight of responsibility to see that something comes of those materials or work (Mann 2019; Keralis 2018). Accepting volunteer labour, or being entrusted with materials important to a person or community, or building something that other people begin to rely on (or rely on the promise of) for their own future work: these are all pathways to a form of genuine failure. The failure that is worth seriously wrestling with, and letting it shape your approach to future collaborations, is the kind that involves letting down people who were counting on you. This is not to say that one should contort one’s life into knots to avoid these letdowns at all costs: some projects are simply not feasible in the end, let alone sustainable. It often feels terrible to end a project (see ‘How I Lost the Crowd’ in Graham 2019, 71–80) but for most projects, endings are a matter of when and how, rather than if. This is partly a consequence of the fact that long-term sustainability for digital humanities projects remains an area of concern. Not only is it not widely provided as a service even at the best-resourced institutions, it is unclear what such a thing would even look like. The diversity of tools, materials and technology underpinning digital humanities work makes it inherently resistant to any sort of automatable workflow, though a considerable amount of thought has gone into what pieces of such a thing might look like, including the work of The Endings Project.²

Sometimes there is truth in the meme-cliché: even if a project did not produce anything one could point to, the true digital humanities might be the friends met along the way. However, grappling with the gap between promises and results – especially when it implicates others’ resources, and considering what that gap means for your collaborators – is an important kind of self-reflection for digital humanists to engage in. Particularly for projects led by faculty or senior staff, it is important to embrace honest feedback from collaborators in positions of lesser institutional power as part of this process, rather than simply speculating on the impact of the project and its demise. Done well, drawing a self-funded project to an ending can uncover lessons of value even in a project that fundamentally didn’t work. When funding becomes part of the picture, however, the entire project framework shifts.

What happens when you get funding?

From the perspective of federal government grant agencies in particular, accountability is paramount when it comes to distributing funding. This is even more so in a political climate where even the existence of government-funded grants for the humanities comes under political attack with increasing frequency. It is important to be able to justify the value of the projects that are funded, and to know with reasonable certainty that the projects will, in fact, be completed.³ Even for private funders like the Mellon Foundation where the programme officers provide more support and dialogue through the application process and after the project is funded, part of the process involves crafting a detailed set of deliverables, project plan, staffing plan and budget.

There is nothing wrong with this approach to careful and deliberate project planning, and depending on the desired scale of the project, it may be the only way forward. Problems arise when scholars feel pressured to shift their project in directions that they don’t truly want in order to secure funding. This leads to grant proposals crafted out of well-meaning self-delusion: being funded, they reason, will come with a set of things they wouldn’t have otherwise done, but it at least would provide institutional legitimacy and surely there will be enough funding around the margins to do the work the scholar is actually excited about.

Compromises between a scholar’s ideal project and something that aligns with funder priorities are an unavoidable and even productive tension that comes out of the grant application process. It is easy to profess support for open data and sharing code; the reality is much messier when one is faced with the prospect of diverting resources (in the form of labour) from research, satisfying technical development work, or scholarly production to the distinctly tedious and stressful task of cleaning and documenting data and metadata, and wrangling them into an institutional, disciplinary or other type of repository. Funder requirements are an effective way to enforce norms like code and data sharing that have a broader value, even when it is at odds with the immediate preferences of project teams.

However, compromises like open data requirements are not the only ones in play when scholars apply for grants. In reality, the projects that make the most sense from the perspective of a scholar’s own research or teaching are rarely well-aligned with major grant programmes. Even digital humanities work itself often falls between the cracks, for example, the major Canadian agency funding the humanities does not have a dedicated category for digital humanities (DH). The reward structure of academic disciplines from the perspective of career advancement is at odds with the priorities of funders, who typically look for a broader impact. At research-intensive institutions, a well-reviewed monograph that wins an award from the disciplinary society has a much greater value for a scholar’s career than building a technical tool or platform that could be used by scholars in multiple fields. The latter also requires considerably more ongoing labour and infrastructure, and the scholar then faces a dilemma. Do they devote their own time to this maintenance work, at the cost of producing additional forms of legible scholarly production that will better support their career? Here, again, scholars outside research-intensive institutions may be in an advantageous position: the self-funded DH projects developed at public access and regional comprehensive institutions tend to be better received as part of the scholar’s evaluation, without forcing them to contort the project to fit a set of specific expectations and outcomes.

In this way, step by step, a scholar with a grant-funded digital humanities project is sucked deeper into the cycle of having to write grants to maintain technical work that they didn’t need for their original vision, but the technical work was necessary to get the grant to fund that initial vision. This process calls to mind the children’s rhyme ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’, where the old lady swallows progressively larger creatures, each to catch the prior creature she’d swallowed, until she ultimately perishes. The wiser choice, at any point in this process, would be to come to peace with the set of well-intentioned but misguided choices that led to a situation of metaphorically swallowing several animals whole (that is, writing grants) and stop swallowing ever-larger animals, even if it means grappling with the consequences of having a ‘failed’ project.

The anxiety about ‘failure’ runs deep, with digital humanities generally following the acculturation of the humanities rather than the technical communities with which it intersects. In the humanities, failure is deeply personal, bringing with it shame and stigma, if not ostracisation. ‘Failure’ to secure an academic job after a PhD can still lead to scholars being written off by their former advisors and community. An article with an analysis that people feel ‘failed’ can be held against the writer for years. These represent fundamental, collective cultural failures within the humanities, casually discarding the years of training and mentorship and acculturation that go into graduate work in these fields. Meanwhile, failure is culturally unremarkable on the IT side because it is inevitable: IT teams do not spend years of meticulous study and work on a focused line of argumentation that draws deeply from their own insights and personal experiences. They build things – often, new things. Some of the things they build will inevitably fall apart, or fail to even come together long enough to meaningfully be described as ‘falling apart’; this is the nature of the work. There is some wisdom in the humanities’ efforts to interrogate the concept of ‘failure’, reframing efforts that one might immediately label that way in order to centre other aspects. But a tendency towards critical analysis and reframing can easily slip into pathological avoidance of the discomfort of ‘failure’, downplaying it and talking around it. It is worth confronting and acknowledging.

Reframing funding

Any project that involves human labour is expensive. It is expensive if you hire specialists with expertise. It is also expensive if you hire people who are learning the skills necessary to become future specialists. Learning involves failure and waste; learning is slow, and often jeopardises project timelines. In my first encounter with preparing a grant budget as part of sustaining the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) directory (Dombrowski 2021), I was appalled when my boss took my numbers – carefully and precisely calculated to include what I felt was a realistic buffer for delays – and told me to double them. He was right.

Digital humanists tend to suffer from a surfeit of naiveté-powered optimism, and we pay dearly by closing the gaps between that optimism and reality with time and energy that would serve us better if we were to step away from this work and take a break. It precipitates burnout, and normalises this behaviour for more junior members of the team, whether or not the project leader attempts to draw clear boundaries and expectations exempting them from heroic measures to get the project done. The fact is that the scale of funds that projects are typically awarded – where $200,000 counts as a sizeable grant – is simply not commensurate with the work we commit to taking on. This is the case even if that work matches our actual needs and desires for the project, which it often does not. The discrepancy between the scale of funding available to humanists and to the sciences is not explainable in terms of the differences in material costs between the fields: labour is a primary cost driver in both cases. We do ourselves, and our collaborators, a deep disservice by pretending otherwise.

Digital humanities is long overdue for a reality check with regard to grant funding. While funding agencies have opened the door to public feedback before, the power dynamics at play inherently put constraints on honest dialogue. Scholars who are themselves potential future applicants are reluctant to raise concerns, lest it be taken as ingratitude – or worse, a reflection of their personal incompetence and inability to execute a project that others could do with ease. I write this from a position of a twisted kind of privilege: in my current role, I am not permitted to apply for grants. With grant funding off the table, I can speak more freely about what I have seen, both as a reviewer and while supporting applicants and recipients at various stages of their journeys.⁴

Funders need to be more conscientious about the assumptions that underpin their calls for proposals (CFPs). What are the benefits to the scholars who undertake this kind of work? What kinds of scholars are even in a position to undertake the work without great cost to their own careers, or spending nights and weekends on the grant in order to do the double load of traditionally legible scholarly output and a digital project? In what discipline(s) are the priorities in the CFP actually valued, beyond the mere CV bonus of receiving grant funding? For what discipline(s) do the priorities feel ‘close enough’ that scholars will be tempted to contort the work they want to do into the shape of the grant? How much time, realistically, is required to do a project that compellingly fulfils the CFP, and is the available funding adequate to do that work?⁵

Funding agencies have set out grant programmes as a form of indirect influence on the priorities of fields. However, the result has been an unresolved game of chicken between funders and fields, the latter of which have not broadly implemented changes to their tenure and promotion guidelines that reflect funder priorities. Professional organisations continue to fight to address this gap, issuing revision after revision to recommendations for greater recognition for digital scholarship. While this is better than simply leaving scholars to fend for themselves, both grant agencies and professional organisations need to take a more active stance in advocating for greater alignment between funding priorities, professional organisation recommendations and the actual requirements that scholars face in their own evaluation process. Otherwise, however well-meaning their actions may be, funders and professional organisations are setting up scholars for failure by incentivising them to pursue grants and start projects that will take time and energy away from work that will actually be rewarded in research-intensive institutions.

There is also a role here for scholars to do a better job of looking out for their own interests. If they see digital scholarship as an important part of their work, that should be included in the negotiations upfront around tenure and promotion requirements. Grant funding is alluring, particularly at institutions where the scholar has access to fewer resources to implement the kinds of projects they dream of, but it is crucial to be brutally honest with yourself about how far the grant expectations stray from what you actually want to do. What additional work are you taking on that you wouldn’t otherwise? What will you be required to find in order to sustain the thing you create – assuming you are able to finish it? How much would you lose face if you’re unable to complete the project, or unable to sustain it for long? What is the value of the project for you personally and your career, when weighed against these risks and challenges? What would you be losing out on – including factoring things like your own mental health – if (and, realistically, when) this project spills over into your nights and weekends, so you can meet the other professional expectations necessary to continue or progress in your job?

In 2023, the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) sought to reimagine its seed grant programme in a direction that centred radical honesty. The outcome of the reinvisioned grant programme wouldn’t be any particular thing, but a write-up of what the project team had learned in the process – which is to say, it would reflect what is truly the most durable outcome of most grants, and be resistant to the traps of self-delusion that so commonly accompany grants. While the implementation of this programme is still under discussion as of summer 2024, the act of discussing such a different approach to grantmaking was itself generative. On the one hand, ACH is free of the kinds of public accountability constraints that national funding agencies are. On the other hand, perhaps a radical reimagining of federal government grant programmes could also stop selling a conception of digital humanities that primarily produces platforms and tools, and shift the discourse towards digital humanities as a vehicle for developing important expertise, not unlike programmes funded under US Title VI, first introduced in 1958 under the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which has subsequently provided support for language and area studies training (US Department of Education 2011). What if we thought of technical and analytical skills at the intersection of data and human cultures as akin to language or area studies knowledge: perhaps not relevant to all citizens at all times, but important for the country to know it has well-trained people to call upon in a crisis that would need to draw upon those skills. Alpert-Abrams (2020) movingly paints a picture of ‘what the humanities do in a crisis’; as a later example, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) brought together digital humanists, librarians and everyday people to preserve Ukrainian digital cultural heritage under siege in Russia’s full-scale invasion (LeBlanc et al. 2022). Ironically, the perceived risks that drove SUCHO were not realised in Ukraine, but rather, in the United States, as the Trump administration quickly undertook a ham-fisted keyword-search based effort to purge government webpages and data referencing women, ethnic minority groups, and the LGBTQ+ community. In a moment where methods commonly used – with care and thought and nuance – in digital humanities circles were being adopted to wipe out an inclusive historical narrative, digital humanities scholars in the US and beyond have found themselves in a position to apply their skills towards a social good.

This is a compelling case for the digital humanities, and there are existing grant programmes focused on training opportunities. But given the often poor alignment between grants that fund projects and what is actually to the benefit of both scholars and broader communities, it may be time to rethink the ‘DH project grant’ as a vehicle to prepare experts who can respond in a crisis, while simultaneously working with disciplinary organisations to develop meaningful, small-scale funding opportunities that can offset the costs of doing the kind of disciplinary digital work that can more directly lead to legible scholarly outcomes for the person doing it. If we cannot responsibly ask scholars to broaden their scope because we do not have the resources to either support or reward that kind of work, a better path forward would be to provide funding at the level where the scholar’s own scope is meaningful and impactful. Even if the amount of funding were smaller, less money better targeted to the scholar’s actual goals is still a better outcome than a larger grant that comes with unwanted obligations.

Conclusion

Money cuts across all disciplinary and technical boundaries, offering a form of validation legible to department chairs and deans, regardless of whether they share one’s own methodological or theoretical framework. As a result, grant funding feels like the ultimate prize for many scholars, whether or not it actually makes the most sense as a way to implement the project they have in mind. The institutional value of grants – quite separate from the metrics on which scholars themselves are evaluated – further exacerbates this drive, leading scholars to partake in a collective delusion where grants are inherently good, however detrimental they may be in practice for the individual scholar.

Given the digital humanities culture of transparency and honestly reckoning with issues ranging from labour to data ethics, the role of grant funding is overdue some serious interrogation from all sides. Are funders genuinely satisfied with their existing programmes, and the incentives they lay out for scholars, even with the reasonably high probability of detrimental consequences for scholars’ careers? Are scholars going into grant applications with a clear vision of metaphorically swallowing that first fly, and all the animals that are likely to follow? What are the roles of disciplinary organisations? Do they genuinely value the kinds of discipline-focused projects that scholars themselves come up with? If so, how can they support the realisation of these projects? If not, perhaps this should be made clear to scholars who can then make choices accordingly, as this has implications for their career development.

It is well past the time for looking the metaphorical gift horse of digital humanities grant funding in the mouth. Otherwise, one would be wise to recall the old lady who swallowed a horse. As the conclusion of the rhyme tells us: she died, of course.

Notes

1. 1 See Allington et al. (2016) for an example of building an argument against digital humanities on the basis of that perceived connection.

2. 2 See https://endings.uvic.ca (accessed 25 November 2024).

3. 3 The mass cancellation of US National Endowment for the Humanities grants in spring 2025 under the Trump administration, in order to reallocate funds to a ‘Garden of Heroes’ featuring realistic sculptures of figures from American history from an approved list, goes to show that bad-faith political attacks are sometimes simply that. No amount of documentation and Gantt charts and carefully worked-through budgeting would have an impact on the cancellation of these grants, and the only path to reinstating these funds runs through appealing to elected representatives and lawsuits, such as ones filed by organisations including the Authors Guild, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association, and others.

4. 4 Different positions come with different sets of opportunities and constraints, and in many cases, staff have a wealth of experience – across a wider range of projects than most individual faculty – and have less personally at stake in the outcome. As a result, they are more likely to be open about challenges, and can get into specifics while also maintaining an appropriate degree of anonymity.

5. 5 The National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) has recently updated its grant application packet to require a justification of costs, which is a step in a positive direction towards surfacing how many people will be paid how much, and forcing applicants to reflect on these numbers somewhat. Programmes would benefit from even more explicit guidance about an appropriate scale for these projects.

References

• Allington, Daniel, David Golumbia and Sarah Brouillette. ‘Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities’, LA Review of Books (1 May 2016). Accessed 25 November 2024. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/.
• Alpert-Abrams, Hannah. ‘What the Humanities Do in a Crisis’. Blog post (11 April 2020). Accessed 25 November 2024. https://halperta.medium.com/what-the-humanities-do-in-a-crisis-a7ae63263b0e.
• Dombrowski, Quinn. ‘The Directory Paradox’. In People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center, edited by Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves and Siobhan Senier, 83–98. Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452968346.
• Graham, Shawn. ‘How I Lost the Crowd’. In Failing Gloriously and Other Essays, 71–80. The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2019. Accessed 25 November 2024. https://thedigitalpress.org/failing-gloriously/.
• Keralis, Spencer. ‘Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities; or, The Classroom Is Not Your Crowd’. In Disrupting the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, 273–94. Punctum Books, 2018.
• LeBlanc, Zoe, et al. ‘A Conversation with the Organizers of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)’. Journal of Library Outreach and Engagement 2, no. 1 (13 July 2022). https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jloe.v2i1.969.
• Mann, Rachel. ‘Paid to Do but Not to Think: Reevaluating the Role of Graduate Student Collaborators’. In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein, 268–78. Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452963785.
• Risam, Roopika. ‘Stewarding Place: Digital Humanities at the Regional Comprehensive University’. In People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center, edited by Anne McGrail, Angel David Neives and Siobhan Senier, 304–14. Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452968346.
• US Department of Education. ‘The History of Title VI and Fulbright-Hays: An Impressive International Timeline’. 2011. Accessed 25 November 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20240301181512/https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/history.html.