Infrastructures and Ecosystems

Intrinsic in the deployment of how and where to invest resources in infrastructure, whether roads, computer networks, or educational systems, are the values of culture and society. Different societies make different resource allocations for infrastructure; consider, for example, the high value given to an efficient rail system in Japan. In considering the physical and social infrastructures that enable digital scholarly projects, at core are the cultural and intellectual ideas and their expression at the heart of humanistic work. For centuries, the humanities in the US limited their scope and perspective by their focus on dominant subjects of investigation, primarily the history and cultural output of the western European tradition, while marginalizing nonwhite, nonmale scholars and taking a limited view of European and American imperialism. In the same way that societal values have shaped the building of rail lines in different ways, those values have shaped the norms, mores, and explicit rules about collecting and preserving the evidence that supported scholarly investigation. Libraries and museums as we know them were the outgrowth of imperial and colonial collections dating back to the 16th century. What material was saved and preserved were decisions made in the context of the political institutions and social norms of society. This is exemplified by the presence of Indigenous objects in European cabinets of curiosity and the presence of looted or stolen cultural property in colonial collections worldwide, but also by the traditional collection scope of European and American research libraries.

An inclusive understanding of humanities scholarship requires an entirely new mode of engagement, especially with the communities that own and create stories previously excluded by societies in power.

Tao-Tao Chang, Associate Director for Infrastructure and Major Programmes, UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, considered the need for a new, shared perspective:

I think part of this is trying to shift the “locus” of where the “voice of authority sits.” Often, in the case of a museum or any scholarly institution, the voice of knowledge is and resides with the academic or the curator … Something AHRC is beginning to interrogate is the idea that “knowledge creation” takes many forms and can be drawn from many sources: there is the local knowledge that is inherent within communities; knowledge that is presented in a non-textual format such as a film, performance or creative output. As a funder, how do you ‘recognize’ these different forms of knowledge creation? How do you reach out to and engage communities who may not even see themselves as repositories or producers of knowledge? How do you codify their methodologies and taxonomies, and how can they be co-opted into the “canon” of research practice? It’s a big cultural shift.

As Roopika Risam framed the challenge:

What would it mean to be able to articulate a consensus of what responsibility means in relation to cultural heritage …? How do we try and build a common understanding and consensus across all these different kinds of institutions that work collaboratively on cultural heritage … [about] everything from start to finish, from accession to sustainability?”

Kim Christen has emphasized to the Commission the centrality of the infrastructure of relationships and the need to embed this in enduring institutional policy. She writes in Archivaria:

The foundation for archival repair and restructure is relationship infrastructure—practices embedded in policies that enact, enliven, and engender respect and reciprocity through sovereignty. Relationship infrastructures … provide modes of governance, operational policies, systematic workflows, and systems of engagement that are grounded in long-term commitments to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination and that cannot be diluted by successive administrations in any given institution. [19]

Focus group participants described the significant effort required to create relationship infrastructure—an effort that, too often, current values, expectations for results, and reward systems are not set up to recognize.

Josh Honn, English and Digital Humanities Librarian, Northwestern University:

One of the things we learned from our grant project with the Native American Educational Services College, that was funded by Mellon, was building substantial time into the project for relationship building. I don’t think we did anything that the academy or the library would see as “work” until six months into the project. I think that’s a really, really important thing that funders are starting to understand… That’s the beginning piece. Building in that relationship-building time that can look like anything from having dinner with folks, and paying for that dinner, and getting to know each other.

Ricardo L. Punzalan, Associate Professor, University of Michigan School of Information:

One thing about relational work in institutions is that it takes a lot of time, and it doesn’t always end up in a publication. And if your infrastructure of promotion and prestige is that of the number of articles you publish and the number of books you write, good luck. … We need to learn how to celebrate those kinds of small, but nevertheless impactful work. One good example in my own project, whenever we have anything that will involve inviting the community, we have to provide food. And when I say food, it’s food of my community. Filipino food. There are no Filipino restaurants in Ann Arbor … I call aunties and uncles to cook, and then they cook amazing food, but they can’t provide a receipt. So what happens?

I pay for it, and I struggle to be reimbursed. There’s a lot of things that are required to do this kind of relational work that our infrastructures are not really supporting, just not there.

Continuing commitment to values and relationships is essential to sustaining the work and its products. As Meredith Evans described, in considering the roles of libraries, archives, and their parent institutions: “That has to become operational within your department, within your school, within your institution, because that is what the library is going to use to build upon moving forward … Your help in building and maintaining those relationships even after you’ve left is really important for the future of the material and the history that you’re trying to maintain.” Focus group participants spoke often of this challenge.

Eric Hung, Executive Director, Music of Asian America Research Center:

I think the partnerships with universities are often problematic because ultimately it is with one person, and if that person leaves, everything disappears. I have been in the past that person that left and people felt very disenchanted with that. I’ve also experienced [this] from the other side.

Sharon Kowalsky, Associate Professor, Director of Gender Studies and Head of Department of History, Texas A&M University-Commerce:

I’m thinking about my institution, which has in its strategic plan increasing rural urban interactions. … We have all sorts of projects that we’ve done in our department, oral histories of veterans from the area, oral histories of various communities, and they get done and they get funded, and then they get kind of lost. We think of institutions, but the priorities of the institutions are so dependent on individuals that it’s hard to create any kind of long-term institutional priorities or commitments.

Jaquelina Alvarez, Co-Director, Oral History Lab (OHL), University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez:

It can be a constant process of educating and re-educating administrators about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and why. Whenever there’s a new dean or chancellor, we have to start from scratch and explain everything again. It takes a lot of energy and could be more organic.

A very significant challenge for the relationship infrastructure is that community access, ownership, and control of cultural heritage resources is at the heart of much of this work. Relationships between communities, institutions, and individual scholars reflect the challenge of learning how to share values and create policies that reflect a mutual understanding, new kinds of relationships, and distributed agency. As Maria Cotera writes of the Chicana por mi Raza project:

Our practices of leaving physical archives in place, of showing women how to access their materials in our collection, of encouraging them to use the collection to produce knowledge on their own, and working with them on writing projects and public exhibitions are all examples of how the CPMR Digital Memory project re-visions the archive as an active site of exchange where participants work together to co-produce knowledge. In other words, the women we interview are more than “resources” to be mined for information about the past; they are collaborators in intimate acts of memory-keeping. [20]

We learned from our conversations how passionate communities are about ownership of their heritage; approaches to sustaining and preserving that heritage become complex questions about relationships and trust.

Stacie Williams discussing the Honey Pot project created by a group of Black archivists in Chicago [Blackivist interview]:

The … thing we thought was really great … was that they said everyone could keep their original files … So saying it’s not just about a repository coming in and taking the stuff … but we’re really here to help make this available in an additional way. This material is still your material … This is your story. This is your community’s story. [21]

Kayla Jackson, Head Archivist, Hallie Q. Brown Community Center:

A good positive note is I just got 1,200 slides repatriated from the University of Minnesota [to the Halle Q. Brown Community Center Archives], which is really great because decolonization is not a metaphor … It’s 1,200 points of information relating to a historically black community that I get to describe and put back into the community it came from.

Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director, Portico:

One person spent 25 years collecting content about Latinos in Rhode Island and putting it in boxes in her living room. She was able to find funding to digitize the content and put it up on a website herself. She told us she could no longer afford the monthly subscription fee to keep Omeka going and didn’t know where to put it next. From a preservation perspective that’s … one mistake away from being destroyed completely. … It’s very hard to reach these places. It’s hard to identify who is in charge. And then once you do, the challenge is trying to build the trust so that you’re not seen as someone who wants to take away their content and put it somewhere that you own, but rather to help make sure that it doesn’t disappear.

The organizations that function as intermediaries between those who create and own material or stories and those who want to study that material function as enabling infrastructure. As such, they live on the borders, and they need to speak both languages. Archivists working with communities are cognizant of how long-standing asymmetric power dynamics play a central role as living infrastructure. They understand and convey the recognition that community ownership is not just about possession, but also about privacy and control, including the power to erase.

K.J. Rawson:

As someone who’s trying to provide this cultural resource, it’s a very complicated position to be in because it involves a lot of power and ethics and there aren’t a lot of guides. … Where you [may] have two different stakeholders with two different needs. And the researchers say, “I need this stuff.” And the content provider is saying, “I can no longer provide access to this stuff… it is harming me to continue doing that.” And I’m in the middle trying to mediate, but it’s two different sets of values.

These reconceptualized relationships are not only attitudinal, but also deeply operational, especially in relation to the ownership of and access to source collections. In an environment where many in the scholarly communication community are pressing for open access to research resources, the essential values of community-created archives add complexities that need to be understood and accommodated. Today, many communities of practice are developing new ethical guidelines, new modes of collaboration, and new principles for care and ownership of archival and other resources. Important examples include the CARE principles adopted by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (“collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics in working with research data”), the Colored Conventions Project Principles, and the Latinx Digital Humanities Manifesto. But they too often find themselves at odds with embedded institutional policies and practices. Few institutions have yet adopted post-custodial practices of supporting community collections in situ rather than acquiring them. And even where there are sharing arrangements for digitized and digital collections, institutional policies and practices regarding access to databases by anyone other than an officially designated affiliate of the institution create both intended and unintended barriers. While the CARE principles are well known to many archivists and researchers, their actual widespread application to cultural content—including not only Indigenous resources—requires a systemic and profound recasting of the infrastructures for collections and access, and the nature of relationships between communities and institutions.

Kellee E. Warren, Assistant Professor and Special Collections Librarian, University of Illinois Chicago:

Let’s be honest. … leadership wants that bang for their buck. They want the projects that bring the institution attention, the bright and shiny things. Actual care and ethics of care in what we’re doing, that might be on the list, but it’s not at the top of the list.

Bergis Jules:

I think it just comes from caring. What we don’t see enough is a deep sense of caring for the entire thing … [In large universities] there is an incentive to bring stuff to you, right? To where you are. And it disincentivizes caring for the whole thing.

How do you [the university] demonstrate that you care about the whole ecosystem? … Well, one thing we could do … instead of you hiring an archivist in your library to digitize other people’s collections to bring into your library, why don’t you hire an archivist and pay that person a fair salary, benefits, everything, but they actually work for the one or two community-based archives that are not at the university?

In the early years of digitizing primary source material, long-standing power dynamics generated the idea that the provision of digital surrogates to the community that created the objects or materials would heal the wounds of extraction. 21st-century humanities that recognize the social dynamics underlying the relationship between communities and archives might reverse that stewardship model, with the objects remaining in their communities rather than serving as institutional assets. There are emerging new models, sometimes stemming from unusual circumstances or disasters faced by a community or goals that can bring organizations together.

Ricia Anne Chansky, Professor of Literature and Director of the Oral History Lab (OHL), University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez:

We’ve had several thousand earthquakes in the southeastern part of Puerto Rico since 2020. The global pandemic of COVID, most recently Hurricane Fiona making landfall approximately five years after Hurricane Maria. … We’re looking at the collective narratives and testimonials of what people have survived, how people have survived, and the creative ways of implementing and strategizing ways to take care of themselves in their home communities is what our project is interested in. This particular stage of the project that we will be working on in the upcoming year is working to rethink archives that emerge from the community rather than from the institution. … We’re trying to re-situate ourselves as a support network that has skills, that has tools that we can leverage for community-based projects…. And then rethinking what makes the most sense for the communities we work with to archive their own work with redundancy at the university so that we’re not reenacting extractive models that take things from the communities that we want to work with.

In classrooms, faculty who may have been trained to focus on research collide with students who increasingly are concerned with the world from which they come and to which they will return. Students are a powerful element in the relationship infrastructure that ties academic institutions to communities.

Josh Honn, English and Digital Humanities Librarian, Northwestern University:

I think these projects need to also emanate [from] or take into consideration student activism on campus. For instance, as far as it goes with Native and Indigenous projects here at Northwestern, our institution wouldn’t have any acknowledgement of its history without student activism. Students often have much better ties to communities around our areas, and are at the forefront of the kinds of things we should be thinking of.

Erika Witt, Coordinator of Public Service, Southern University of New Orleans:

For Southern University of New Orleans, with Katrina and having to start over, our biggest why for doing the things that we do is to make sure that we get our students and our community involved in their history. So our school is a bit unique in the sense that we’ve always been a commuter college, so the majority of our students are non-traditional. They’re older students, they are maybe students that had felonies. There are students with children [who] work full-time … For example, for Black History Month here, I wanted to make sure that we focused on SUNO black history so students can see themselves in it. … We still need our history to be able to know where we’re going.

Infrastructure is not just code … or servers; it’s people and labor as infrastructure. If you think about it as who depends on this work, who depends on this person … there’s a sense in which the … years I’ve been at Sloan the common thread through virtually all of what we have funded has been a certain kind of trying to … raise up, and in a certain sense valorize, different kinds of labor.
–Josh Greenberg

Fostering and sustaining a diverse, well-prepared, engaged, and fairly paid workforce is a requirement for all fields, in academe and throughout society. In higher education, there has been a widespread effort (now facing new obstacles in many states) to adapt infrastructures for recruiting and other policies to better enrich the diversity of the workforce and the student body that will be its future pipeline. The new generation of humanistic work faces challenges that go beyond those already well known to readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education because its workforce and participants are spread across so many kinds of institutions and so many kinds of communities outside of the academy. As Rodrigues and Schnepper write,

The human infrastructure around digital humanities projects is not just a set of complementary skills but is often a sedimented history of higher education’s hierarchies, reward structures, and expectations. … Reimagining the power structures inherent in our institutions will not be a matter of personal education or enlightenment: it will require rethinking how our institutions recognize labor, design incentives and rewards for the labor and conceptualize all forms of labor in service to undergraduate learning. [22]

The precarity of labor in the academy has been much more pronounced for faculty of color, and inequities are even greater across those who labor in and for the fields of racial and social justice, as this work engages many kinds of employees and volunteers: in communities, as interns, as students at all levels, as any worker who is not in a faculty line; this work relies on a collective of different kinds of participants. Compensation and career paths for these individuals are often insufficient or nonexistent. A major concern raised by the Commission and frequently echoed in focus group conversations was the under compensation and the overall underappreciation of students and community workers struggling to make a living, and the bureaucratic barriers to institutions compensating community project participants.

As Marisa Parham described her experience with so many community projects:

“All this money to build this, do that, but if we can’t just feed people who have to come after work, we can’t do this … It’s actually huge that you can’t buy food. It’s actually huge that you can’t give people cash stipends.”

Commissioners also forcefully highlighted the importance of giving credit and value to all the different workers engaged in these projects, especially as the nature of this work engages a diverse team that includes community members, IT specialists, librarians, and others beyond faculty scholars. As Maryemma Graham emphasized, “We need to give our students and staff more say in projects and create career paths to move them up to administrative and lead work. There is too much difference in career perspective and career path between the students and the trained academics.”

Jason Rhody, Director of Academic Program Services and Professional Development, Modern Language Association:

We collaborate in the humanities with archivists, with librarians, with students, with partners and spouses. The histories are rich with collaboration, even as it is often hidden and unrecognized. … I’m not saying that the sciences and social sciences are perfect, but clearly there are mechanisms for peer review and scholarly publishing that account for everything from running a lab to publishing in collaborative ways that don’t detract from people’s ability to get tenure. I think that we are in our own way, oftentimes leaning so heavily on this notion of individual brilliance that never really existed.

Key elements in the infrastructure of human resources are the succession pipelines that attract and retain individuals from underrepresented groups into research and teaching and also into related fields of cultural heritage curation and publishing. Focus groups spoke of pressing needs for diverse archivists and librarians, and the publishing community has identified diversity as a significant concern. [23] While we heard about many excellent initiatives underway in professional societies like ALA and SAA, in schools of information, and in individual cultural institutions, often initiated with grants from the IMLS Laura Bush Library Education Program, the need is great, and a gap remains. And beyond training, the rewards in the workplace will be a critical factor in attracting diverse workers.

Ida Jones, Associate Director of Special Collections and University Archivist, Morgan State University:

The idea is succession planning. So ideally I would like to see my replacement look like me. I was mentored by people that looked like me, and they had been stewarding the materials [in my collection for] 100 plus years. … We’re not seeing African Americans or the larger ethnic or racially diverse community coming into this field [of information science]. … I would say the greatest challenge in this subfield of the HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities] world is the apprenticeship to make it a viable and attractive option that graduate school and employment could be rewarding. But it is also frustrat[ing] because it is not the most fiscally rewarding and, like you’ve heard from my colleagues in various institutions … challenged with being a Swiss army knife in the midst of the forest called the university.

There are challenges in building the cohort of scholars in the field who can understand and evaluate the work. As Kenton Rambsy put it, “When we talk about infrastructure, we mean people who can relate to one another, who can evaluate one another, who can understand and translate certain ideas. … I also think that means particularly in digital. How are we training diverse digital voices?”

We learned of a variety of successful programs to train diverse scholars in the techniques of digital methodologies and the ethics of community work. At the same time, we heard time and again of the need for more—more candidates of color, more funding for those whose institutions cannot support their training (typically any faculty member outside of an R1 institution), more training for community archivists. The various academic and academic-adjacent labor pools for conducting digital work and the community engagement that so often serves as the basis for opening up new fields of study requires a human resource infrastructure that is not keeping pace.

There are, as there have long been, vast differences in resources available for professional development and research support for scholars across different institutions. Much generative work in racial and social justice is emerging from diverse scholars in HBCUs and other underresourced colleges and universities. A summer program at Brown has highlighted the kinds of new investments that could make a difference.

Allison Levy, Director, Brown University Digital Publications:

[At] an NEH institute that Brown ran last summer we had 15 participants from under-resourced institutions where they don’t have a center for digital scholarship, they don’t have a Mellon grant, et cetera. And over half of the participants of the 15 teach at HBCUs, and they have excellent projects and they are outstanding scholars. But at the end of this three week institute, they went back to very heavy teaching loads [and] administrative duties. … The big question for us is how do we get those authors more support?

Digital methods are accelerating efforts to catch up neglected fields to those with the decades of support afforded to long-canonical subjects. It is essential to recognize that digital work requires work—and new categories of labor. Community colleges can bring a diverse new workforce into the digital realm and create new career paths for their students, especially through partnerships with other institutions. As Jewon Woo, describes:

In a community college setting, to enrich the student body that will build the future of humanistic work, we need to offer quality work-study opportunities. However, community-college students already have full-time or multiple part-time jobs while taking classes. What they need is not simply working opportunities but assurance of academic rewards through those opportunities. Student internship programs that become part of a course requirement are practical and beneficial for students and also for faculty. Most community colleges have a work-study program, experiential learning, or service learning course that requires students to have off-campus work experience as part of course assignments. These programs could create a pipeline for underrepresented students to find career potentials in the DH field and with acquired DH skillsets. In considering the lack of infrastructure for DH in community colleges, we need a teaching partnership between a community college and other institutions, such as well-established DH projects and DH centers at a four-year institution. Through this kind of partnership, students would have both work experience and course credits, and faculty at a community college can fulfill their required teaching loads without adding additional work beyond the classroom.

The labor infrastructure of community, student, and contingent workers relies on devising ways for them to subsist; the labor infrastructure of digital staff requires a reconciliation of what it takes to do digital work with the expectations and priorities of the institution. The need for a sustained human resource investment is a thread that runs through the many kinds of infrastructures. For the most part, this work is viewed both by funders and by the institutions in which they reside as one-time, siloed, temporal activities, with no underlying organizational or staffing infrastructure. Even in larger, better-resourced institutions, the development of staffing to partner with and support scholars who work in digital humanities has lagged far behind the actual growth in the work and its challenges for work in racial and social justice. Even comparatively well-resourced institutions struggle to find sustainable staffing patterns to support the work.

Anne Cong-Huyen, Director of Digital Scholarship, University of Michigan:

We only have so much staff capacity so we can promise [only] so much support, and we try to get folks to talk to us in advance before they submit their grant applications. Because it’s really difficult to shoehorn that support in after the fact. … This time around we’re asking [the institution] for three years of funding to pilot an expanded version of our current support service, and we’re very much trying to push the institution to invest in hard funded positions and not just hire temp folks for a couple of years. We’re also trying to find ways to ask for funding to support postdocs and graduate students. This could also help diversify the skills and experiences of humanities students.

Linda García Merchant, Public Humanities Data Librarian, University of Houston:

My role is to train them [faculty] how to do project management, how to do plan management, [and how to] utilize resources with their own institutions. There’s a lot of ground that we need to cover in terms of funding support, in terms of awareness around cultivating the larger issue of racial and social justice. And yes, I think it’s great that we’re all making this conscious effort to do these things at our institutions, but the labor is not there. We really have to begin to look at the labor and the representations of labor that is not available to these projects.

Commission investigations also highlighted disjunctions in the labor infrastructure supporting the advancement of faculty. Promotion and tenure guidelines for digital scholarship emerged in the early 2000s as a creative force for changing the nature of humanities scholarship. In 2012, the Modern Language Association (MLA) released its Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media, “designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion.” MLA is updating these guidelines in 2024, and in addition published its Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship in Language and Literature Programs in 2022. The American Historical Association released similar guidelines in 2015 as well as Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship in 2023; the American Academy of Religion released Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Scholarship in 2018. But the operational assessment and reward structures have lagged. “Faculty members in humanities disciplines have been pioneers in many forms of digital scholarship and teaching,” wrote Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed in 2009, “but many have complained for years that some of their departments don’t have a clue how to evaluate such work, and that some senior scholars are downright hostile to it.” It was clear from the many conversations held by the Commission that the situation has not greatly changed; the existence of professional society-sanctioned guidelines has yet overwritten pre-digital standards and reward structures. These organizations can and will play a role in changing the system from within, but the pace needs to accelerate in time for a new generation of scholars to thrive.

Scholars seeking to be rewarded for their new work in racial and social justice face another layer of challenge beyond the lagging ability to evaluate digital research. Revisiting the intellectual frameworks of fields and challenging the foundational schema of disciplines represents challenging work. PhD students of today are facing a very different set of opportunities as reductions in lines limit the opportunity for a generation of emerging scholars to enter and re-define the disciplines. There is also a disproportionate number of younger faculty engaged in recovery scholarship and newer methodologies. Commissioners and focus group members voiced concern about the unrecognized workloads these projects place on junior academics and the need to redesign the tenure path to value this work.

Ricia Anne Chansky, Professor of Literature and Director of the Oral History Lab (OHL), University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez:

Some of the things that I’m hearing from junior faculty members in the digital humanities is that they’re now expected to do everything. That if they want to do a DH project, they have to do that in addition to articles, in addition to academic presentations, in addition to printed and bound books.

The nature of collaborative teams to produce the work also challenges the way scholars are evaluated and the way they must be prepared, as they must take on more roles than research and writing. Focus group participants saw this throughout their work.

Christopher Prom, Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

I was talking to a faculty member in African American Studies, Dr. Bobby Smith II, who is working on a book project related to an organization called The New Farmers of America, which was a group of black youth males who studied vocational agriculture and farming methods in public high schools between the 1920s and 1960s. While the organization’s history runs parallel to the Future Farmers of America organization, its history has been almost completely erased, and he’s trying to resurrect it through a book project, but would also like, of course, to have all kinds of digital outputs … You really do need more than a team, you need almost a small army of people, because there’s just so much to be done.

Evaluating digital projects in a manner appropriately equivalent to and equitable with traditional output, such as books and articles, has been a challenge for humanities disciplines for at least two decades. A number of ways forward were suggested in focus groups, from post-hoc review to creating more review publications dedicated to digital work to greater flexibility in departmental tenure guidelines.

Jennifer McNabb, Department Head of History, University of Northern Iowa:

I think a model of post hoc review would be extraordinarily useful. … I think some potential pathways to post hoc review that are pretty robust, that are more than just finding two people who might be experts in this thing and asking them to write a one page report … If we could have some step-by-step instructions that communicate pretty clearly the rigor of the process, that is something that is going to speak to a number of different constituencies, both internal to a department or college, and external to a campus-wide audience.

Rethinking the evaluation process for scholarly work was a frequent theme in focus groups and other conversations.

Jeffrey Cohen, Dean of Humanities and Foundation Professor of English, Arizona State University:

Doctors review the work of doctors, dancers and choreographers review the work of dancers and choreographers. Those in other fields have long been comfortable gauging the significance of contributions made in practice, interpretation, performance and public impact. The Humanities don’t need to reinvent anything, but re-adjust with intentionality and care.

Mary C. Francis, Director, University of Pennsylvania Press:

It’s a structure, a set of structures created by humans, and the humans can change it. We won’t have people post-publication reviewing successfully if we don’t create the space where those folks have the resources of time to say “yes I’m going to respond to that; I’m going to legitimize this in the public sphere in an engaged and positive way.”

In essence, we have learned that the innovation that institutions want to foster currently depends on entrepreneurial faculty, staff, and students taking risks upon themselves. Whether it is paying uncles and aunts in a local Filipino community out of one’s own pocket or prioritizing urgent project management work to compile an archive of oral histories rather than to write a “safe” (in terms of tenure review) traditional journal article based on existing archives, the risk falls disproportionately upon the individual committed to tell a new kind of story.

Collaboration and creating large networks of project contributors are hallmarks of new humanistic scholarship, from Maryemma Graham’s founding of the History of Black Writing in 1983 to the more than 7,000 people who have contributed to the Colored Conventions Project to the ever-growing number of communities that use Mukurtu and the Shift Collective’s convening of diverse community archiving initiatives. Creating networks that enable professional development pipeline programs, create subject-based resource sites, and engage in community archiving initiatives are typical modes of working and are evidence of the high levels of energy and mutual support within the field of recovery scholarship. The field is impressively rich in scholars and other practitioners who have come together in innovative ways to enable new work. For example, the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) has, with Mellon Foundation support, devised programs including summer schools, microgrants, conferences, and training to generate expanded cohorts of students and practitioners engaged with Caribbean studies. Archiving the Black Web (ATBW), founded by Makiba Foster and Bergis Jules, was developed to encourage the documentation of Black experience; its recent award from the Mellon Foundation is enabling continuing education and research programs to diversify and increase the number of web archiving practitioners and collections that focus on the Black experience. The mission statement of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon), a collaborative initiative founded by five scholars including commissioner Roopika Risam, illustrates the nature of the vision propelling these new collectives. As articulated on its website:

We are committed to sharing resources with and building a community of digital humanities practitioners whose work engages in ethnic studies fields. As faculty who work at institutions focused on undergraduate education, we are invested in supporting the work of graduate students, faculty, and librarians who are integrating digital humanities into their undergraduate teaching in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American studies. Equally important is our investment in developing ethical digital humanities initiatives that work with community partners to promote justice and equity in the digital cultural record.

Knowledge Commons (formerly Humanities Commons) illustrates another mode of shared enabling infrastructure; it was developed to facilitate connecting individual scholars across institutions, enabling scholars to form groups and share their ideas and their work. With more than 53,000 users, it is an indicator of scholars’ strong desire and ability to network across institutions.

Zoe Wake Hyde, Community Development Manager, Knowledge Commons:

A lot of it is really related to what digital spaces enable in terms of community development and people being able to come together because the ideas are there. To find each other and really leverage those kinds of connections and approach things as a community that isn’t limited to one institution, but can be international or can be across a region, whatever it is that makes sense for the project. One example that emerged organically on the platform is the composers of color group. … It’s a really active group who are developing resources to diversify the materials available for teaching composition and bringing the histories and the presence of composers of color into contemporary education.

Such network creation, in many arenas, has been core to the development of the field and is essential for its sustenance and growth. At the same time, the ability and encouragement to create networks across subject matter expertise has been limited. For example, much could be gained by bringing together scholars, community storytellers, artists, archivists, librarians, and technologists who can provide mutual support, shared expertise, and enriched perspectives. NHPRC conducted an extensive listening tour across many practitioners and many kinds of institutions and concluded, as R. Darrell Meadows described:

R. Darrell Meadows, Acting Deputy Executive Director, NHPRC:

In this broad ecosystem, these are highly complex networks of folks who are unaware of each other almost completely. … What we came to in thinking about how we would transform our historical and scholarly editing professional development work was really around the idea of co-creation and of asking ourselves, how do we facilitate network connections that are not currently happening, but could prove really beneficial to everyone involved? And so we really jettisoned the old idea that to attend this professional development training you need to be doing very specific, almost prescriptive, ways of working in historical documentary editing. But instead to say we’ve got a complex set of communities out there who are all engaged in very similar work who don’t necessarily know each other, they don’t often recognize where aspects of their practice overlap.

In fact, funders are often well positioned to play a role in assisting network creation and are recognizing the value they are bringing:

Terri Taylor, Strategy Director for Innovation and Discovery, Lumina Foundation:

Part of what we’re doing is trying to get a lot better in our own approach to networks, because one thing funders have that’s often hidden are really rich networks. We can provide huge value in connecting people, and we try, it’s just sometimes it’s sort of ad hoc. … It also helps us be better at trying to see what’s not happening or where the gaps are and where we can fill them.

Scholarly societies have long played an essential role in creating networks within their disciplines and are critically positioned in academic culture in their ability to develop shared values, goals, training, career development, and more. As we see the demonstrated need for more kinds of cross-fertilization in network creation, scholarly societies could take a fresh look at the kinds of convenings, training, and partnership opportunities they provide, focusing not only on enabling “birds-of-a-feather” mutual support but also on learning across areas of expertise and productive collisions across types of institutional environments and engagement with other professions.

Beyond connecting individuals and fostering collaboration, there are few agencies and organizations that provide continuing assistance to those in smaller institutions (i.e., those in institutions lacking the technical and administrative support available in R1s and better-resourced colleges), and often few opportunities for cross-disciplinary interactions and creative collisions both within and outside of one’s institution. In fact, the commission often heard of failed collaborations between larger and smaller institutions because the well-resourced institutions were unable to recognize the realities of and pressures on those who work with heavier course loads or “Swiss Army knife” job responsibilities, without any budget or staffing for assistance, and without administrative support. They also could not adapt to working with smaller institutions in other than a top-down mode. Much of our current infrastructure for collaboration is built upon the research environment of R1s—i.e., partnerships of “equals,’’ albeit frequently undermined by competition between these “equals—while scholarship in racial and social justice occurs in a much more complex and heterogeneous environment. And even when project design is well crafted and successful, there is too often innate mistrust of a large, well-resourced, predominantly white institution.

Lisa Janette, Archivist, University of Minnesota:

For the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the successes were that its resources were shared equally. It was based out of the University of Chicago and they were the funding holder, and they provided the staff space and the HR resources, but we weren’t employees of the University of Chicago. Technically we were employees of the consortium which included community archives, personal collectors who had material, and public libraries and universities and some museums as well. So some of the successes were that we were able to process and create access guides for collections within privately held collections and community-based collections. The downsides are that it was still grant funded, so when the grant ended, the support did too. The consortium still exists and they’re doing some really interesting things … But I think there’s a lot of trust that can’t be regained. I really believe that there is a downside to having a university partner be the primary partner and the funding holder, because that power remains within a large institution that’s primarily white and has bad histories of breaking that trust. Figuring out a way to separate the model so that the funding can be retained and maintained and the power can be held by the community rather than the institution [is the challenge].

We need to imagine and create new capacities and new kinds of collaboration. As exemplified by the emerging networks enabled with Mellon Foundation support, funders are exploring how to create purpose-built models for different kinds of institutions:

Maria Sachiko Cecire, Program Officer in Higher Learning, Mellon Foundation:

Many of the grants I’ve made in this area recently have been multi-institutional or otherwise bring together and lift up existing networks of folks so that they can reach more people. … For example, we funded a network for digital Caribbean scholarship that’s supporting scholars who have been stringing together their own research funds and pockets of resources to do this work for years, and now we’re helping them to institutionalize. … A lot of what we’re doing with grants like those is connecting and resourcing scholars who have built these shadow networks of people with whom they felt they could work, and trying to help them establish structures and relationships so that after the grant period is over these communities can continue and sustain and grow. Part of that is putting down institutional roots, ideally within the scholars’ own home institutions, but also more broadly in the field.

Terri Taylor, Strategy Director for Innovation and Discovery, Lumina Foundation:

I have found sometimes actually the network approach is not what minoritized populations want, e.g., an HBCU doesn’t want to be a sub-grantee of an R1 university. They actually want their own grant. Or maybe a racially diverse project team does something and then the next step is actually for us to fund different members of that team on their own work moving forward. … Something I’ve really seen is that we need to make sure that our approaches allow for both mature organizations that might be historically white [and] also being able to adjust to how often leaders, scholars of color develop their own thing or their own work. And those two prospects are sometimes different, and also requires us to think about networks differently.

There are emerging examples of R1 institutions working to develop different kinds of relationships with communities or with different kinds of institutional partners. One example is Reckonings: A Local History Platform for the Community-Archivist, which describes itself as an innovative program of “collaboration to empower BIPOC communities and citizens in the preservation, creation, and curation of community histories. This effort sees reckoning with the historical record and making it more accurate as important for civic life. With an emphasis on digital and physical sustainability for Boston and New England, the Reckonings team of scholars will work with partner organizations and students to correct gaps and inequalities in the existing historical record, and assist communities to recover under-represented histories and cultures.”

Another recent announcement describes the creation of the HBCU Digital Library Trust, a partnership of the HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard Library described in its announcement “to sustain and deepen capacity for the digitization, discovery, and preservation of African American history collections held by HBCU libraries and archives.” The Trust director is a Harvard position based at the Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library—perhaps an emerging model for partnership.

As we try to imagine fresh approaches to collaborative ventures, examples from focus group participants highlight the critical component of recognizing and maximizing mutual benefit.

Ida Jones, Associate Director of Special Collections and University Archivist, Morgan State University:

In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University was able to acquire a grant from Mellon and sought to partner with Morgan. And of course, like all institutions and various urban centers, there are some historical issues of contest and rivalry. But we were able to bury the hatchet enough to come together for one particular project, which will be to publish a book of sorts, a coffee table book of things we hold, or memories we hold in our hands. Hopkins wants to tell the story of black Baltimore in particular, and the larger black state of Maryland in general, and they need a partner with which to do so. … I think in terms of going forward, there can be these moments of confluence where we can actually come together for a finite period of time with which to build some trust.

Project successes and challenges illustrate the value and complexity of multitype institutional collaborations. Commissioner Jewon Woo describes the benefit of the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative, which partners Case Western and four local community colleges, as offering a way for community college students to deepen their study of the humanities and take courses that can transfer to a four-year program. “I have connected the Charles Chestnutt Archive to the Collaborative so that students in Cleveland and northeast Ohio learn about Black DH and Black print by joining this archival project,” Woo said. “If I taught this only within my institution, I would not have enough students and institutional support. The Collaborative can allow me to have more students, resources, and an independent curriculum.”

The concept of independent curriculum has become significant within the boundaries now created on curriculum content by Ohio State law. In another multi-institutional partnership, Woo was able to partner with the Lorain Historical Society, which could receive funding for a Black history project otherwise prohibited to her public community college.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLoC), a partnership of institutions collaborating to digitize a wide variety of collections, has experienced both the benefits and pitfalls of multitype institutional collaboration. The founding partners created the initial infrastructure, and each brought different capacities and perspectives to the project: the University of Florida (a flagship R1), Florida International University (an Hispanic-serving institution,) and the University of the Virgin Islands (an HBCU). The University of Florida had the ability to create a stable technical infrastructure, while other institutions were well positioned for outreach and training, as well as having the ability to pay foreign participants (often easier for private than public institutions). At the same time, the different institutions had administrative turnover and shifting commitments to the project. While the DLoC continues to be a vital enterprise—largely due to the constancy of the University of Florida infrastructure—the contributions, relationships, and funding arrangements require continual adjustment. Scholars underscored the importance of stable funding for one or more staff positions if the resource is going to continue.

Partnerships across institutions, such as between Johns Hopkins and Morgan State, are possible if they work to heal old wounds. But we need to recognize a fundamental truth as well: Colleges and universities compete. They compete for students, faculty, grants, public support, and even public affection. Collaboration is not generally in their nature or in their reward structures. This centrifugal pull within every inter-institutional partnership needs to be acknowledged and worked through, as building single-institution capacity for every aspect of digital collection building, scholarship, and sustainability is not possible.

All endeavors that depend on digital technology (which is to say, almost everything), and particularly efforts that generate any product worth sustaining, raise questions about the nature of their underlying technical infrastructure. Maintaining technology represents an ongoing process of writing, patching, and tuning; maintaining content requires derivation, transformation, and uploading and reloading. Little of the startup costs of a project that lives in technology retreats after the startup; digital efforts within institutions require ongoing staff support. All aspects of technology infrastructure necessitate either a reliance on an externally maintained (and continually updated) platform and network or the same capacity in-house. A given college or university that supports the creation of a project starts down a path that it may or may not understand with regard to the stewardship of the project over time. Sustainability of a project inevitably intertwines financial planning with technology planning.

The relatively long life of the University of Virginia’s Valley of the Shadow project, conceived by Commissioner Ed Ayers, frames the question of how innovative digital work requires an intensity of refreshing greater than the collecting and care of paper sources. After two intensive rebuilds carried out by the University of Virginia Library, the project’s front end was beginning in 2021 to seem outpaced by other websites and thus by user expectations. Ayers chose to take advantage of commercial software to update learners’ interactions with Valley of the Shadow (and other projects) providing a new “skin” for the underlying content and metadata, which are also being preserved by the University of Virginia. “Potential audiences need to be attracted and guided to the resources to find them amid digital profusion. New American History seeks to attain the design and programming standards of commercial products for noncommercial ends.” [24] At the same time, Ayers attributes the sustainability of the core content of the Valley of the Shadow to its reliance on the nonproprietary standards and formats used in its content creation. University of Virginia Libraries invested considerable resources to maintain the project over its 25-year life, most of it in personnel. This has been an exceptional investment and not one that serves as an easily replicated model way forward. When should institutions be expected make a commitment to maintain a high-use or otherwise significant project? Can we devise external solutions that provide more realistic infrastructural support for digital collection building and scholarship?

These questions are endemic in technology support. We found a particular set of underlying tensions and contradictions that add further complexity to technology choices and life cycles of digital projects associated with racial and social justice: (1) the desire to ensure that the technologies for this mode of work are readily accessible for use by any scholar or community; (2) the imperative from many scholars that the work not be homogenized or “flattened” by a requirement to use standardized software; (3) the core value that communities be empowered to control their content, including protecting it from surveillance, and to keep it, and be not expected to surrender it for deposit or sometimes even reproduction elsewhere; (4) the importance of ensuring that the work product is accessible to the communities that contribute to it; and (5) the overarching responsibility, and the institutional (and/or community) challenges associated with that responsibility, of ensuring that the work, or at minimum the primary sources collected by the work, endure for future knowledge.

The phrase “technology infrastructure” is a shorthand for complex, interacting layers of software and hardware for data and metadata creation, content management, interfaces and interactions with content, modes of and platforms for dissemination and access, and repositories for various levels of preservation. For many projects, the core issues revolve around collecting resources in many formats and sharing them, either openly or selectively. For others, the development of code for analyzing, interrogating, and aggregating data is at the heart of the intellectual effort. All technology choices have implications for sustainability of the work activity, for continuing access to the products of that work, and, often, for long-term preservation of curated primary sources.

Maria Cotera expressed her concern regarding technical infrastructure as the biggest issue for communities of color that are documenting their own histories. “They’re currently documenting on infrastructure that is owned by corporations, that is not secure (or even searchable within collections). We can think it’s sustainable, but we can already see what is happening with Twitter and other platforms … Those are national heritage materials. We cannot allow them to disappear into the digital hole of Instagram and Facebook.” The dominance of social media platforms and “free” (i.e., the user is the product) applications presents a tempting and voluminous menu of choices for digital projects. While these products are, on the surface, attractive and easy to use, for any form of substantive content, the “digital hole of Instagram and Facebook” poses risks to privacy, security, content integrity, and preservation.

Fortunately, many projects are finding the best match for their needs among a variety of noncommercial software tools, platforms, and data management systems, such as Scalar, Manifold, Fulcrum, Omeka, PubPub, and Documenting the Now, or in more targeted commercial products like CLOWDER. While these platforms avoid many of the dangers of Big Tech, sustaining products like these and the many new, well-designed shared applications yet to come will be a continuing challenge for support of digital scholarship.

One central realization that the Commission’s work revealed depends on our collective understanding of the institutional structure of US higher education: The autonomy of individual institutions, and often of individual departments, that fosters creative inventiveness in the humanities makes it very difficult for faculty and staff to know when or how to shift to collective solutions for shared challenges. In other words, the impulse to devise solutions, be they intellectual explorations or technical problem-solving, is inescapably central to both academic freedom and our society’s reliance on higher education. As Marisa Parham noted:

When we can’t make a pathway for bespoke digital scholarship, in a way, we’re actually running the risk of eliminating a lot of cultural heritage of the future. If we all had to flatten out and do WordPress, there’s a way in which there’s a real loss there. So we actually have to find a way to manage this bespoke if we’re going to uphold any idea of the digital, because I’m speaking from the side of the creators and the makers and the artists and the writers.

This can be—and often is—true. And, at the same time, we need to be better at devising shared mechanisms for determining when to act collectively when an individual creative project should earn the care of a broader base of institutional support than it can get from the institution where it happened to be originally fostered. This infrastructural challenge is both technical and social; it requires shared repositories, service platforms, and distribution channels for innovative digital work. Digital bridges and tunnels require sustainable financing and networks of people who, whether employed in a home institution or a collective organization, can enable a shared capacity to steward projects that become, in essence, public goods. These infrastructures require partnerships that cross over among and between institutions, communities, and professional like-minded third-party organizations to forge workable shared solutions.

One size will not always fit all, even if collective solutions relieve less-resourced institutions from having to devise each stage of a solution. Even placing all materials into standardized, third-party repositories—even if such repositories were made available—is not an acceptable solution for all groups. Kim Christen emphasizes that even admired portals and repositories, like the Digital Public Library of America, JSTOR, or HathiTrust, are not for all communities, saying, “There just has to be a very clear understanding that there are reasons why some groups would just never want to do that. Whether it’s the violence that’s been meted out on them … or anything else.” Murkutu, the platform developed under Christen’s leadership at Washington State University as a content management and access system for Indigenous communities, demonstrates that this kind of local control can still be achieved through shared technology. Humanities Commons has aimed to be a multifunctional platform for sharing digital research objects and other work by providing access and preservation services for objects in standardized formats in its CORE repository, even as it struggles with significant issues of scalability and sustainability.

At the same time, many materials resist local repository solutions, either because of their design or scale. Moving image materials, for example, present a large-scale storage problem that can be handled only by a large repository. May Hong HaDuong said, “The moving image archive [at UCLA] has petabytes of data and just a really intense metadata issue … We’re having to think out the scaffolding issues around data storage for moving images.”

These potentially conflicting parameters may not quite meet the definition of a “wicked problem,” but they do push us to new ways of thinking and continuing efforts to find creative solutions, “a constellation of things,” as Dan Cohen describes it. Digital Scholar (founded as the Corporation for Digital Scholarship) is a successful model for developing and sustaining important tools like Zotero and Omeka and making them readily accessible to scholars. Ed Ayers imagined a “GitHub for these kinds of projects … agnostic of institutional home or loyalty or responsibility.” If funders created “a place that had staff that was flexible in creating and sustaining a suite of tools that are necessary for building a community-based project, and you didn’t have to go through persuading a department chair, and then a dean, and then a provost, and then a vice president and then a president to do it, it strikes me that we could actually release a lot of the energies … [of] these people doing inspiring projects.” Bergis Jules’s Shift Collective has just received a grant from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web to explore decentralized, sustainable storage for community-based projects.

Even the largest institutions are struggling with finding the right balance of supporting scholars in whatever way they need to do their work while managing limited resources and considering long-term preservation. Focus group participants described their approaches and choices.

Bohyun Kim, Associate University Librarian for Library IT, University of Michigan:

We really struggle to support more than 80 IT products and to preserve content housed in many of those as much as possible [in light of] … the limited resources and staff time and the limitation of infrastructure. … So to give an example, we are running five large repositories. They’re running on four different platforms, and they are all very, very highly customized. And one of them has been running since 1996. So there is also the high level of legacy product aspect.

Julia Damerow, Lead Scientific Software Engineer, Arizona State University:

If you are, let’s say, at Princeton, and there’s a whole research engineering group that can support long-term maintenance, great. Or if the project is not meant to live longer than three years, great. But in those middle cases where people want to do something new and innovative, that’s awesome, but [it’s a problem] if there’s not a long-term plan about what to do with that, once the initial development work is done. It’s easy to get money for new things, like write a grant and get some exciting new project off the ground, but what do you do with it once the money’s out and the thing is built? Because within three or four years, technology’s changed, you need to constantly update things to keep it running.

Focusing on sustainability of core content rather than bespoke projects is one way that institutions have been able to take responsibility for support of new work.

Jill Sexton, Associate Director for Digital & Organizational Strategy, North Carolina State University Libraries:

We have really backed away from creating a lot of bespoke solutions for digital humanities types of projects. But we do consult with faculty on these, and primarily we help them with sources. We help them come up with interesting and creative ideas for tying their idea with archival and other types of content. But we also consult with them on how to decouple the content from the presentation so that it can be preserved in the long term and presented in a way that’s still coherent but maybe doesn’t require the same level of effort at maintaining a bespoke custom interface.

Jimmy Ghaphery, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communications and Publishing, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries:

One of the good decisions we made [about a major compilation Mapping the Ku Klux Klan] is that we do not consider this manifestation something that we’re going to preserve, which is kind of funny since it’s still there after eight years. But what we did do is make the conscious decision based on our resources to move the underlying data into the repository. And I think that was probably a wise decision upfront and has taught us as we have ongoing projects to really think about that separation.

Linda García Merchant, Public Humanities Data Librarian, University of Houston:

I really think that helping faculty and researchers understand that a foundational data structure is key because then we’re not as worried about sustainability because you can migrate that to a different [repository] and think about the publishing as a transitional space.

Christopher Prom, Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

We actually run our own bespoke repository service here for digital content, for data, for research publications, our own institutional repository. But it is an integrated platform that allows us to do both, preservation and then publishing on top of that. In addition to that, we have the Illinois Open Publishing Network where we provide our humanities scholars and others access to Omeka, to Scalar, and to Pressbooks as three kinds of out of the box options that we provide to them.

These examples, not surprisingly, represent the capacities—however limited they may seem—of better-resourced institutions. The services these institutions describe are available only to their own or selected qualified scholars. Others are seeking more generic (“flattened”) approaches for a broader range of scholars and practitioners. Manifold has been a successful, readily accessible platform for students, scholars, and other creators to use to share their digital content, often in coordination with more traditional forms of publishing. Matt Gold, one of the creators of the Manifold platform, described his goal.

Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center:

I think that in addition to thinking about those kinds of institutions [that are not R1s] and how we can support them … we can think about citizen archivists trying to do so on their own. A lot of people don’t have the kind of support they need to pull together digital publications and collections. And so I’m thinking about ways institutions without resources can start to empower faculty and students together to create in ways that align with racial and social justice. There are model support structures, there are collective support structures, there are places where people can work together, and that’s really important.

Zoe Wake Hyde, Community Development Manager, Knowledge Commons: [Humanities Commons enables] having [research objects] in a coordinated space that is also open enough for people to be customizing, to be using it in ways that make sense to them. Plus, there are things that we are aware of that we can be helping with, like different levels of permissions and access. So particularly in projects around racial and social justice, you’re often dealing with either topics or actual research objects that you don’t necessarily want to have fully open to everybody all the time but that you can have levels of permission there. Which is something that a platform like ours can help with the cultural or community standards for.

While there is no magic, one-size-solves-the-problem technology infrastructure, the wide and successful use of Mukurtu is an important model. The policies and agreements Christen was able to negotiate with WSU to enable sustainable, community-centered use are as important as the software itself in demonstrating how institutions and communities can create partnerships and sustainable new platforms. Beyond the work of creating a project, the question of how it will be accessed for continuing use is not just one of sustainable technology platforms, but also of how it will enter and remain in the system of scholarly communication.

Ecosystems for sharing, using, and building on knowledge are intrinsic to human existence, whether employing rich oral traditions or myriad forms of material documents. The world of institutionally supported research and scholarship has developed a robust, complex global infrastructure of scholarly communication that carries a scholarly record—whether a scientific result, an archival record, a long-form analysis, or any product of investigation—through its evaluation, publication, dissemination, and enduring access. It is an infrastructure with many players, within and outside of the academy: publishers, libraries, standards-making bodies, societies, indexing organizations, review outlets, and more. It is difficult to comprehend how thoroughly the still-in-process transition from paper to digital has created enormous new opportunities for the dissemination of the fruits of scholarship and the need for updated infrastructure to support these new possibilities. In the age of paper, access to scholarship was always going to be severely constrained; in a digital world, access is constrained only by financial sustainability limitations and the still-incomplete components of digital infrastructure.

Digital transformation in this infrastructure has enabled a wealth of new services for finding, assessing, navigating, and using resources. The first 30 years of this transition has, understandably, seen the most dramatic advances in the digital amplification of what were widely adopted paper vehicles: articles in scholarly journals, via journal aggregation platforms like PubMed, ArXiv, and—for the humanistic fields—JSTOR and Project Muse. But digital work has engendered wholly new formats, presenting new challenges when the work itself and its product break the mold of traditional books and articles.

The concept of “the scholarly record” is no longer necessarily limited to a published book or article but may be a digital record of a scholar’s research process, their presentation—often interactive—of exploration, analysis, and/or evidence. And, as in a practice that has been more familiar in traditional archaeological work or documentary editions, it can include the collection of cultural and historical evidence, newly exposed, curated, and made available digitally. In the case of much new humanistic work, this evidence is being gathered in partnership with or entirely by the communities that identify with a particular cultural story: protest movements as they play out in social media; tribal artifacts once appropriated by settler institutions; 18th-century archives hiding in plain sight evidence of enslaved families; oral histories of LGBTQ+ activists. This is evidence and knowledge that could not be more important for society today and in the future, but much of it is not served by the current infrastructure for scholarly communication. The gaps in the current system are viewed differently from the perspectives of its multiple participants: the academic scholars struggling to insert a respected place for an interactive or otherwise complex digital project into the traditional peer review and publication process; university presses and other specialized publishers working to accommodate varieties of digital expression but with limited means to do so; innovative platform providers seeking acceptance (and funding) for new paradigms; libraries focused on demand for new services rather than on expansive and difficult new parameters of collecting; libraries now functioning, to varying degrees, as open-access publishers; and a vibrant, growing realm of communities, researchers, storytellers, and project creators concerned with the challenges of getting their work done rather than with a post-production life cycle. The Commission heard all of these passionate voices in its focus groups, voices that revealed profound gaps in vital infrastructure, from planning to publishing to preservation.

The traditional values and rewards of academia are not typically shared by communities who are building resources to tell their stories. They are not creating publication for tenure and often not for the long-term scholarly record. This creates tension and contradictions for the scholars working with communities.

K.J. Rawson:

There can often feel like there’s a competition between building in the now and the immediate future and then thinking long term. And it’s almost as if there’s not enough infrastructure; it’s hard to do both at the same time … Because there’s just this frantic pace of the everyday. Just thinking about having a sufficient infrastructure that affords the possibilities and the privileges of being able to think about the long term planning seems like a huge step for many projects and initiatives.

Maria Cotera:

I do feel like there’s a kind of disconnect between the infrastructural imaginaries of the institutions and the infrastructure imaginaries of community members… In the community there’s an explosion of interest in archival matters … and yet all these materials really sort of sit outside of the structural spaces of relationships that are constituted by libraries and funding.

Kim Christen:

With sustainability … you’re talking … about keeping things forever, but … some of that stuff either shouldn’t be; it should have never been collected; it shouldn’t be there; it’s framed for the wrong people … Sustainability is one of those things that is … readily misunderstood and preservation becomes very political because it can slip fairly quickly into paternalism … There are different policies for different types of collections of cultural heritage material.

K.J. Rawson:

I think about this from a trans history perspective. History can actually be quite damaging for many trans folks, and [they want] the ability to control your story and your narrative. … I wonder what it might mean to take a more nuanced and sometimes theoretical approach to ending things intentionally, and perhaps even starting things with an eye towards endings.

These tensions and potentially conflicting values require new approaches to preserving and sharing work.

Gabi Ventura:

Thinking about the roles that we currently have in taking care and making sure that whatever projects or materials or archives or whatever we’re working on exists for future generations, [if the community wants them removed] maybe we still keep a record of those archives that are no longer made available. At least that there’s a record that they exist is also important. That’s a huge responsibility for all of us.

Marisa Parham:

We need some distinction between “projects” and archival objects. Our conversation about sustainability in all of this work often slips into being a conversation about the preservation of archival objects. Part of what I’m hearing, especially from the community perspective, is that what emerges at the moment of doing the work on the ground is actually what’s important about the project. That goes to [the question] of whose interest is being served at the moment of talking about a certain kind of sustainability, and are those the interests of the people for whom a project may have first been instantiated.

Community-engaged work by its very essence needs to be of value to the community, as well as shared with others. Institutions and scholars are exploring what that means for support, publication, and sustainability.

Judy-Lynne Peters, Co-Director of Northeast Slavery Records Index, John Jay College:

When we began to work with the members of our consortium we suddenly realized that our stuff was written like scholars wrote for other scholars. And we really wanted this to be something that everybody would have access to. It’s such an important thing for people that we really need to think about: How do people in our target audience need to use this? What do they need to be able to see? And how can we make this relate to them rather than have it relate on the level that we look at it? … How do we make this accessible to all those different levels?

Josh Honn, English and Digital Humanities Librarian, Northwestern University:

The last thing that I’ve really struggled with, especially because we were working with an institution that was so small and so underfunded, was … empowering (for lack of a better word) communities to own the resources that we’ve created together. Instead of seeing it as something that Northwestern has to own, how can we get that final deliverable, that website, that digital project, into the hands of the people who it really affects and who are going to be the stewards of that legacy and remain in [the] community?

Annette M. Kim, Associate Professor and Director of Spatial Analysis Lab (SLAB), University of Southern California:

In terms of dissemination, I’m offering the dataset to doctoral students; [they] want to use it, and they’re the next generation, so I’m excited about that. … There are also people outside of academia who are accessing the project through the website or social media and they have different interests [that] they’re getting out of it. And I’m also trying to accommodate it for public school teachers at the high school level. So I’m trying to have layers of depth for the different audiences.

Jaquelina Alvarez, Co-Director, Oral History Lab (OHL), University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez:

One of the things that we are doing with this grant is acquiring technology to be able to provide to the communities because we understand that lack of resources at the community level is a significant barrier to share the information. We are very concerned about access, and we want to give access to all these digital resources. However, we understand that if our communities cannot access [them] digitally, we need to provide an alternative method. We’ve been discussing how to do that with the communities. In terms of dissemination, we have the website, and we are working on a repository of their histories, but also we are creating exhibits. And those exhibits will be more targeted to the different audiences.

Megan Senseney, Head of Research Engagement, University of Arizona Libraries:

The groups and individuals we’re working with expect to continue building and growing their archives, so we don’t expect them to stay static. There’s sustainment to consider in terms of growth and change. There’s also preservation, which is capturing something at a point in time. We want to capture through web archiving how they’re representing their digital archive and the end of the project, if they choose to, and we hope to continue building these relationships so that the archive itself is a living thing that grows. We will take great consideration as to how we continue to activate the digital archive to make it accessible to the broadest possible audience.

Darcy Cullen, Assistant Director of Acquisitions, University of British Columbia Press; Founder, RavenSpace:

We’re based in Vancouver on Musqueam First Nation unceded territory, and we launched a new publishing model and a platform for the publication of community-driven publications [called RavenSpace]. Indigenous peoples are working with scholars, and they are involved in the actual design of the scholarship and the research questions. And so as publishers we found that we needed a solution to produce publications that would be more accessible, relevant, and generally resonating with those very communities and with Indigenous peoples, ensuring that the knowledge and outputs from that research went back into community and supported community goals as a priority … We’re really thinking … about how we return the fruits of community-led research back into communities.

Bringing these new community-based resources into an ecosystem of enduring access, and doing so in accordance with CARE and FAIR principles, brings a significant new challenge to the academic, cultural heritage, and publishing communities. Unless that challenge is met, we will be left with a gaping hole in our knowledge infrastructure.

We have learned through the work of the Commission that capacity building, pedagogical development, public knowledge, and diversifying the digital landscape are deeply intertwined issues. For example, Kenton Rambsy has noted that sustainability in digital humanities starts with the student. Training the next generation of diverse DH scholars, which Ramsby does in his work as a faculty mentor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Summer Institute at Howard University, should be an intentional element of any effort to sustain a field. That training has inspired his students, as reflected in the comments of Howard senior Nyla Jones: “Digital tools can help bring to light the litany of issues impacting marginalized communities, forcing people to look at these issues numerically, in addition to anecdotally, providing undeniable proof of the need for social action and restorative justice.” Jewon Woo has highlighted the profoundly fluid boundaries between the institution and the community when discussing her students; the community is quite literally in the classroom at community colleges. Training them in digital methods is not simply a pedagogical exercise, it is an empowering process of giving undergraduates the technological skill to tell their stories in novel ways. Her student Nevaeh Pasela said, “Beyond the historical and humanistic aspect of the project [to transcribe and code Charles W. Chesnutt’s correspondence], I find myself invested in the workings of the programs which we use to transcribe letters. I have been provided with new knowledge … which would be useful in careers around archival research. [And]... I have found myself making new connections I never would have before without the internship opportunity.” Such efforts bolster campuses’ intellectual vibrancy and extend beyond the walls of the academy. Given the continued uneven institutional landscape within the academy, efforts to train the next generation of DH and social justice scholars and to bolster publicly engaged work through DH pedagogy still require intentional support.

Future iterations of the ACLS Digital Justice Grant program will retool its eligibility requirements to more explicitly welcome projects that operate at the intersections of DH capacity building, pedagogy, and public knowledge. One such example of work at this interplay is the Recruiting and Training the Next Generation of Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA) Scholars at Vanderbilt University, which earned an ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant in 2023. Led by professor Jane Landers and associate professor Daniel Jenkins, the project trains students at Fisk University, Tennessee State University, and Middle Tennessee State University in machine learning to enhance access to records within the Slave Societies Digital Archive, the oldest and most extensive serial records for African and Indigenous people and their descendants in the Atlantic World. Projects like this one highlight the fluidity between capacity building (expressed here as pedagogy and skills training) and publicly engaged scholarship.

Students who have the benefit of working with active scholars are engaged in the full range of new humanistic work, learning about digital and analytical methods and exploring extraordinary cultural and historical stories. At the same time, the products of this work, from primary sources to research findings, are not yet reaching as wide an audience as they could beyond those already familiar with particular initiatives. This was Ed Ayers’ motivation in creating New American History online resources, which has successfully attracted an enormous audience. “New American History translates the tools of, say, redlining, the other maps of American Panorama, into teaching resources that people can use. We build these things, but we’ve not built out the pedagogical bridge to some of our imagined audiences.”

Commissioners imagined creating trans-institutional communities of practice and shared platforms that would translate scholars’ and communities’ work into resources for teaching. Focus groups considered ways to share teaching materials, including peer reviews, sessions at discipline conferences, and targeted publishing initiatives such as Lived Places Publishing.

Barbara Kline Pope, Executive Director, Johns Hopkins University Press:

It’s our responsibility, as publishers, to help authors reach their readers. Many authors don’t have the time or even the expertise to think about the best way to disseminate their scholarship. We make it our obligation to ensure that the audiences are as targeted or broad as the work demands. And we have to get ourselves out of thinking about only books and journals as the vehicles for that dissemination. For example, we’re partnering with the National Science Teaching Association to write and distribute curriculum based on a series of books that we think high school students would be interested in and inspired by. And so, it’s best to start with the audience and then go from there.

Andrea Eastman-Mullins, Founder/CEO, West End Learning:

I’ve seen so much on the ground working directly with faculty where they have created really intriguing and innovative content that has no plan beyond the grant or no plan beyond the one semester that they took to create it. And I see a lot of money going into OER [open educational resources] and a lot of money going into creating these things. But it tends to prioritize the privileged so the faculty who are at larger institutions are able to get release time to create learning content. And as a result we don’t have voices in teaching content coming more from community colleges or HBCUs. I see that as a divide plus making sure there’s a path for the content to be found and used and sustained.

Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center:

[I’m] thinking about the whole movement within OER that really starts to involve students as creators. What’s so cool about it to me is that you have a model where instead of having students in a class, whether it’s a graduate or an undergraduate class, working on individual seminar papers or term papers that get read only by the professor, instead you may have an entire class working together on a collective publishing project that everyone is contributing to. And then, at the end of the semester, it becomes an OER in its own right that can be read and experienced by others. We’ve had a kind of explosion of content [on Manifold]. For example, a student in our master’s program working on digital humanities created a podcast archive interviewing queer and trans prisoners of color and put that up on Manifold. To me, it’s just an example of how a single student working on a project can create something that really is engaging and that then becomes a resource in its own right for others to see.

Andrea Eastman-Mullins, Founder/CEO, West End Learning:

Thinking about the teaching and learning side, it’s historically been hard to be recognized for teaching and learning period, let alone publication in it. But I think as higher ed is transitioning, things that the highest levels of universities care about are also changing. So student retention, graduation rates, student success and the entire brand of the institution itself—how is it going to compete with how the world is changing? If you’re a faculty member and you’re able to articulate the number of views on your OER or the number of students you have retained in your department because you explained something better through your YouTube video, that starts to get at what matters the most right now at universities. I’m not sure how that translates into something the scholarly community can create, but it’s a conversation that is changing as we speak. And so some of it, I’m optimistic, will naturally change because the objective of the university is going to have to change.

Scholars engaged in uncovering and creating new knowledge in racial and social justice are energetic and generous in sharing their work with their students, but they typically lack the time and expertise to translate the results of their work into broad-based curriculum content or K-12 teaching resources. Commissioners and others noted several successful partnerships with schools of education to create teaching resources. One successful model of moving the results of new scholarship into curricular materials is the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project.

Victoria J. Gallagher, Professor of Communication, North Carolina State University:

We did a pilot with area high school teachers who took it up and used it. And we based our application on that pilot. And in fact, we have done a really good job of getting it into the eighth through 12th grade curriculum. We do hope to provide curricular materials for younger grades, and plan to work toward that with interested partners in the College of Education at our institution.

Ultimately, widespread use in teaching of the resources created by new recovery scholarship will require better dissemination and access to these vital digital resources. A mind-opening new knowledge base is being created, and in too many ways, we lack the capacity to deliver it to the world.

Thinking back to the original invitation to form this Commission, if there was one topic that we would inevitably take up, it would be this: How has, is, and might digital scholarship related to racial and social justice be financially supported? Given what we have seen about the needs and possibilities for scholarly co-creation with communities, the place of this work within the institutional contexts of colleges and universities, and the opportunities that might require time, focus, and resources between the boundaries of particular organizations, how might funders consider prioritizing their limited resources? How might institutions consider internal priorities to enable this work to thrive?

A wealth of innovative, energetic, and substantive humanistic initiatives in recovery scholarship has recently been fueled by public and private foundations that recognize the vital importance of the field. But the apparent vibrancy and success of this activity is masking a serious lack of stable, sustained financial infrastructure, a situation that is endangering the longer-term health of the field. This kind of humanities work is relatively new, and there is little built-in operational support in institutions to match and continue grant funding, and only in larger institutions is there support for the grant process itself. And the reality is that a digital enterprise is costly: costly to create content, to manage it, to make use of it, and to preserve it as part of a scholarly record where norms were designed around print publications. While there is not enough funding to support all the digital scholarship that enterprising scholars and communities can envision, the deeply essential work that is now being done—and the more that needs to be done—in recovery scholarship will require reprioritization in institutions and new models for collective action and external support.

Commissioners and focus group participants spoke often of the barriers created by a continual short-term cycle of project-specific support. Unrealistic grant cycles, process overhead, cost-sharing requirements, and restrictions on paying community participants are examples of factors that too often create a procrustean bed into which many institutions and initiatives are unable to fit. While grant-supported research has always, often necessarily, had strict funding rules, these are rules that have been designed to work typically for science disciplines (i.e., where large-scale grant support has long been a standard mode of operation) and in large institutions with an established research-support apparatus. In contrast, much of humanistic research now cuts across institutions of all types and sizes and engages communities with no support structure for grants management. When projects are of modest size, the ratio of labor in creating a grants infrastructure relative to the investment in actual project work can be out of scale.

Marisa Parham:

That’s always the bind of some of these digital projects, as you spend as much time asking for money … [as you] spend doing the thing. … So if you’re imagining business hours, Monday through Friday are spent trying to get the money for doing the work, [and the work] for which you’ve gotten the money starts after those times [i.e., after business hours].

Monika Rhue, Project Manager, UCLA:

Some of the basic challenges that we faced early on at smaller institutions [are because] we typically wear many hats. So you may be the director, you may be the octopus, but you’re also the one wanting to push having your collections accessible, working with your community, and partnership with your community. Typically you are the one writing those grants. At larger institutions, they can work with their development officers or grant officers to write a proposal. But that’s not the case at these smaller institutions.

Work with community-based groups adds different perspectives and considerations for funding; it is not just the same business-as-usual as funding R1 institutions.

Cecilia Conrad, Director of Levers for Change, the MacArthur Foundation:

In our 100&Change competitions, we saw the same structure over and over again: the work was being done in the community—the community leaders knew how to get change done, they knew the people, they understood what could really make a difference. But the universities knew how to write a grant application. They knew the right things to say and the right way to report—it was all buttoned up. But there’s something wrong with that balance.

Marisa Parham:

Funding agencies [are moving] to include more kinds of communities in these sort of large scale grants. But the level of staff you need to even produce that grant is unattainable for most people. You have to have capital to even get the capital.

R. Darrell Meadows, Acting Deputy Executive Director, NHPRC:

What we’re seeing in all of our grant programs is an effort to support work that centers the voices of Black, Indigenous and people of color, not just collections but also practitioners of color and Indigenous practitioners. … and thinking carefully about how we can support institutions that are not well resourced and often not well positioned to succeed in our grant making area. So we have to look at our policies and processes of how we’re vetting applications, what kinds of hurdles that are really proving to be barriers to people in applying.

Lisa Janette, Archivist, University of Minnesota:

I really believe that there is a downside to having a university partner be the primary partner and the funding holder, because that power remains within a large institution that’s primarily white … Figuring out a way to separate that model so that the funding can be retained and maintained and the power can be held by the community rather than the institution [is the challenge]. And I think that’s where grant funding becomes problematic because for a lot of grants you have to have a certain number of employees or be a certain size or be able to prove that you can manage the money well. … It makes it difficult for smaller institutions to be able to make the case that they can do it when they really can.

Government funding agencies in the UK (Arts and Humanities Research Council), Canada (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) and elsewhere described how they are reconsidering guidelines for community-based cultural heritage groups, with Canada especially responding to mandates to support Indigenous community-based initiatives.

Matthew Lucas, Executive Director, Corporate Strategy and Performance, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada:

So we have two types of eligibility at Canada’s three federal granting agencies. One is the eligibility of researchers or organizations to apply to specific funding opportunities, which we refer to as applicant eligibility. This varies a little by opportunity. The other is the eligibility of organizations to manage our funds, what we refer to as institutional eligibility. All of our awards flow through organizations, usually post-secondary institutions, whether they are awards for institutions or individual researchers, and these organizations must meet certain criteria and agree to certain conditions to be eligible to manage this funding. While we are looking at both types of eligibility to ensure we haven’t created unnecessary barriers to participation in our programs, we have paid particular attention to institutional eligibility as we realize that the processes and requirements we’ve put in place with respect to relatively large post-secondary institutions don’t necessarily work when you’re working with not-for-profit organizations.

Using organizations and institutions closer to the ground as regranting agencies can be one way for funders to give larger grants that are then better shaped for smaller applicants. The Mellon grants to the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices, is one successful example. Roopika Risam described a program in which Mellon provided funds to Salem State to in turn provide grants to smaller institutions to develop curriculum. (Before receiving this grant, Salem State first had to prove its own capacity to manage a grant program.) At first, the community colleges did not have the capacity even to apply for new curriculum development.

Roopika Risam:

So we ended up pushing back for the second year after we got no applicants the first year and said … let everybody tell us what they need for capacity building, for professional development, for infrastructure, and let us try and fund that and give them a mentor. And it worked really well. We have for this year more applicants than we can fund. … I think one of the things we have to keep in mind is that people on the ground know, or we can help them learn, what questions to ask, so they can articulate what they need rather than have it be something that comes from external bodies.

There is also typically a lack of financial infrastructure to sustain the work after the grant period has ended. Commissioners considered how grant funding is aimed at innovation and exciting short-term project work, but then leaves projects, especially in communities and smaller institutions, without resources for its less glamorous continuation. Dan Cohen characterized the problem as the need to Meet Operational Needs Each Year, i.e., MONEY. Ben Vinson noted that R1 institutions understand core capacity support in the sciences but have not thought of the humanities in terms of defining a research core; they need to translate that to the humanities and implement a necessary infrastructure. Vinson said, “If we speak of a humanities core in that way, that becomes understood as an investment resource … something that benefits multitudes of scholars at an institution.”

Even larger institutions have not built in a support pattern for research that includes community collaboration. Ultimately, most of the funding for digital work in the 21st-century humanities will come from institutional funding. To gain institutional funding, scholars and their staff colleagues who seek support in undertaking this work need to demonstrate how their work aligns with the goals of their institution and remind the institution of its stated goals:

Kim Christen:

I partnered with our College of Engineering as well as our College of Medicine and Education. And we reminded everyone of the university strategic plan, where we commit to our land grant. They remember that we were a land grant and asked what’s the land grant mission of the future if we’re going to look at the history and leave that behind? And it is in there that says that we have community-engaged research in our strategic plan. Our Office of Research is just trying to understand what that is. And so they’re coming to those of us who are doing it. And that is where we can be connectors. We are like, “Hey, we know how to do that. Y’all don’t know how to do that. You have to go that last mile.” And they do understand the concept of lab to market. They don’t understand what that means when they’re outside of the context of translational science applications and that we can show them what it means to be community engaged.

Megan Senseney, Head of Research Engagement, University of Arizona Libraries, describes how digital humanities work carried out as part of the Border Lab aligns with institutional priorities:

The inclusion of a Border Lab as a pillar initiative in the University of Arizona’s strategic plan represents a commitment from the University to prioritize and fund efforts that reflect our borderlands region. The topic is really interdisciplinary, and these commitments at the institutional level are fundamental for supporting the work we do within the context of social justice and the humanities. The University Libraries has for a very long time set their efforts and priorities by anchoring into the University’s priorities. In the early teens, the University was more explicitly indicating a focus on border studies, even if quite broadly, which helped Special Collections cement efforts around borderlands community archiving.

Makiba J. Foster, Librarian of the College, The College of Wooster, describes how she sees her the alignment between her work as the college librarian and her work on the Archiving The Black Web project:

In the aftermath of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, you’ve got universities and all these other institutions giving lip service to their stance on issues of social justice coming out supposedly against anti-blackness. And so, if we think about how sometimes to challenge the systems that are in place, that also means that we have to maybe let go of some of the structures that are in place that we’ve just accepted for no reason other than saying this is the way to do something. That was one of the reasons why I accepted the position here, where I am in a more senior administrative role reporting directly to the provost who reports directly to the president. In this leadership role, I am using my work with Archiving the Black Web to test systems that are in place, checking for currency and equity.

Ben Vinson:

I think we could advocate for intentionally calling out our objectives in the strategic planning processes of institutions and also of units within an institution. Not only at the institutional level, but there may be opportunities for schools that are also elaborating strategic plans to be very intentional about putting this language in those documents so that there’s actually activity generated that bakes this work into the institutional planning process.

Roopika Risam:

At Salem State, we have leveraged these particularities of institutional life and student experience to design a digital humanities program that suits their needs and have tapped into our institutional strategic plan priority for student success to gain departmental and administrative support for the program. In spite of what we do not have, we do have students who know what they want and need, and designing digital humanities initiatives to meet these requests underscores the role of social justice in our work. … Because they tend to lack forms of cultural capital that are rewarded in job searches, they have difficulty imagining career options or translating marketable skills from humanities majors into employment. …. There would not be a need for digital humanities at the university if not for its value to our students.

Jennifer McNabb, Department Head of History, University of Northern Iowa:

Unless you’re one of the bullet points in the strategic plan, unless you are data that can be shown as advancing on that strategic objective, you’re not going to get much play. You might get a story or you might not. … And as far as money is concerned, you’re not always going to get them to put their money where their mouth is if they don’t see the value of your project, which I think is a really tough reality.

Extending support to community participation can also be integrated into institutional infrastructure and strategies. Claire Stewart used the model of state extension programs as an example. “When I got to Nebraska, I found they already had a grant to the public library to bring in maker spaces,” Stewart said. “So I think there might be existing things in universities that are potentially designed to help with this kind of thing but probably aren’t focused on it yet.”

Fitting in with institutional strategy is crucial to attracting the institution’s support. And at the same time, the search for outside support requires internal institutional infrastructure. Obtaining grant funding requires supporting infrastructure to undertake a project, infrastructure that is often lacking for the humanities, even at better-resourced institutions.

Katrina M. Powell, Professor of English, Director of Center for Refugee, Migrant and Displacement Studies, Virginia Tech:

For instance, at a place like Virginia Tech, there are lots of people doing community based research and doing technology research in the College of Engineering or in the College of Natural Resources. And so the kinds of infrastructure that are in place for those colleges, like grant proposal writers, project managers, we don’t have that same infrastructure in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Anytime I propose and then luckily get a grant, I’m managing it in a way that my colleagues who are in other disciplines are not managing theirs because they have staffing to support that work. Our Office of Sponsored Programs seems bureaucratic to us because we have less experience working within their system—which is set up for engineering and the sciences. If you’re a project manager in the College of Engineering, you know how to manage all those systems and you’re working with organizations used to signing complex contracts. … What takes someone who has the job of grant project manager five minutes to do, may take me all day to figure out. And so that has taken my time away from producing various kinds of scholarship or digital projects or community-based resources as we figure out how to both be trained in the system as it exists and to clearly communicate the ways the system might adjust to our needs.

As funders shape guidelines, they need to consider longer-term sustainability as well as immediate project support, but that doesn’t relieve institutions of the importance of infrastructure. As Josh Greenberg noted after considering ideas articulated by focus group members, “What I read through in a lot of these recommendations is where should funding come from for these different pieces of work. I am increasingly of the mind that particularly grant dollars or private philanthropic dollars are best optimized at the level of project work and then overhead on those dollars … But the sort of infrastructure and the maintenance is increasingly the purview of the institutions because they are the ones who have the durable view.”

While funders may not play the role of ongoing support infrastructure, they can help to build it. There are investments that funders can make in building sustainable infrastructure in different kinds of institutions and organizations. Interinstitutional and extra institutional solutions can create powerful and cost-effective approaches to shared services, shared technology, shared expertise, and shared platforms. Intermediary organizations such as JSTOR and HathiTrust were supported by foundations to, in turn, become self-sustaining. Grant makers and grant seekers alike realize project-level funding can be more effective when projects are contextualized in a larger systemic strategy.

Maria Sachiko Cecire, Program Officer in Higher Learning, Mellon Foundation:

We’re taking a lot of factors into account in how we’re thinking about sustainability. In the past, we were primarily working with some of the wealthiest colleges and universities in the country. I think you can and should lean on them pretty hard to eventually take over many of the budget lines that they establish through a grant-funded project. But the situation may be different at other types of institutions with fewer financial resources at their disposal. We are always thinking about questions like: what are we expecting of this project? Might it be a sunset project with a clear conclusion date? Or if we think it’s a project that we know will need to go on much longer, what alternative sources of support are available and how prepared are we to have longer-term funding horizons for it?

Carly Strasser, Program Manager for Open Science, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative:

Sustainability for infrastructure is really hard. It’s even harder if funders have rules on what they are or are not willing to fund. Funders shouldn’t have hard lines that we’re unwilling to cross. Instead we should be engaging in conversations with infrastructure providers on how we can make these projects last for the long term.

Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer, NEH:

There are people in the funding community that think we should only judge a project based on its scholarly merit. … But at the end of the day, if … they’re going to be out of business in a year or so, that is money down the drain. It requires funders to have to put on a different mindset about how you fund something for the long term.

Sustainability also requires taking a hard look at the nature of partnerships and how to build support for smaller institutions in reliably enduring ways.

Monika Rhue, Project Manager, UCLA:

We do this work because we know it’s a necessity. We write the grants, we apply for the grants, we receive the grants, we implement the activities of the grants, but then it’s like the partnership is gone. How can we continue partnerships with those organizations beyond the grant to help with sustainability? ... There’s got to be some way of working with these agencies to understand that … we may have put a sustainability model in the grant proposal because, you know, that’s what the funding required. And some of that sustainability is realistic, but it also depends on where that institution is at that time as far as their own budget … So a systematic way is how can an agency support sustainability across our funding. Thinking about a broader way that we can share expertise, digital infrastructures and things like that. Thinking holistically about where we are … think[ing] with us about how we can come up with the best model when it comes to sustainability and don’t always make the ownership of sustainability on the person who applied for the grant.

Virginia Steel, Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian, UCLA:

The Modern Endangered Archives Program’s preservation grants are given to teams that self-identify. We have teams working now in over 50 countries around the world. At the end of the day, what we do at UCLA Library is receive copies of the digital files, and our commitment is to make them openly available at no cost and then to preserve them over time and to make sure that a copy remains in the community where the materials are located. So, we’re not taking possession of anything; instead, we’re providing resources for communities to do work they define as important, and then we receive, publish, and preserve a copy of the digital files. One thing we’ve noticed—because the program has been going for a few years now—is sometimes it’s been a really helpful catalyst to getting more digitization to happen and to continue after the project is concluded locally because the equipment stays; whatever the teams purchase, they get to keep; we’ve got videos online that provide some training; and we’ve got materials about how to assign metadata. The idea is to create a knowledge base in all the locations where grants are given and we’re not actually running the projects ourselves.

In public institutions, stable funding in this field faces new, serious threats, as legislators in many states are working to defund and ban programs associated with critical race theory and other aspects of social justice. Funders can also play a role in helping institutions make the case for their priorities or to get work done through feasible partnerships.

Kevin C. Winstead, Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Tech University:

Institutions are only going to respond to two things, legislators and money, and the legislators are already making it clear what that’s going to look like. It is the responsibility clearly of grant funders to make certain things like personnel decisions within your infrastructure, around advisory boards all the way down to who they hire as graduate students, explicitly clear as a way of combating some of the things that are happening. A school like Florida on its own is going to respond to the governor because that’s the relationship they have. They need somebody else to tell them to do something different, and for an R1 that means money.

Jewon Woo:

In an effort to react to a bill in the legislature that will remove funding for any program that has diversity, equity, and inclusion as a goal, our college has tried to remove any such language from our curriculum. But then of course we can’t fulfill our written mandate from the state department of education which requires preparation in this work as part of our preparation for the workforce. Why should an outside funder work inside this [state] system? Perhaps our community partners—the historical society, the community group—can get the foundation funding and then maybe re-grant some of it to us, rather than the other way around?

Along with values and policies, financial support can be viewed as the infrastructure layer that supports all the others. In the context of enabling critical 21st-century humanities, that layer needs to be viewed as a deep, wide, long-range ecosystem of support, not as quick-fix infusions. Commissioners and funders considered how collaborative efforts and networks of funders could have an impact. Commissioner Charles Henry has proposed how long term and collaborative funding could enable collaborative planning, a platform of integrated and related elements, as we see in scientific undertakings:

The platform … would be an amalgam of existing platforms, a coherent mosaic of projects, publications, ideas, curricula, and software that is coherently architected and builds upon existing efforts while allowing for new innovations. A value of this platform would be the imagined centrality of what is actually a widely distributed ecology, so that thousands of projects can be easily accessed and used interoperably. Mentally substitut[e] “the humanities” for “science” and there would be a legitimate argument for reconceiving the humanities, or some aspect of the humanities, as a large scale, collaborative, interdependent research project that would benefit enormously if designed and supported like the Hadron collider but with a considerably smaller investment.

As the Commission considered its recommendations, taking a big picture view of collaborative and networked possibilities was a necessary perspective. The recovery work of 21st-century humanities has become essential to the social and intellectual health of our nation. Fostering and sustaining diverse digital scholarship is a grand challenge that merits the focused attention of active coalitions of institutions and the creative financial support of a coordinated network of committed funders.