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Project Development Support

The College of Liberal Arts is committed to the development of digital humanities at Texas A&M University. Although institutional funding for digital humanities research has grown substantially, barriers remain, especially for those who wish to initiate a new project. Faculty wanting to begin or maintain digital humanities projects today face a daunting task as they evaluate current technologies, engineer computer systems, and explore ways forward that could lead to a successful grant application. The College is developing the infrastructure make it easier for scholars to pursue digital projects.

The Digital Humanities Lead Developer is able to provide the following to all College scholars who wish to work with digital humanities:

  • Consultation during office hours for things like exploring technology options, preparing grant proposals, or exploring possible project areas, designs, or goals.
  • Humanities computing resources, including, but not limited to unscripted web services, UNIX shell access, file services, relational databases, data/text processing tools, and a development environment for applications built on Free and Open Source software.
  • Workshops on various topics.

The following can be provided to specific projects for specific goals as approved by the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee:

  • An allocation of programmer time each week dedicated to the project goal.
  • Additional computational support such as hosting scripted web applications.
  • Any other feasible and reasonable technical support need approved by the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee in consultation with the Digital Humanities Lead Developer.

The development of a successful digital humanities project often requires the primary investigator to invest time and effort in technical training and other areas beyond their customary area(s) of expertise. The goal of the Digital Humanities Program is to support this investment, especially in the initial stages of project development since the long-term sustainability of a project may well rest upon the technological decisions made early in its history. The Digital Humanities Program expects that in most cases, supported projects should be self-sustaining within two years, though Program resources will continue to be available to all digital humanities projects.