Sustaining Digital Humanities: Important developments in the UK landscape

This week the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) published a report on "Sustaining the Digital Humanities in the UK", making a set of recommendations to further develop its role in the Digital Humanities landscape. 

SSI's mission is to cultivate better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research. Currently celebrating its 10th year, SSI has achieved broadening engagement across academic communities including humanities - for example as a longstanding supporter of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and with SSI Fellows in arts and humanities areas.

The report follows hot on the heels of another national organisation publishing its recommendations in this space: The Alan Turing Institute recently announced their white paper on The challenges and prospects of the intersection of Humanities and Data Science, which also makes a set of recommendations for future activity and engagement.

Professor David De Roure, a founder of SSI and a member of the Turing's Humanities and Data Science Group, said: "These two reports are important reflections on the growing significance of digital methods and infrastructure for arts and humanities scholarship in the UK, and they bring a welcome emphasis on skills and training". He points also at the formation of the new UK-EI Digital Humanities Association, which is a network for research capacity enhancement, and a programme of investment in the UKRI Research and Innovation Infrastructure which, significantly, includes the collections that support arts and humanities research.

Both reports are the result of consultative events and collaborative authoring, and are intended to encourage this important discussion on the national stage. The SSI report was led by Giles Bergel and Pip Willcox, working with Guyda Armstrong, James Baker, Arianna Ciula, Nicholas Cole, Julianne Nyhan, Mia Ridge, Oscar Seip, Claire Taylor, Pip Thornton, Elizabeth Williamson, Jane Winters, and with inputs from many other participants of a workshop held in Oxford e-Research Centre. The Turing white paper was led by Barbara McGillivray and 24 co-authors in the Turing Humanities and Data Science special interest group.

The reports are published on these links:

• Sustaining the Digital Humanities in the UK - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4046267 
• The challenges and prospects of the intersection of Humanities and Data Science - https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12732164.v5