Working in Phases
As you develop a DH project, you should be considering the work in phases. Phases can be thought of as smaller iterations in a larger project, defined by discrete goals, funding streams, and team members. Each phase of the project can help move forward over time, and work through difficulties and gaps in the initial proposal.
From Patricia’s Talk A segment from the original IDAH Faculty Fellow proposal: ‘There are several levels of collaboration that I require, involving both the exploration of the corpus data (either using existing resources for Spanish and Portuguese or adapting existing ones to these languages, since they have fewer resources available for data analysis) and higher-level exploration of methods that can be used to study semantic change.’ However, once starting this project, it became apparent that the historical texts (corpora) were not in a usable form for computational analysis. The texts would have to be converted into the .txt format, a process that is time-consuming. From this problem, Patricia isolated 3 needs: - Need 1: create a corpus that allows us to use distributional methods and/or clean existing ones. - Need 2: Compare resources from different languages: challenges posed by resources for different languages - Need 3: experiment with different methods to see if the available SMALL data sets yield reliable results: Is there a size limit for these methods? How replicable are they? |
- Start with small sections of the project that are achievable
- move the project forward more consistently over time
- help all members of the team build their public expertise
- make connections to other scholars
Example from Patrícia’s Work For the IDAH faculty fellowship Patricia realized that multiple steps were required: - The creation of a corpus (or the collection of texts required for computational analysis)
- The analysis of different language corpuses (what kinds of collections of English, French, Chinese and so on. . . are available? Are there materials in Spanish?)
- Experiment with the corpus using **SMALL** data sets. Do these experiments have reliable results? Are the findings replicable?
- How will these findings help determine **the next** funding stream? What will need to be done to apply for the internal, *New Frontiers Grant*?
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Each phase should have layered outcomes, which are composed of small steppingstones and turn-ins. Team members can follow ideas or concepts that apply to their research or expertise, building side projects related to the central one. The team should think of these layered outcomes as separate deliverables from journal articles and poster sessions to internal corpuses and literature reviews.
The layered outcomes:
- let many people get experience
- get feedback from reviewers along the way
- refine the phased strategy
- prepare the next step of funding/publishing
Example from Patrícia’s Work Following and her team published their findings. Different collaborators led different paper projects: · Hu, Hai, Patrícia Amaral and Sandra Kübler. Methodological concerns in modeling language change for medieval texts. (Long paper) 2nd Workshop on Computational Detection of Language Change 2020, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, November 25, 2020. · Amaral, Patrícia, Zuoyu Tian and Juan Escalona Torres. Tracing semantic change in Portuguese: A distributional approach to *porém*. Poster, presented at the Vienna Workshop on Portuguese Linguistics—Empirical Approaches to Portuguese, University of Vienna, Austria, Dec. 11-12, 2020. · In 2021: 3 conference presentations and 2 publications · In total: 5 conference presentations and 4 publications (one more under review) |
Acquiring funding requires the project to be grown from something small into something larger. It would be very difficult to propose a project for a NEH Digital Humanities grant in the earliest stages of a project, especially if you are unfamiliar with the terrain of the field. Instead, we recommend thinking small and developing the project through internal funding streams to learn the field, identify gaps in your needs, and learn how to address them. This phase can also include the development of relevant prototypes, surveys of the literature in a given field, and the learning of specific technologies for the project. This can include:
- IDAH Faculty Fellowship
- IDAH Summer Incubator
- HASTAC Scholars Program
As you develop the project, you can begin to apply to larger and more prestigious internal revenue streams, using the insights you gleaned, the prototypes you developed, and the findings you have documented as part of the previous round of funding. These internal grants can include:
- New Frontiers Fellowship (Now the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Program)
- Collaborative Faculty Fellowships
- Seed Grants
You can also think about funding specific arms of the project, rather than the whole thing, by breaking the larger project into smaller chunks.
Finally, as you continue to scale the project up, you can apply for external funding using the publications you have produced through the previous resources.
Example from Patrícia’s Work The initial application was for a one-year IDAH faculty fellowship. As a consequence of the COVID pandemic, the faculty fellowship was extended for an additional year. The smaller-scale prototypes and data-cleaning activities that resulted contributed to receipt of an IDAH senior fellowship, a smaller but more flexible model that supported several publications based on the early data models and prototype. These provided the foundation for a successful New Frontiers Fellowship application. |
Collaborators
Collaborators can bring additional skills and perspectives to the team and afford the development of spin-off projects and publications. Collaborators contribute unique strengths and abilities and can make specific contributions to the project’s progress. Collaboration also means incorporating your collaborator’s priorities and their authorship goals. Identify portions of the project that are suited to the collaborator’s needs and skillset, and try to match funding sources to the partner’s needs, skills and available funding.
Example from Patrícia’s Work In the two phases of research, Patrícia worked with five fellow scholars. ADD THE NAMES OF THESE RESEARCHERS. The IDAH Faculty Fellowship team was different than the New Frontiers Grant team because of how the project changed, and how different graduate student’s expertise could be applied to the main research goals. |
Your collaborators will have their own interests and skills. Embrace their goals in the context of the larger project, because they can do work that will help expand the project beyond its initial scope.
Together with your collaborators, ask:
- What can become its own separate, publishable project?
- Can one of the projects become a Ph.D. dissertation?
- Would a team member profit from a specialized internship/incubator?
- Should the PI develop a book proposal? A graduate course?
- How can the PI create space for learning and mentoring opportunities?
Example from Patrícia’s Work One team member—Zuoyu Tian—brought his own research questions to the collaboration. His interest in change over time in medieval Chinese addressed broader conceptual issues that the project team was trying to answer. Zuoyu also drew on the team’s work as first author on an article about the Chinese-language portion of the project. (See: Tian et al. 2021) |
As these processes overlap, each small component can inform and reinforce other aspects of the larger project. Peer review coming from poster sessions, journal submissions, conferences, and graduate seminars (as well as internally from the team), informs other projects as they are being developed, presented, or reported.
This feedback becomes one step in this iterative process, and is layered into the outcomes of the PI and the team:
- Layered outcomes help build in the broader-impact-criteria response from the beginning rather than having to think about it as an afterthought (not just specialized journals but also public impact)
- You develop new skills for each outcome
- You develop tools that can be shared with a wider community
- The team expands their expertise and visibility
- The outcomes help the growth and training of the group itself
- The outcomes become teaching tools for graduate seminars as well as new members to the team
It is easy to think on intellectual merit—the “research”—but it can be harder to see the “broader impact”—graduate student training and dissertations, the creation of resources for open-access platforms, the distribution of research and tools to specialized and lay audiences. The phased, layered approach helps see that every kind of knowledge practice from teaching team members, to producing research tools or collections are as significant to the research process as traditional scholarly outputs.
Start by asking the following questions,
- How can you break down the problems or components of your project?
- Can you identify venues or outlets for the different components?
- Can you identify possible collaborators for each component?
- How does each step listed above “become” an end?
- A publication?
- An online resource?
- A teaching tool?
- If you think of intellectual merit and broader impacts, how does your project fit and how can it be improved?
