Origins of DiRT

In spring 2008, Lisa Spiro, then the director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, launched Digital Research Tools (DiRT) with an initial editorial team consisting of five library colleagues at Rice and at Sam Houston State University. She described it in a blog post announcing the soft launch of the directory:

Not everyone has the time or inclination to read blogs, software reviews, and listserv announcements obsessively, but now researchers can quickly identify relevant tools by checking out the newly-launched Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki. DiRT lists dozens of useful tools for discovering, organizing, analyzing, visualizing, sharing and disseminating information, such as tools for compiling bibliographies, taking notes, analyzing texts, and visualizing data.8

From a technical perspective, DiRT was minimalist but functional, serving the project’s goals of information dissemination in the absence of technical resources or a mandate to implement the project. It used the free tier of the PBWiki service and consisted of 30 initial categories corresponding to some kind of activity (e.g., Build and Share Collections, and Communicate with Colleagues). Each category was represented by a single wiki page, which contained a definition of the category and an alphabetical list of relevant tools, with a link to and brief description of each. Some listings included annotations about platform (e.g., web based, Mac, Windows), cost, and licensing (e.g., open source versus proprietary). An RSS feed was available for monitoring site updates.

The public launch of DiRT in June was briefly covered in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the site quickly gained traction.9 In August 2008, Spiro reflected positively on the project’s reception and expansion, including offers from Dan Cohen (Tools Center Wiki) and Alan Liu (Digital Toolchest) to share their data with the developing DiRT. But the conclusion of the blog post spoke directly to the fact that directories require ongoing upkeep, and it is unrealistic for an individual—particularly in an alternative academic career track—to do that work indefinitely: “I’ll end with an invitation: Please contribute to DiRT. You can sign up to be an editor or reviewer, recommend tools to be added, or provide feedback via our survey.”10

The development of directories in the late 2000s spoke to the challenges faced by digital humanists at the time. Although more people were doing digital humanities, many individual practitioners felt isolated. Directories provided an easy way to find out what tools others were using and what projects were under development, even in the absence of digital humanities colleagues within one’s own institution. When presented with the opportunity through the Mellon-funded Project Bamboo initiative to shape the development of technical cyberinfrastructure to scale the deployment of digital humanities tools and services, scholars resoundingly advocated for more directories instead.11

From DiRT to Bamboo DiRT

Between 2008 and 2009, DiRT’s content and audience expanded, and it became a familiar referent in discussions of digital humanities tools in general and how to get started with digital humanities, specifically.12 A 2009 Rice University news article notes that “DiRT is already generating a positive buzz,” noting praise for the site from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities, and the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.13 Nonetheless, the public enthusiasm for DiRT failed to translate into the hoped-for groundswell of edits. Spiro remained primarily responsible for maintaining DiRT, while being drawn into other projects. The tools and projects listed in DiRT and other directories were themselves emerging, changing, and falling into disuse. As a result, links would quickly become deprecated, and keeping up with these changes was challenging. As time passed, the increasingly stale content became more evident. A 2010 review of DiRT on the American Historical Society blog notes “While some of DiRT’s pages have not been recently updated, the site still offers a wealth of information we found worthy of being highlighted.”14

In 2011, Spiro took a new position with the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) as Director of NITLE Labs.15 At the time, maintaining DiRT was not seen as a priority for NITLE, and Spiro was encouraged to transition responsibility for its upkeep. Major shifts in job responsibilities are a common aspect of alt-ac career paths, jeopardizing the stability of “passion projects,” such as directories, that emerged in a different workplace context. Luckily for DiRT, Project Bamboo—more than a year into its technical implementation phase—saw an opportunity to refocus a technical deliverable, the tool and services registry (TSR), as a scholar-oriented community resource that would generate positive publicity for a cyberinfrastructure initiative that was perceived as opaque at best.16

Following extensive internal analysis, discussion, and debate, Bamboo project staff decided in July 2011 to eliminate the TSR as a component of Bamboo’s technical infrastructure in favor of developing a scholar-facing TSR based on DiRT.17 Official discussions with Lisa Spiro about a merger commenced in August 2011, and within a week, I (at the time the scholarly technology manager at the University of Chicago, a partner institution on the Project Bamboo grant) developed an initial prototype of Bamboo DiRT, a Drupal-based reformulation of the directory in which each tool would have its own page and unique URL, with metadata standardized across the entries. I intended this re-architecture to facilitate commenting, reviews, more precise and shareable links, and data exchange with other directories.

The previous iteration of DiRT had failed to sufficiently incentivize ongoing crowdsourced contributions. I hoped to more effectively leverage the reputation economy by automatically tracking who created or edited each tool profile, with revisions publicly viewable and attributable to users, as on Wikipedia. A list of a user’s contributions, with clickable links back to the tool profile in question, automatically appeared as part of each user’s profile, with the goal of making visible the unseen labor that goes into directory maintenance and conferring some sort of credit that contributors could point to as part of a digital CV. In practice this was ineffective, because although DiRT was perceived as generally valuable, there were many competing and more visible opportunities for engaging with the digital humanities community that did more for building one’s reputation (e.g., weighing in on the latest debate or outrage on Twitter) than adding or editing tool listings.

Project Bamboo saw the creation of a large-scale consortium as an essential component of its own long-term financial sustainability but deferred consortial development until an anticipated second phase. As a whole, Bamboo staff felt that a similar model was necessary for Bamboo DiRT before it officially launched, albeit with the focus more on defraying the time involved in sustaining the site rather than the modest financial resources (hosting costs) it required. In May 2012, we put out a call for a curatorial/steering committee with the responsibility of updating and expanding DiRT, engaging in outreach, and attending monthly steering committee meetings. The response was modest but sufficient: three people applied directly in response to the call, I was already in touch with a user who had become a frequent contributor, and Lisa Spiro and two Project Bamboo staff members (project manager Seth Denbo and myself) formed the initial committee which began to meet monthly to discuss topics including metadata standardization, adding new tools, and potential partnerships.18 After a very active first month that included a site redesign, metadata cleanup, and the addition of hundreds of new tools, Bamboo DiRT had its official launch in July 2012, just in time to send promotional pens (analog tools) to the DH 2012 conference.19 Providing tangible “swag” at the international conference for this project associated with Project Bamboo was meant to signal that the amorphous cyberinfrastructure project still existed and was producing something valuable that merited exploration and consideration by the community. A branded pen, moreover, could remind its user of Bamboo DiRT and potentially spur a visit, supporting the directory’s relevance through its continued use.

DiRT Directory and Mellon Funding

During discussions with the Mellon Foundation about Project Bamboo’s ultimately unsuccessful second-phase proposal, program officers indicated an interest in supporting DiRT as a project separate from the defunct Bamboo. Having relocated to UC Berkeley shortly before the demise of Bamboo, I began work on a proposal to the Mellon Foundation that would fund a technical integration with DHCommons (a project directory I had cofounded with Ryan Cordell) and Commons in a Box (CBOX), a new scholarly networking platform that had been adopted as the basis for the Mellon-funded MLA Commons, as well as numerous regional DH initiatives. In addition, the grant would support the process of identifying an organizational home for DiRT. Without being part of a larger Project Bamboo development effort, DiRT fit awkwardly into the portfolio of UC Berkeley’s central Research IT department, just as there was no groundswell of support to continue DiRT at Rice University after Lisa Spiro’s move to NITLE. As a general community resource, it made more sense for DiRT to ally itself with a larger-scale organization with a mission that DiRT directly supported. The Mellon Foundation funded this proposal, beginning in September 2013.

Technical development constituted the majority of the work laid out in the grant. Centering the grant around technical deliverables aligned it to well-established funding models and programs, making it a relatively straightforward funding request. Each of these new technical components was intended to set the site up for success as a valued digital humanities resource for at least the following five years. However, technical development for DiRT without a realistic, sustainable model for ensuring the currency and expansion of its content was akin to directing a ship’s crew to optimize the rigging while steadfastly ignoring the leaking hull.

The technical developments implemented for the DiRT site held potential for supporting DiRT’s ongoing relevance, if the core issue of basic upkeep were addressed somehow. A tool list feature enabled any registered user to generate and export a list of that user’s favorite tools, and was used by the ADHO Geohumanities Special Interest Group to power the GeoDiRT listing of geospatial tools on their website. I hoped other groups would replicate this model, drawing upon discipline-specific subsets of DiRT’s data and improving those listings on DiRT itself rather than creating a separate directory whose ongoing care and attention would compete with, rather than contribute to, DiRT. Another related effort was the development of the TaDiRAH taxonomy, a partnership between DiRT and DARIAH-DE to create a shared digital humanities taxonomy that could apply to the full range of digital humanities activities and scholarly products for meaningful exchange of linked open data.20 I used this newly created taxonomy, whose development was informed by the use case of DiRT, to replace the ad hoc tool taxonomies characteristic of many directory projects, and I also added a SPARQL query interface to DiRT.21

For the integrations with CBOX and DHCommons, developing the DiRT API was a trivial task, requiring minimal configuration of the services module created and supported by the international open source Drupal developer community. This was sufficient for Matthew Gold and Boone Gorges from the CUNY Graduate Center to develop an integration between DiRT and CBOX that would bring “DiRT’s tool listings directly to people in an environment where they can discuss digital tools and share their expertise and suggestions within trusted communities.”22 When central IT staff at UC Berkeley became unavailable to do the integration between DiRT and DHCommons, a serendipitous encounter with Dean Irvine from Dalhousie University led to an alternative staffing model, as the integration between DiRT and DHCommons became one of the first projects of Irvine’s new Agile Humanities Agency.23 I adapted this DiRT/DHCommons integration code to additionally support integration between DiRT and Methodi.ca, a sister project to TAPoR under development in early 2015, with the intention of publishing “recipes,” that is, information about how tools could be used together.24

One technical development was aimed squarely at addressing the feedback that adding a tool to DiRT required too much work for people to create entries for new tools as they discovered them.25 Leveraging the ubiquitous use of Twitter among digital humanists, tweets that followed the syntax @dirtdirectory Tool Name http://tool-url.org/ #dhtool would trigger the creation of a DiRT stub page for the tool that would appear only on a Twitter submissions page (similar to a list of Wikipedia stub pages) until the listing was expanded by volunteer editors. Despite early enthusiasm from the community and assurances that this approach would make the contribution process so easy that submissions would flood in, there were only six submissions ever, with five of them appearing within a month of launching the feature. This suggests that overcoming the inertia that impedes any contribution is by far the most fundamental challenge of crowdsourced directory maintenance and that simplifying the contribution process should be treated as a secondary concern rather than a solution of any sort.

Rebranding Bamboo DiRT to distance it from the failed cyberinfrastructure initiative and finding an organizational home aligned with DiRT’s mission were the two aspects of the grant most directly connected to the long-term sustainability of the project. The former removed a source of some embarrassment, and the latter was meant to ensure that DiRT would not fall victim to local budget cuts and changes in IT organizational priorities at UC Berkeley. After putting out a call to a wide range of well-established DH, library, and higher ed IT organizations, the only responses came from ADHO member centerNet and DARIAH. centerNet’s international scope, timeline for obtaining the nonprofit status necessary to receive future grant funding, and straightforward access to the ADHO web hosting infrastructure tipped the scales in its favor. ADHO hosting, now available at no cost to DiRT, nullified one of the most common threats to web-based directories and projects: the cessation of web hosting, be it through the collapse of a free service or the end of funding to cover hosting costs. But DiRT’s new status as a centerNet initiative did not address either of the directory’s biggest obstacles: the difficulty of maintaining a steady stream of crowdsourced additions and edits and the directory’s dependence on me personally for overall coordination. Even if the directory itself were no longer under the auspices of UC Berkeley’s IT organization, UC Berkeley still determined the priorities for my job. centerNet lacked paid staff who could take on those responsibilities, without the burden essentially shifting from one volunteer to another.

Content Curation and Maintenance

While developing a strategy for content curation was not within the funded scope of the Mellon grant, I pursued a number of approaches contemporaneously with the grant to ameliorate this fundamental problem. Over the course of 2013, the steering/curatorial board had served more as a consultative and project development body than an active group of curators. This trajectory was unsurprising: actively maintaining the directory is much more time-consuming and tedious than periodically weighing in on the site’s development, in addition to sounding less prestigious when one is trying to justify work time spent on it. An email exchange with Christopher Erdmann (then at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) led to the conceptualization of a new editorial board for DiRT whose charge would explicitly be to address the curation and contribution gap on the site.26 The tremendous response to this call—fifty applications in total—was a testament to the work the original steering/curatorial board and I did to develop the new DiRT and raise its profile in the DH community. The steering/curatorial board and I reviewed applications and ultimately selected thirty members for the first editorial board, aiming to capture a geographically and linguistically diverse group of participants.27 The geographic diversity, in particular, came at a price: attempting to arrange a call for the editorial board across so many time zones proved daunting. Although the group’s large size reduced the amount of work any individual was tasked to do, it required a tremendous amount of coordination overhead on my part. After the initial orientation call, I assigned each of the new editors a set of existing tool profiles in DiRT to check over, and update with the new TaDiRAH terms. The results were mixed, as not all editors were able to complete the task. The significant effort needed to organize, assign tasks to, and follow up with the editorial board made it easy to postpone that work in the face of the project’s other demands, and the first call for editorial board engagement was also the last. Selecting a smaller and less geographically dispersed group for this role would have addressed some of the factors contributing to the quick demise of the editorial board, but a group of any size demands nontrivial coordination work to be effective, and with the grant’s resources directed toward technical development, I simply did not have the time necessary to maintain engagement with a group of any size. The two-year commitment DiRT asked of its editorial board also would have doomed it in the long term, as most of the participants held alt-ac positions subject to the same fluctuations in funding and availability that I had experienced.

One of the most substantive outcomes of the largely failed editorial board was the opportunity to connect with colleagues outside the United States and Canada. Elena Gonzalez-Blanco, a member of DiRT’s editorial board and the director of the Digital Humanities Innovation Laboratory (LINHD) at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid, initiated a Spanish translation project for DiRT, which was subsequently led by Gimena del Rio Riande, from the Argentine Center of Scientific and Technological Information of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CAICYT-CONICET). Even though making DiRT’s content more accessible to Spanish speakers seemed like a positive development, it introduced another sustainability challenge: now both the content and its translation had to be consistently monitored and updated.

Collaborating with discipline- or methodology-focused groups seemed like a potentially more promising approach. Instead of managing a team of volunteers, DiRT could instead engage with organizations that could manage their own members as volunteers. Piloting this approach with the ADHO Geohumanities SIG led to a set of geohumanities volunteers undertaking a one-time editing pass over geospatial tools on DiRT. However, Geohumanities was no more successful than DiRT in transforming one-time volunteers into a source of ongoing curatorial support.

The Next Transition

Following the conclusion of the Mellon grant, a mix of local and other grant funding sources fundamentally reshaped the nature of my job in UC Berkeley’s central research IT organization. As such, it became increasingly difficult to justify spending time on a directory of tools that were mostly not supported in any way at Berkeley itself. The website remained functional if increasingly spam-littered, requiring little technical maintenance beyond Drupal module updates, which the ADHO sysadmin began to provide in 2016. Without my setting up monthly meetings, the DiRT board became inactive. By the summer of 2016, I acknowledged to the DiRT board that I needed to move on from the project and received their blessing in doing so. The act of leaving a project responsibly requires a significant amount of work by itself, however, and it took until early 2017 for me to formulate a specific succession plan for the project.

I engaged with Geoffrey Rockwell, the founder and long-standing director of TAPoR and the Methodi.ca Commons, about a potential merger of DiRT with TAPoR. While TAPoR had historically focused exclusively on text analysis tools, its notion of tool profiles generally aligned with DiRT’s. TAPoR had stable, reliable hosting and technical support at the University of Alberta (Rockwell’s home institution), and Rockwell had a long track record of ensuring the upkeep of TAPoR’s content through a mix of grant funding and graduate student assistant positions. The completion of the migration of DiRT’s content to TAPoR, coordinated by University of Alberta graduate student Kaitlyn Grant, was announced to the Humanist listhost in May 2018.28 DiRT lingered online, with limited functionality after an ADHO server crash, until its domain name, unrenewed by centerNet, expired in late 2019.

Sustainability and the Directory Paradox

The sustainability challenges illustrated by DiRT’s development and decline are broadly shared by digital humanities projects. The grant funding models in place for one-time technical development, digitization, or archive-building work assume that ongoing maintenance costs will be covered by the project’s home institution, even when the project provides something that could be deemed infrastructure.29 Technical maintenance costs (e.g., hosting and routine upgrades of open source platforms) are relatively straightforward to estimate, but directories are inherently more demanding than archives or finished digital humanities projects, insofar as they demand constant human intervention to maintain their currency.

Crowdsourcing is a philosophically appealing model for maintaining a directory, particularly because directories that provide information not inherently linked to time or space (e.g., tools or projects, as opposed to events or jobs) are a common good in which all members of the community can benefit from the fruits of volunteers’ maintenance efforts. However, there is strong evidence from multiple projects that a volunteer-coordination role is essential for successful crowdsourcing. For the Transcribe Bentham project, “[f]eedback and a level of moderation were, therefore, important not only to maintain the pace and quality of transcription, but were a vital part of the general user experience, as we discovered when most regular transcribers ceased participating at the end of the fully-staffed testing period.”30 Similarly, the Civil War Diaries Transcription project and Papers of Abraham Lincoln both found crowdsourced transcription to be more expensive than hiring skilled professionals for the job, after factoring in the time spent on quality control and user engagement.31 Arts-humanities.net had a research assistant position funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK to work with grant recipients on filling out information for their funded projects, but the grant recipients were largely uncooperative. Once there was no longer a dedicated position to support the curatorial work, arts-humanities.net proved impossible to maintain.32

The two longest-running digital humanities tool directories that predate DiRT and continue to be maintained as of 2020, Geoffrey Rockwell’s TAPoR and Alan Liu’s DH Toychest, do not rely on crowdsourcing for content maintenance. TAPoR allows registered users to comment on and rate tools, but principal upkeep is done by paid graduate student assistants. Alan Liu maintains the DH Toychest himself. The scope of both sites is much narrower than DiRT’s aspiration of gathering all tools relevant to digital humanities: TAPoR has, at least until the merger with DiRT, focused exclusively on text analysis. The DH Toychest is a highly curated list of tools Liu selects himself, meaning there is no sense of obligation for him to spend time entering and updating listings for tools in which he is not personally interested. As professors with tenure at the point when they started their respective directories, Rockwell and Liu had much more control and flexibility over their work schedule and responsibilities than either Spiro or myself in our alt-ac roles. In addition, both Lisa Spiro and I became further constrained in our ability to volunteer nonwork hours on DiRT as a consequence of intensive, daily caregiver responsibilities for young children.

The Rockwell/Liu model of tenured professors having primary or sole responsibility for the creation and upkeep of digital humanities directories is hardly ideal. These directories are inherently shaped by the interests of a privileged subset of the digital humanities community rather than the interests of alt-acs, students, or adjuncts who are not in a position to lead a directory over the course of multiple years. Furthermore, while having a professor at the helm of a directory may provide a better guarantee of institutional support for multiple decades, retirement and mortality are inescapable threats to sustainability. Stéfan Sinclair’s death in summer 2020 was a stark and painful reminder of the risks that come with DH infrastructure, in this case Voyant Tools, being tied too closely to a single faculty member.

The structure and arrangement of digital humanities directories may evolve as the field itself becomes more complex; NeMO (the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology, 2014–2015), for instance, offered a more nuanced way to categorize resources, and anticipated that adoption of linked open data will continue apace.33 Whether they take the form of a simple HTML page, a PHP/MySQL database, a minimal computing website,34 or a web of data, directories are, and are likely to remain, an integral part of digital humanities infrastructure, given their value for new practitioners exploring the terrain and for experienced scholars looking for specific resources. It is unrealistic to expect to contain the impulse for creating new directories, although anyone undertaking such an endeavor should temper their enthusiasm with an understanding of the inescapable maintenance burden required for a directory to sustain itself and anticipate upfront that the directory will be relevant for a short time only. Luckily, sustainability is not a prerequisite for success: a directory of work within a particular field or subfield may serve a valuable role in catalyzing conversations between colleagues, even if it is abandoned as relationships solidify between individuals and people move on to new projects.

To reduce, or at least postpone, the high likelihood that a directory will be ephemeral after all the funding and effort feeding its development, the larger digital humanities community needs to explore and adopt new support models that can be run centrally. One approach could be to treat key directories as common-good infrastructure and ensure their upkeep by institutionalizing them as part of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), perhaps through the creation of an annual position compensated through a mix of prestige (that can be leveraged in a student or alt-ac context) and pay, similar to the ADHO Communications Fellow. While such an approach would be at odds with current trends toward decentralization toward ADHO’s constituent organizations (COs), it would be difficult to make a compelling case for one particular CO to be more responsible than others for funding upkeep of shared directories, and the relatively frequent turnover in CO executive boards would put directory maintenance at risk, even if a given CO were to take responsibility for it. The DARIAH European research infrastructure consortium, which has begun to advocate for its relevance beyond Europe, may serve as another venue for a centralized directory.35 Since 2018, Geoffrey Rockwell and I have been meeting with Frank Fischer and Laure Barbot from DARIAH’s SSH Open Marketplace project to inform the development of that initiative by sharing lessons learned from DiRT and TAPoR. These discussions will additionally serve as the basis for a presentation at the ACH 2021 conference (postponed from DH 2020) entitled “Who Needs Tool Directories? A Forum on Sustaining Discovery Portals Large and Small.”

The past, present, and future of digital humanities directories such as DiRT provide vivid illustrations of tensions within the discipline as a whole, including grant funding models, individual initiative versus institutionalization, the mixed landscape of paid and volunteer labor, and how to meaningfully support and recognize work across a highly diverse group of individuals and institutional roles. After nearly a decade of being a frequently mentioned guide for digital humanities practitioners, DiRT died quietly the night its domain name expired, but this ending is only the beginning of DiRT’s impact on discussions and decisions about whether and how the broad digital humanities community should take action to sustain the directories that people claim to value.

Notes

1. As one example, The Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook includes both “global” and “local” resources.

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2. See, for example, Vandegrift and Varner, “Evolving in Common”; Kijas, “An Introduction to Getting Started”; Rockenbach, “Digital Humanities in Libraries”; and Sula, “Digital Humanities and Libraries.”

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3. For example, Carr, “Review of the Darwin Manuscripts.”

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4. See Anne et al., “Building Capacity for Digital Humanities.”

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5. See, for example, Burdick et al., Digital Humanities.

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6. For example, Anne, “Building Capacity for Digital Humanities.”

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7. See parallels, for instance, in the technology life cycle “whale” chart in Beck, “Technology Development Life Cycle Processes.”

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8. Spiro, “Digging in the DiRT.”

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9. Young, “New Wiki Helps Humanities Researchers.”

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10. Spiro, “Doing Digital Scholarship.”

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11. Dombrowski, “Outreach about What Is Possible.”

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12. For example, Finley, “DiRT.”

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13. Spiro, “Fondren Library Develops Research Aid.”

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14. Grant, “Get the DiRT on Research.”

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15. NITLE (2001–2018) was a community-based nonprofit initiative to help liberal arts colleges adopt emerging technologies in innovative, effective, and sustainable ways, including offering academic technology services to liberal arts colleges. Project Bamboo regularly presented at the annual NITLE Summit during the project’s early years as a way to connect with liberal arts colleges, which it saw as a key constituency.

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16. Dombrowski, “What Ever Happened to Project Bamboo?”

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17. Project Bamboo, “TSR Decision Meeting Notes 7-22-11.”

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18. DiRT, “Bamboo DiRT Seeks Curatorial/Steering Committee.”

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19. DiRT, “Bamboo DiRT Now Out of Beta.”

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20. Borek et al., “TaDiRAH.”

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21. DiRT, “New Categories for DiRT”; and “DiRT Adopts TaDiRAH Terms.”

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22. DiRT, “DiRT Plugin Available for Commons in a Box.”

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23. Irvine, “From Angel to Agile.”

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24. DiRT, “DiRT Partners with TAPoR.”

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25. DiRT, “Add Tools to DiRT by Tweeting.”

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26. DiRT, “DiRT Seeks Editorial Board.”

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27. DiRT, “Editorial Board.”

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28. Grant, “Absorbing DiRT.”

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29. Rockwell, “As Transparent as Infrastructure.”

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30. Causer, Tonra, and Wallace, “Transcription Maximized; Expense Minimized?”

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31. Zou, “Civil War Project”; and Cohen, “Scholars Recruit Public for Project.”

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32. Personal communication with Lorna Hughes, July 28, 2017.

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33. Hughes, Constantopoulos, Dallas, and “Digital Methods in the Humanities.”

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34. Gil et al., “A Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship.”

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35. DARIAH, “DARIAH beyond Europe.”

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Bibliography

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2. Beck, David F. “Technology Development Life Cycle Processes.” Albuquerque: Sandia National Laboratories, 2013. http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2013/133933.pdf.

3. Borek, Luise, Quinn Dombrowski, Jody Perkins, and Christof Schöch. “TaDiRAH: A Case Study in Pragmatic Classification.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2016). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/1/000235/000235.html.

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13. DiRT Directory. “DiRT Adopts TaDiRAH Terms, Provides RDF Data.” March 25, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20170301044623/http://dirtdirectory.org/dirt-adopts-tadirah-terms-provides-rdf-data.

14. DiRT Directory. “DiRT Partners with TAPoR to Provide ‘Recipes.’” March 27, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20161023063028/http://dirtdirectory.org/dirt-partners-tapor-provide-recipes.

15. DiRT Directory. “DiRT Plugin Available for Commons in a Box (CBOX) Scholarly Network.” March 27, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20170612080818/http://dirtdirectory.org/dirt-plugin-available-commons-box-cbox-scholarly-network.

16. DiRT Directory. “DiRT Seeks Editorial Board.” May 7, 2014. http://web.archive.org/web/20170801155253/http://dirtdirectory.org/dirt-seeks-editorial-board.

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18. DiRT Directory. “New Categories for DiRT.” September 12, 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20150414073025/http://dirtdirectory.org/new-categories-dirt.

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