Follow the Money?: Funding and Digital Sustainability

This essay will explore the role of soft and hard funding in the digital humanities, with particular attention paid to the ways funding intersects with sustainability. It will discuss a variety of types of soft funding available from public, private, and institutional sources, and the ways the needs of funders can align with or compete with the desires of scholars. The availability and sustainability of funding as project needs change over time, along with funders' agendas, can influence project teams' decisions about the direction a project will take, who leads it, who can contribute to it, what technology supports it, on what servers it is hosted, if and when it can be updated, as well as if and where it will be preserved. Not considering the implications of financial support received can be detrimental to both the project and the researchers involved. Seeking funding should become part of wider strategies that enable the formation of mutually beneficial relationships, promising avenues of research, and sustainable revenue streams, rather than a time sink that explodes a project's scope in ways that undermine the project.