Research software consists of software, code, and tools that allow researchers to generate, analyze, and present data in order to produce research results. Research software engineers (RSEs) are the people who specialize in developing research software. Arizona State University in collaboration with colleagues from Princeton University and Harvard University is exploring the development of a Digital Humanities Research Software Consulting Unit (DHReSCU) with a one-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This virtual unit will provide digital humanities researchers with the opportunity to consult experienced DH RSEs during the project planning and design phase to create a software development plan. DH software development plans will focus on scoping feasible budgets and development goals while also considering sustainability and maintainability, in order to increase the durability of the software and potential reuse.
DHReSCU will match projects with consultants based on needed technical and domain expertise. DHReSCU will pay a small consulting fee to the RSE consultants to compensate them for their time. Selected projects will be supported with a small amount of funding to enable the PI to work on the design and planning with the consultant. This will include discussions about the envisioned features of the software to be developed (for instance, kinds of data and planned data workflows), assessment of existing and required resources (for instance, home institution support for infrastructure), and profiling of the users that will most likely use the software and how this impacts the user interface design. The outcome of the consultancy phase will in most cases be an implementation plan for the planned software, which could be given to a third-party development team or contractor, but might also result in other artifacts, such as a recommendation for integrating existing solutions appropriate to project requirements.
Project Leadership
DHReSCU is led by a team at Arizona State University headed by Julia Damerow, Lead Scientific Software Engineer in collaboration with Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Lead Research Software Engineer, Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, and Cole Crawford, Senior Software Engineer, Arts and Humanities Research Computing, Harvard University.
Work Plan
We plan the project activities according to the following timeline:
July - September 2024: Release and distribute calls for projects and consultants.
October 2024: Schedule initial planning meetings with projects and consultants. These meetings will be run by the DHReSCU to ensure reasonable expectations are set for both consultants and projects.
November 2024 - February 2025: Projects and consultants work on the software development plan. DHReSCU will regularly check in with projects (potentially on a monthly basis) to ensure a successful collaboration and if necessary find new consultants for a project. In month 6 we will ask for an asynchronous short report from both the consultant and PI.
March 2025: DHReSCU will organize retrospective meetings with projects and consultants to reflect on experiences and outcome. A survey will be designed and sent out to all participants to collect further feedback.
April - May 2025: Analysis of survey results and retrospective feedback and planning of further DHReSCU activities.
This project is being supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (HC-303355-24).