General Guidelines for IATH Fellows

ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT

The General Guidelines contain advice for project design, management, and planning and information about some IATH policies. It will, we hope, help new fellows take maximum advantage of their fellowship period, and build long-lasting and useful scholarly works.

1. INTRODUCTION

A typical IATH project has a lifespan that may far exceed the two-year fellowship period. Fellows often discover that they have a far richer and more complex topic than they had thought and that it will require many years of work (and much more funding) than anticipated. In this case, the fellowship is a period of intense focus on building a kernel, a functional starting point for later long-term development. In such cases, you must plan for the long-term technical and financial survival of your work. IATH fellows remain part of the IATH community after their fellowships end: there are no former IATH fellows.

The final product of an IATH fellowship will differ from one fellow to another, in both the scope and technical challenges that are being pursued and the intent of the fellow's research. There are, roughly, two types of work that fellows can undertake: reflective and artifactual. Reflective work is, as the name suggests, reflective. It involves intellectual analysis of theoretical, philosophical, historical (etc.) issues in humanities computing and it leads towards a symposium, conference, book, or article that discusses the topic. Artifactual work is more of a production process and is aimed at producing a complex work of digital scholarship.

2. WHERE TO START?

This section discusses some high-level issues that new fellows should address when planning out their two-year residency at IATH. You will need to discuss them with at your first meeting with the IATH directors.

2.1. Project Scope

The first part of an IATH fellowship is to develop and define the project's scope. This comprises both intellectual and technical aspects of the project. You should define the project's assumptions, such as the average user's knowledge, scholarship, technical ability, and expectations. You should also discuss scholarly conventions that you will be following and your research objectives with the IATH staff. It may be helpful to give a presentation at the beginning of your fellowship, so that the staff understands your subject matter and any particular requirements that should be observed.

In all likelihood, you will need time and patience to understand the technical issues involved in creating a digital project. It is important to avoid getting bogged down, however, and to stay focussed on your long-term goals and the long-term survival of your data. A well-defined project scope will help you and your project staff maintain a clear and productive path towards a well-produced and useful product.

2.2. Timelines

This section has generic schedules for the average two-year fellowship. It covers basic tasks and deadlines that apply to all projects and is intended to serve as a starting point. Fellows should work with the IATH directors to develop a more detailed timeline for their projects.

Figure 1, below, shows an artifactual fellowship. The tasks listed on the left side are in two categories: production and funding. Production tasks (discussed below in section 2.3) are marked in blue and include designing, implementing, and building the project. Funding tasks (discussed in section 3), marked in green, are related to developing and implementing a funding strategy. The right side shows a list of deadlines and events.

Figure 1: Timeline for a two-year artifactual fellowship

Figure 2, below, shows a reflective fellowship. Reflective fellowships vary widely, so this timeline is more vague. It will depend on what kind of final product is planned (a paper, a conference, a lecture series, etc.) and the type of research or analysis that is planned.

Figure 2: Timeline for a two-year reflective fellowship

2.3. Production schedule: artifactual fellowships

Once you have defined the project scope, you can begin work on technical specifications and a design prototype. During the first six months, you should meet regularly with IATH staff to define the technical, content, and design scope of your project. This involves identifying your internal and external content resources, writing technical specifications, developing and testing design prototypes for the user interface end of the project, and identifying technical, administrative, and content milestones for next eighteen months. It is important to separate questions of data capture (putting the data into a usable format) from presentation (how the data is distributed). In the second half of the first year, you should be implementing and building the project according to your specifications. You will undoubtedly be revising and editing these specifications, as new ideas and sudden problems arise. This version of the project might be considered the alpha version of the project (e.g., intended for in-house use only).

Most of the second year should be spent building a complete version of the project. This might be considered the beta version of the project, when the work is available to a selected group of users or released to the public in planned versions. The final goal is this is a publicly released stand-alone version of the project. That is to say, it should be a complete, usable, and scholarly work that satisfies the stated goals of your project. This applies whether or not you intend to continue work on the project and have (or will soon have) secured funding for further development.

You should consider the project's long-term survival. Artifactual projects need technical structures that can be repackaged and recycled. Projects that are now technically on the leading edge will eventually be obselete, proprietary software will eventually be superseded by new versions or dropped, and fundamental changes in user interface technologies will change users' expectations. Technological evolution is difficult to predict, but the goal should be to design a structure that can support, archive, and distribute data over the next ten to twenty years.

2.4. Production schedule: reflective fellowships

Reflective fellowships cover a wide territory and can result in many different kinds of work. There are certain general tasks that must be performed: you need to define a project scope, you will need to submit monthly reports to the IATH director, and you will need to plan and implement any events connected with your fellowship (such as a conference, symposium, or lecture series). As with an artifactual fellowship, you should identify technical, administrative, and content milestones that need to be met in order to meet your fellowship goals by the end of your two-year fellowship.

2.5. Events and deadlines

The list of events and deadlines includes meetings with the IATH Development Officer (discussed further below), progress reports (submitted to the IATH Director every six months), and presentations to the IATH community at the end of the first and second years of your fellowship. Since you will also want to present your work to other scholars in your field, we will help you develop a demo package for conferences and symposiums before the end of your first year.

3. EXTERNAL FUNDING

Not all projects will require external funding. Small projects with a short production schedule may not need any resources or time beyond the two-year IATH fellowship. Medium and larger projects are far more likely to require extensive support for travel, digitization, student wages, and continuing technical support beyond the two-year fellowship period. You should meet with the IATH Development Officer within three months of the beginning of your fellowship to assess your needs and to begin discussing possible funding opportunities.

The IATH staff will work with you to improve your chances of getting funded. The Development Officer can help you identify funding sources; develop an overall fundraising strategy; approach and cultivate donors and sponsors; assist in writing the proposal narrative; prepare budgets, forms, and supporting documentation; get university approvals for proposal submission; and transmit the proposal to the sponsor. Other IATH staff members will help to edit and comment of drafts.

2.1. Schedule

There are some general funding milestones that we have set for all projects. You should schedule your first meeting with the Development Officer in October, to assess your project's short- and long-term financial situation. It can take 12-24 months to apply for and receive a grant, so it is vital that you have a carefully thought-out strategy that will bring your project a steady and sufficient income.

In January, you should prepare a proposal summary and a summary of your project. These documents explain what you intend to accomplish and your project's significance to your field of scholarship. They are sent to program officers at private foundations and federal agencies, and to collaborating institutions and individuals to solicit interest in your project.

We recommend that you start implementing your funding plan at the beginning of your second year. As part of this process, you should begin to pull together your project and technical narratives, which describe the project's purpose and goals and its technical plans in detail. These documents will be part of your proposal package and usually require several drafts and close collaboration with the IATH technical staff.

Midway through your second year, you should meet again with the Development Officer to review and update your funding plan. Your project may have run into unexpected technical problems or unearthed a rich new avenue of inquiry or you might have realized that the project will take longer than you'd planned. Regardless, it is a good idea to revisit this plan now before the end of your fellowship.

3.2. Proposals

There are very few programs that support humanities scholarship and funding is very limited, so competition for sponsors is very strong. The most important strategy for getting proposals funded is to begin preparing them well in advance of the deadlines. This will allow time to solicit comments and recommendations from the Program Officers at the funding agencies, IATH, and other colleagues in your field. Many funding agencies are happy to review draft proposals if you give them sufficient lead time (not less than two months). We have drawn up a generic schedule for preparing and submitting a proposal (figure 3, below).

Figure 3: Guidelines for preparing and submiting a proposal

We recommend that you start preparing proposals for the major federal agencies as least six months before their deadlines. You will need to submit a draft of the proposal to agency and sponor program officers at least three months before the due date. At that point you should also be collecting permission agreements, subcontracts, technical service agreements, fee schedules, and whatever other supporting documentation is required. You should submit your budget request to the Development Officer at least four weeks before the deadline, to ensure University approval of the proposal by your College Research Administrator, the Office of Sponsored Programs, and/or the University Development Office.

The IATH directors will also need to review your proposal in order to approve any statements concerning IATH's role in the project: we require that you submit to us a full copy of your narrative and all supporting documentation (curriculum vitaes, letters of commitment, collection inventories, etc.) two weeks before the deadline. The Development Officer will help you gather together the necessary UVa approvals (department support, OSP signatures, etc.).

One week before the deadline, check in with the Development Officer to be sure that everything is in order.

A list of major funding agencies for Fellows' projects can be found at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/aboutFundraising.html.

4. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES

Depending on your project and subject materials, you may need to negotiate copyright permissions for using materials owned by private collections, libraries, archives, museums, and governments. Because failure to obtain appropriate permissions can imperil future digital dissemination or publication of your scholarship, this issue must be taken seriously from the very beginning of your project. Ideally, you should start the process before you begin your fellowship, especially if you are dealing with material in other countries. Intellectual property (IP) laws can differ widely and you may want to consult an IP lawyer for help. You can also talk to other Fellows who have dealt with similar issues.

You may need to have secured all necessary permissions for materials before you submit grant proposals, so you should investigate this during the first year of your fellowship.

4.1. IATH help

IATH has helped other projects with copyright permissions and access issues in the past and can provide templates, advice, and information as needed.

4.2. UVa and IATH copyright policies

Your work will be subject to UVa copyright policies. The official UVA Copyright Statement (http://www.virginia.edu/copyright.html) applies to IATH projects. For information about UVA's copyright and intellectual ownership policies, please see https://etg07.itc.virginia.edu/policy/policydisplay?id='RES-001'.

4.3. Fair Use

Fair Use policy is a component of the US copyright laws. It allows you to reproduce portions of other authors' works for scholarly and pedagogical purposes. For more information about Fair Use and international copyright laws see:

5. COLLABORATORS

The fellowship process in a collaboration with the IATH staff and, to a lesser degree, with other UVA electronic centers. However, depending on the project, you may plan to collaborate with faculty here at UVA and other academic institutions or with independent researchers. This is

There are pros and cons to having collaborators. A good partnership or editorial board can make a project more efficient, give it greater depth, and improve its quality control. A poorly organized collaboration, on the other hand, will cause administrative, financial, and philosophical headaches. If you decide to collaborate, we would suggest a maximum of three or four partners or co-editors (or whatever title you want). Also, we would suggest that large collaborative efforts are better served by starting off slowly, with fewer people, and then gradually growing to the final size.

6. ISSUES TO CONSIDER

Building and implementing your project will (and should) occupy a great deal of time and energy over the next few years, but before you start tagging, coding, and compiling you should take time to plan, outline, and design it.

IATH strongly believe that IATH projects should place a premium on the long-term survival of their data, and that should be at the forefront of your mind while working through the issues discussed in this section.

Another thing you should think about it avoiding letting any one part of the project take up a disproportionate amount of time. You should identify and tackle the more difficult or ambitious aspects of the project in the first year so that when start looking for outside funding you can show solid (or at least plausible) solutions. However, you don't want to overlook basic design planning and development and long-term planning. The first year is a balancing act between long- and short-term goals and it can be difficult to assign priorities to the many details.

  • Long-term survival of data. This should include planning for future users, who may be using different interfaces or software to use your project. The basic components should be persistent.

  • Practical, realistic planning for your two-year residency.

  • Finding the right scope for your project, to fit technical possibilities, audience needs, and expected uses.

  • Everything in the project should be relevant to your larger purpose and to your scholarship.
    • Is it relevant and necessary to the project?
    • Why is the information important and for whom?
    • What kind of scholarship will it support?
    • How much will it cost (in money & time) and is it worth that price?

  • Practical planning so that your staff doesn't have to re-engineer an interface, database, DTD, etc. for unexpected detours and late-breaking ideas.

  • Build a logical and clear structure for content that will be added later (i.e., two, three, or four years later).

  • Avoid letting a particular part of the project take over at the expense of other parts.

  • As the opportunities arise, continue your technical training.

  • Planning for whatever technical support various parts of your project will require (databases, stylesheets, etc.) and have a system for identifying and handling problems.

6.1. Branding

It is a good idea to design and stick to some kind of visual coherency, especially with a large project. Branding involves a recognizable look and feel which gives a project an identity. This can be as simple as an icon which appears at the top left corner of each page or identical layouts on each page or as subtle as a unifying system of colors and design factors. This not only lets visitors know that they are still in your site, it also gives the site a clear visual identity.

6.2. Basic information

This information should either be on your home page or entry point or within a few mouseclicks from the home page. Note that you need to be wary of stashing information in one corner of your project, but instead aim for a structure that lets users quickly and independently find whatever they are looking for.

  • table of contents

  • site map

  • staff list

  • copyright

  • contact information

  • introductory text about this site

  • introductory text about the subject matter

  • FAQ

  • special instructions for using the project and links to any required software or plug-ins

  • history of the project

  • IATH logo and standard IATH text

  • pointers to other related projects

6.3. Open source vs. proprietary software

Open source software is software that is freely distributed to anyone (usually over the internet), with no royalties attached; allows its source code to be freely distributed, altered, and redistributed; amd has a nonrestrictive license. In other words, it is free and its source code is free. Proprietary software is owned and distributed by an individual, institution, or corporation. It may not cost anything to get and use the software, but its source code is restricted and may not be altered. While proprietary software is often well-written, useful, and supported it is attached to the fortunes of its owner. If its owner someday decides to stop supporting it or radically redesigns it, previous releases of the software may become unusable and data which was distributed with those versions may disappear. We therefore suggest that you use open source software at every reasonable opportunity. If you have questions about the best piece of software for a given task, talk to an IATH staff member.

6.4. Templates and prototypes

Templates and prototypes are very useful tools and we strong recommend that you use them. They will save time and effort, add quality control, and maintain graphic coherence.

Prototypes — using small sections of content put in proof-of-concept pages to test software and interface ideas — are crucial and should be used while designing the project. They should work with representative samples of all data types that you will use. Be sure to keep in mind the expected audience for your project, and be aware of what the average user will want from your project and how he or she will expect to use it.

6.5. Stay inside the project scope and budget

It may seem obvious, but you should consider limitations of time, staff, and funds when designing the project. Unexpected circumstances may create a surplus or lack of these factors, but you should try to plan something that you can reasonably finish.

7. AFTER THE FELLOWSHIP PERIOD

Once the two-year fellowship period is over, you are still part of the IATH community. As noted above, there are no former IATH fellows. We hope that you will feel welcome to attend and participate in IATH events and that you will be able to serve IATH as a representative at University events or as a member on a selection or advisory committee or to present your work at later stages to the rest of the larger IATH community.

It is likely and desirable that your project will continue to develop and evolve. You will therefore need funding and support. IATH receives funding from the University primarily to serve the needs of the current fellows. Toward the end of your fellowship period, however, if you have not been able to secure external funding, you may apply to receive modest additional support from IATH aimed at sustaining (rather than enhancing) your project. Your application should contain a precise list of IATH services that you will need and a timetable. Only in rare cases can IATH commit itself to more than two additional years of support in the absence of outside funding.

Other Guidelines documents: Administrative and Technical

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