The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities welcomes the opportunity to have its programs evaluated by an external review committee, and it anticipates constructive suggestions for modifying and improving those programs. And although this document suggests a course for the future, its purpose is to inform the committee of current thinking within the Institute, and not to preemmpt their own recommendations.
In the last several years, IATH has been centrally involved in two initiatives aimed at addressing the long-term survival of the sort of originally digital humanities research that it produces. Both of these initiatives received their funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first is a project called "Supporting Digital Scholarship" (SDS). This is a joint project with the library's Digital Library Research and Development Group, and it addresses the collection and preservation of originally digital humanities scholarship in libraries. This project is coming to an end in December, and it has produced some convincing demonstrations that these goals can be reached: by the end of the project, we hope to have several IATH projects permanently and officially collected and provided to users by the Library. The second initiative is the Electronic Imprint at the University Press, a unit of five people reporting to the Director of the Press and devoted to exploring business models for publishing originally digital humanities scholarship. This project aims to strike the difficult balance between the need for funding to produce these projects and the desire to make their results as widely available as possible. At IATH, we see these as complementary efforts, each of which, in different ways, can provide an exit strategy for IATH projects--or, put another way, a means for our projects to sustain themselves without being completely dependent on grants, and a means by which their products can be preserved for the future, once their active development and putative economic life is over.
Under the heading of long-range planning, it is worth mentioning that the Institute is an excellent example of the sort of "bridge center" that the University's own long-range plan (the "2020 Initiatives") has emphasized and promoted. It bridges disciplines within the humanities, and it bridges quite effectively between humanities and computer science. However, since the 2020 initiatives are essentially a strategy for the next capital campaign, and since most of the work in that campaign will be done by the individual schools and colleges in the University (each of which has its own foundation and its own development staff), and since IATH--by design--does not belong to any of the colleges or schools, we are perpetually in danger of being left out, ignored, and passed over in this campaign (as, indeed, we were in the last one). Recently, Anita Jones (Computer Science) has been holding open discussions with faculty across the University about coordinating efforts to raise money in the next campaign for information technology research, and she has been promoting the idea of an institute that might either compete with or include IATH. We hope the latter would be the case, and we hope that, as part of a larger effort, we might have better luck in this campaign than we did in the last one--but we are skeptical of the likelihood that development staff with school-specific goals will raise endowment (or indeed, any significant support) for a unit that crosses these boundaries, and we have little reason, from past experience, to expect that the University Development Office will step in to fill that gap.
IATH should continue to support research projects initiated by UVa faculty, it should continue to cultivate engagement with information technology in humanities departments, and it should continue to provide a space for innovative interdisciplinary collaborations. Some in the administration have expressed the opinion that IATH may have served all the local humanities faculty interested in using information technology as a tool for research: at the Institute, we don't believe that is true. IATH has never, since its inception, been overwhelmed with applications for our fellowships--we generally receive three to six a year, but that number has held steady over the years, and each year we have found worthy projects in the applicant pool. However, we do believe that it is time for IATH to develop a funded external fellows program, in place of the ad-hoc and unfunded networked associate fellowship. It needs to do this because there are great opportunities to work with top-notch faculty at other universities (and, frankly, to bring their grant funding to the University of Virginia) simply because no organization like IATH exists at any other US university, at the moment. Furthermore, the opportunity to bring outside faculty to IATH, and to the University of Virginia, would raise IATH's program to a new level, would contribute significantly to the MA in Digital Humanities, and would help to make clear to local faculty the breadth and depth of humanities computing.
IATH has been extremely successful in promoting engagement with information technology among humanities faculty, at bringing in outside funding to support faculty research projects, and in developing a culture of collaboration and innovation. The University's provision of IATH's base funding is critical to this success, because it demonstrates the University's commitment to IATH (a deciding factor, for foundations like Mellon, when they consider supporting a University-based initiative), and because it permits us to maintain the human and technical infrastructure on which grant applications and grant-funded research depend. And although it is true that IATH's external funding exceeds its internal funding, it is not, and will not be, the case that the external funding can replace the internal support. Most grant funding in the humanities is project-based and, in that sense, self-consuming. Some of it does come back to IATH in the form of overhead, when the grant is federal, and some comes in direct support of staff, but the Institute could not survive solely on its portion of the grants generated by its fellows. Indeed, there are examples of humanities research computing organizations that have tried to support themselves this way (like Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group) and they have failed in the attempt.
In fact, if IATH is going to pursue an external fellows program (on a national or international scale), the University's commitment to IATH's budget must increase. Our current program, in which faculty departments contribute release time, effectively conceals a budget item that would not be concealed in an external fellows program: one would not expect University's elsewhere to pay their faculty to come and work at the University of Virginia.
One possibility for outside funding for an external fellows program is the NEH. The NEH would provide funding for such a program if the Institute were more independent from UVa (for example, if its current annual state funding were replaced by income from its own endowment), and if the external fellows program were already in operation. In short, if UVa were to dedicate a few million dollars of endowment to IATH, and if it were to fund the bootstrapping of an external fellows program (at the cost of two or three hundred thousand dollars, for a couple of years) there's really no question that we could find outside funding to continue these programs.
Looking forward, it is important to note that several major IATH grants will expire during the coming year--most notably, the SDS project, which currently supports 2.5 people on the IATH staff. The departing director will endeavor to secure a subsequent Mellon grant (for tools development), but conversations on that score are at an early stage, and in any case that project is conceived of as multi-institutional, so the staff support it might provide for IATH will probably be less than what we now receive under SDS. Moreover, IATH's main relationship with Mellon has been through the current director, and when he leaves, it may take some time to build a new IATH relationship with Mellon.
The Institute is at a crossroads, about to hire its second director, and about to step forward into the next phase of its existence. This change comes at a time when the University's resources are constrained, when IATH's budget has been cut and cut again, and when we are already short-handed because of those budget cuts. With the current director leaving, existing staff will inevitably need to do more, and the absence of that missing staff member will be felt more keenly, especially in the area of systems administration, since the current director has been doing a good deal of that work. It will probably take 18 months for the Institute to find and relocate a new director: in that time, if the University devotes no new funds to the program, it is very possible that existing staff will leave, feeling overworked and underappreciated. That would be a real crisis for IATH in this period of leadership transition, and it would, therefore, be a real crisis for the many faculty who depend on IATH's services and support for their projects. If, on the other hand, the University were to restore IATH's budget to the $485,000/year level that it was at before the budget cuts, IATH could use that funding to hire a programmer/systems administrator, and service to fellows would not suffer. Furthermore, if the University would acknowledge the importance of IATH's development officer by funding her position, that would restore the fiscal flexibility that IATH may need to weather the interim period, during which several important grants will expire. And finally, if the University would consider reallocating endowment to the Institute, in an amount sufficient to replace the state funding that IATH currently receives, then when a new director comes on board, the Institute would be positioned to announce (and pursue funding for) a new and highly visible national (or international) fellowship program.