technicalities of digital humanities project?

[rabbitandfox23]

Hello there!

I'm a newbie when it comes to digital humanities, but I'm growing increasingly interested in its potentials for my field.

My hope is to create a simple public access database online where people can discover bibliographic details for a given text (I work in ancient and medieval literatures); users would be able to search by author, genre, time period, etc. The idea is that we would have all the relevant authorial and 'publication'/performance history of any given text from a wide temporal span. It would also point to contradicting bibliographic data (for example, there is debate about when Plato wrote each dialogue -- a search for Symposium would not only show the various dates proposed by various ancient authors, but also the different titles attributed to that work).

I've been exploring and have discovered ARTFL, which looks like something that could work:https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/

My question to you more experienced folk is: how feasible is such a project, and how much would it actually cost?-- for a domain, for a computer programmer to design the site, etc.? 

indeed, is there any literature on how to develop such a project, with suggestions on how to tackle the technicalities and finances?

Many thanks in advance for your thoughts!

[polly_mer]

The hard part of what you've proposed is the data entry and to what extent what you want already exists in some useful electronic form with all the metadata in place.

Programming access to an existing database is easy enough that undergrads can do it.
Putting a nice interface on a website for users is also easy enough for undergrads to do.

Constructing the database from scratch is the part that requires real resources and expertise.

[mamselle]

Sorry, not meaning to throw cold water all over your idea, but...

There are already many resources in medieval studies in various pigeon-holed corners of the web.

Depending on your areas of interest, you might be re-inventing the wheel.

I tend to go see the manuscripts I want to work with, get my own photos (or purchase them when that's what's necessary) and work with the digital versions online, of which there are already many. I might want an outlet to share things with, but I'm so far content with the connections I already have.

The Leeds and K'zoo folks probably have links on their websites as does the Medieval Academy of America.

Again, it's also topic-specific, so groups like the IMS (musicologists) may have links somewhere, also.

I'd do a looooooot of researching before I got started doing something.

My sense is that projects like that can eat you alive, and are best done in dedicated groups of colleagues with a variety of complementary skills.

One-person-shows tend to break down and never get done.

There are others on this forum with a lot of background in this, though (larryc comes to mind), so I'll defer to them in case I'm incorrect.

M.

[Hegemony]

You would need an army of people to maintain this.

I have two questions about it, not that you asked. The first is whether you have tenure. Because if you don't, this won't get you tenure, and it will take up all the time that you could have used otherwise in publishing for tenure.

But maybe you already have tenure. My second question would be: Couldn't you just do the same thing with Wikipedia?  Just append all those references to a text's Wikipedia entry? There the structure is already set up, and other people already do all the maintaining of the underlying system. True, you wouldn't get the same measure of glory as you would with Rabbitandfox's Text Reference Site. But also, it wouldn't totally fall apart once you lost interest, energy, or funding.