Understanding Digital Humanities (david M. Berry) / quote 4 of 16
Maintenance of digital humanities projects
The financial considerations are also new with these computational disciplines as they require more money and organisation than the old individual scholar of lore did. Not only are the start-up costs correspondingly greater, usually needed to pay for the researchers, computer programmers, computer technology, software, digitisation costs and so forth, but there are real questions about sustainability of digital projects, such as: ‘Who will pay to maintain the digital resources?’ ‘Will the user forums, and user contributions, continue to be monitored and moderated if we can’t afford a staff member to do so? Will the wiki get locked down at the close of funding or will we leave it to its own devices, becoming an online-free-for all?’ (Terras 2010).