Planning and deciding on a digital humanities budget includes a number of matters to be considered and kept in mind. The following checklist includes necessary elements of a budget plan. For more detailed information on this topic go to the suggested list of resources, below.
Your project's scope - for example, aside from available existing digitized collections internationally, the need to digitize primary sources (for example, manuscripts, maps, images).
Funding needs - internal (your institutional) grants and/or external funders. Familiarize yourself with their specific requirements and limitations. Consider establishing communications with your institutional grants office.
Staff and student recruitment - For staffing: will you need a project manager? a programmer? a systems administrator in your staff? a knowledge of correct salary categories including benefits is most helpful. For students: research assistants are better for a sustained engagement or filed-specific knowledge, while hourly student workers are better for specific and directed short-term tasks.
Direct costs -
Equipment (provide vendor quotes in your funding request's justification or as supporting materials).
Travel - To conferences to present your project's development and to establish networks with interested colleagues or possible collaborators. Travel to other universities offers opportunities to view non-digitized primary sources and to meet with possible collaborators.
Consultant fees or honoraria if needed
Indirect costs
Costs that are not directly related to your project (but that may be required by your project): lighting, heating, printer paper, wireless access, network connectivity, administrative overheads, Storage in Institutional Digital Repository.
Suggested list of Resources:
Planning Your Next DHAG 2: Activities, People, & Costs for Doing the Work (National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH])
Sample Research and Related Budget Form and Budget Justification (PDF)
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/pm4dh/budgets/ (Emory University)
https://handbook.pubpub.org/funding (Budgets and Funding, in Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook).
5 Steps for Creating a Strong Grant Proposal "Putting together a grant proposal can be time-consuming and even frustrating if you do not have a strong concept around the key points you want to emphasize. With a solid game plan before beginning your proposal, you can save yourself time and create a grant proposal that will shine." The 5 steps appearing in this document are:
Step 1: Think about Your “Why” from a Funder’s Perspective; Step 2: Craft the Perfect Needs Statement; Step 3: Organize Your Goals; Step 4: Know Your Grantors; Step 5: Finally…Be Nice!
What Grant Program Fits My Digital Project? National Endowment for the Digital Humanities (NEH) Blog Post by Sheila Brennan, June 20, 2024. "As you consider developing a proposal for a digital humanities project, think about the types of activities you want to fund, who the work is designed for, and what the final products will be. / Below is a quick guide to help you navigate the existing grant programs that support digital projects at the NEH. You may also want to review this guide to funding digital projects at small, regional, and minority-serving institutions."
Fellowship and Grant Programs, American Council of Learned Societies. Over the past century, ACLS has supported individual scholars and scholarly teams around the world in their pursuit of research with the potential to advance knowledge in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. / Our current focus includes providing more pathways for those who have traditionally had less access to external research support and scholarly resources, including first-generation scholars, people from historically marginalized communities, and non-tenure track faculty.
Humanities in Place (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation): Humanities in Place supports a fuller, more complex telling of American histories and lived experiences by deepening the range of how and where our stories are told and by bringing a wider variety of voices into the public dialogue. Working with media, heritage and public spaces, history museums and other institutions, and conveners of shared experiences—including the digital or ephemeral—we strive to expand the public expression of the histories that have made us and the values we hold. Our program works across and within diverse communities, encouraging bold, innovative rethinking of past practice, as well as visionary new approaches for how to collectively understand, uplift, and celebrate more complete stories about who we are.
The NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG), National Endowment for the Humanities. Supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. The DHAG program supports projects at different phases of their lifecycles that respond to one or more of these programmatic priorities:
• research and refinement of innovative, experimental, or computationally challenging methods and techniques
• enhancement or design of digital infrastructure that contributes to and supports the humanities, such as open-source code, tools, or platforms.
• evaluative studies that investigate the practices and the impact of digital scholarship on research, pedagogy, scholarly communication, and public engagement.
Maximum award amount: Level I: $75,000; Level II: $150,000; Level III: $350,000, with an additional $100,000 in matching funds.
See also: their informative "Frequently Asked Questions" (Downloadable PDF) and (on YouTube) the DHAG 2024 Webinar
The NEH Digital Projects for the Public program (National Endowment for the Humanities.) Supports projects that interpret and analyze humanities content in primarily digital platforms and formats, such as websites, mobile applications and tours, interactive touch screens and kiosks, games, and virtual environments.
NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (National Endowment for the Humanities). This program aims to bring together humanities scholars, advanced graduate students, librarians, archivists, museum staff, computer scientists, information specialists, and others to learn about new tools, approaches, and technologies, and to foster relationships for future collaborations in the humanities. NEH encourages you to develop proposals for multidisciplinary teams that include the necessary range of intellectual, technical, and practical expertise. You may draw partners and collaborators from the private and public sectors and may include appropriate specialists from within and outside the United States. You should consider not only the practical applications of the institute topic, but also address ethical implications of its subject for humanities research, teaching, or public programming.