Henry Francis Lynam wrote:

[log in to unmask]" type="cite">Hi Scot,

This raises an interesting point. Should graduate students in Digital Humanities be rewarded in some tangible way for participating in open source DH projects? The thing that has often struck me about graduate work (from the outside) is how narrow the focus is. Like the case you mention of the paid programmers, it's probably very difficult for a graduate student to justify a large commitment to something that does not directly advance their PhD work. If there was a credit scheme for participation this might open up the talent pool and provide an incentive.

Henry that is a very good question but one I am not in a position to answer. Sometimes there are intangible benefits to developing open source projects, which often then lead to the jobs being paid to write open source software. ;^) However as general rule in an academic setting, I have no idea (my own background is that I work as a programmer but doing a PhD in classics part-time). Perhaps its worth finding out what university comp.sci departments do? They must come across this problem fairly often.

regards
scot

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