Originally presented at www.software.ac.uk/dphw

1. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
The Software Sustainability
Institute and engagement
with the Digital Humanities
21 June 2018, Digital Practices in the Humanities (DPHW),
Oxford
Shoaib Sufi, Community Lead, Software Sustainability Institute
shoaib.sufi@software.ac.uk
Supported by Project funding
from
Partners

2. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Context
• Minimum spend on Software enabled
Research in 2013 was £840M, third of
entire RCUK budget!
• 7 out of 10 Researchers say - It's
impossible to conduct research
without software
 https://www.software.ac.uk/blog/2014-12-04-its-impossible-conduct-research-without-software-say-7-out-10-uk-researchers

3. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
The Software Sustainability Institute
A national facility for cultivating better, more
sustainable, research software to enable world-
class research
• Software reaches boundaries in its
development cycle that prevent
improvement, growth and adoption
• Providing the expertise and services
needed to negotiate to the next stage
• Developing the policy, forums and tools to
support the research communities developing and
using research software
• Core concerns: credit, career paths, reproducibility,
capacity/capability Supported by EPSRC Grant EP/H043160/1
+ EPSRC/ESRC/BBSRC grant EP/N006410/1

4. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Website & blog
Campaigns
Advice
Guides
Courses
Workshops
Fellowship
Research
Software
Policy
Training
Community
Consultancy
80+ projects
150+ evaluations
4 surgeries
40+ UK SWC
workshops
2000+ learners
90+ guides
50,000 readers
85 domain
ambassadors
20+ workshops organised
740 researchers
50,000 grants
analysed
200+ contributed articles
20,000 unique visitors per month
4,500 Twitter followers
1000+ RSEs engaged 2100 signatures 13 issues highlighted
Outreach

5. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Software
Policy
Training
Community
Outreach
Delivering essential software
skills to researchers via CDTs,
institutions & doctoral schools
Helping the community to
develop software that meets the
needs of reliable, reproducible,
and reusable research
Collecting evidence
on the community’s
software use & sharing
with stakeholders
Bringing together
the right people to
understand and
address topical issues
Exploiting our platform
to enable engagement,
delivery & uptake
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2w
76p0oeczzuc6/Screenshot%20
2017-11-
14%2014.42.04.png?dl=0
112

6. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
“I see one key benefit of the Institute
lies in how it helps good ideas
translate from one academic
discipline to another.” Stephen Eglen,
SSI Fellow (Sept 2016)

7. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Community
• Fellowship Programme
 Run since 2012 – now
• 112 Fellows
 £3K for events/activities
in research software
 A number of DH related
Fellows since the
beginning
 https://peerj.com/prepri
nts/26849/
James Baker (2015)
Adam Crymble (2013)
Lariza Blazic (2015)
Melodee Helene Beals (2016)

8. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Training
• Software Carpentry (SWC) and Data Carpentry (DC) are two programs of The Carpentries.
 Teach computing and data skills.
 Exist because the skills needed to do computational, data-intensive research are not part of basic
research training in most disciplines.
 Build Capacity – instructor training – pedagogy training
• Reproducible Research Oxford - Laura Fortunato leads Oxford Partnership with SWC/DC
 https://rroxford.github.io
 https://software.ac.uk/blog/2018-04-06-what-reproducible-research-oxford
 https://www.software.ac.uk/blog/2017-10-12-data-carpentry-humanities - DC for the DH
community
• Guyda Armstrong - DH @ Manchester Colloquium
 https://www.digital-humanities.manchester.ac.uk/events/workshops/past-workshops/
 SSI – Ran some sessions, supported trainers, provided speaker, logistical support
https://github.com/iaine/ReproResOxford
• Heather Ford @ Leeds – more Social Science but focuses on sentiment analysis in SM so in DH
space
 https://arcleeds.github.io/2016-11-21-leeds/
• Library Carpentry
 https://librarycarpentry.org/ (Fellows lead)
 https://programminghistorian.org/ (two of the Fellows involved)
• Very Nascent google group to talk about a DH oriented curriculum
 https://groups.google.com/a/carpentries.org/forum/#!forum/dh-curriculum
carpentries.org

9. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Software
• RTI-VIPS
 Easy installation of ‘Reflectance Transformation Imaging’
packages
 Manual know-how to a wider audience of Cultural
Heritage
• cuneiform tablets, numismatic archives, manuscripts, rock
art and lithic artifacts
• arts-humanities.net
 Migration to new Drupal
 Documentation of how to install
 ‘Customer’ Digtial Humanites at Kings College London
happy with new robust footing.
 As of 2015 data is now part of DHCommons
(dhcommons.org)

10. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Policy
AHRC
ESRC EPSRC
Databases are important in the AHRC area,
clearly people don’t just store data but the do
something with the data – that’s software!

11. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Why we are supporting this workshop
• We are interested in the DH area
 http://bit.ly/dphw2018-topics
• How Software comes about, training, DH as practice,
interdisciplinarity view from DH, careers, credit, research
outputs, funding etc
• We want to better understand and support Software in the DH
Communities and crucially those who are trying to make a
difference
• Also trying to identify sub communities which would be useful
for e.g. training and software support

12. Software Sustainability Institute
www.software.ac.uk
Questions
• ?