NOMINATIONS
- Can I nominate my own project/resource/blog?
Yes, you may nominate your own work for inclusion in DH Awards. If this makes you feel bad for some reason, consider nominating a different resource as well.
- Can I nominate someone else’s work?
Yes, you may nominate someone else’s work for inclusion in DH Awards. It helps us if you include their contact details if you know them.
- Does the project/resource/work I nominate have to have been completed in the year of the awards?
Yes! We were a bit less stringent last year, but this year we will remove any that don’t seem to have had a major update or have not been launched, created, started, finished, enacted or had something significant happen in 2014.
- Can I nominate more than one project/resource/work?
Yes, simply load the nominations form again and submit the form with your next nomination.
- Can I nominate something that is not in English?
Yes, in fact you are actively encouraged to! You may nominated any resource in any language or writing system in any relevant category. Although the DH Awards uses English as its base operating language this is not meant to limit the awards to English resources. Additionally, if you want to translate the call for nominations or announcement of voting into your local language please do get in touch!
- Something I nominated hasn’t appeared in the list of projects I can vote for, did you ignore my nomination?
No! We won’t ignore any nomination, but we get a lot of them in each category so the nominations committee will review these and reserves the right to whittle them down slightly by seeing if they are appropriate to the category, created(etc.) in 2014. We are very sorry that your nomination did not make it through that process, but the decision of the nominations committee is final. We won’t change the ballot once it has been announced.
- How are the categories decided? Will they be the same next year?
The categories were decided by the nominations committee to give a range of distinct categories. While some of these categories will be repeated we may change others. If you have categories you would like to see get in touch.
- Can you tell me who nominated my resources?
We could tell you as all nominations store the name and email provided, but we probably won’t. Nominations should be assumed to be in complete confidence. While we could put two parties who agreed in touch we are running DH Awards not a dating service.
- Will you email me to tell me why my nomination/resource was or wasn’t put forward?
The nominations committee will send out a single email to the owners of all nominated resources (at the address given by the person nominating) with a short deadline asking if the link, spelling, category, etc. is correct and giving them a chance to withdraw from the DH Awards. We will not email all the people nominating to let them know whether/why there nomination was successful or not. We are willing to discuss the reasons the nomination committee had for not putting it forward with those who nominated it or resource owners should they wish — but this won’t change the result.
- Does the nomination committee filter out based on quality?
No. We may filter something out of the nominations based on whether we feel it is vaguely Digital Humanities or not, we may do so based on whether it is relevant to the category, or created/published/launched in that year, but we will not do so just because we happen to think it is awful. While we think all nominated resources are worth looking at this does not imply that we’ve assessed or ranked their quality.
- What criteria does the nomination committee use?
The nominations committee only filters based on the following criteria:
Is it (vaguely) Digital Humanities?
Is it appropriate to the category (or could it be moved to another better one)?
Has it been published/launched/majorly updated in that year?If in doubt the committee may email the resource owner for confirmation, but tries to err on the side of including resources.
- What do you mean by a ‘major update’ in the criteria above?
This is hard to quantify. If the resource has undergone some major development which fundamentally changes or improves the system or main purpose of the resource then that would qualify as a major update. If you’ve just upgraded from one version of a CMS to another version of the same CMS this is less likely to be viewed as a ‘major update’. Perhaps more important in the nominations committee’s deliberations are whether we are easily able to find out that you’ve had this update. If all the dates are from several years ago, and no news item or text explains there has been an important update, then we will assume probably wasn’t that important.
- Why doesn’t your international nominations committee not have a member from area X of the world?
The nominations committee was set up through gathering people I knew (or friends of them) who happened to do DH in places around the world. The idea was intentionally to make it as dispersed internationally as possible and and get a variety of languages and cultural backgrounds on to the committee. There are some areas we’ve asked for people and not got anyone willing to commit the time needed. If you have particular recommendations of people in non-Western countries you think would benefit the committee and are knowledgeable about many DH projects in their vague geographic area, then get in touch.
VOTING
- Am I allowed to vote?
Everyone is allowed to vote, voting is entirely open to the public. You do not even have to view yourself as part of the Digital Humanities community to vote. If you want to vote, then vote.
- Doesn’t that just turn it into a popularity contest?
In some ways, yes, it does! The other alternative would be to have the winners decided by a shadowy oligarchy, and we don’t like those. (Though they sometimes do perfectly good work, it isn’t what these awards are about.) DH Awards was set up intentionally as an openly-nominated and openly-voted form of recognition and awareness raising. If we start controlling who has the right to vote it undermines this. There were active campaigns by some to get their entire university, sub-community, friends, etc. to vote for their resource…this is fine. It all goes towards publicising DH resources to the wider public.
- How does this relate to the official award given by this or that DH organisation?
It doesn’t. The DH Awards are affiliated in no particular way with any specific DH organisation or institution. We respect the work they do in assessing the quality of DH work and awarding its excellence. The DH Awards are not in competition with these more official awards — just an open DH awareness activity. Something can be nominated in multiple contests.
- Can I vote for my own resource/project/work?
Yes, you can vote for your own resource/project/work, but please vote for some of the other categories as well.
- Can I vote multiple times?
Please do not vote multiple times. The voting form asks for your email address specifically to track this. Yes, you may have multiple email addresses, but it really isn’t in the spirit of things. If we detect any attempted voter fraud we may remove all your votes.
- Do I have to vote in all categories?
No. You do not have to vote in all categories, but we’d like it if you did. Maybe have a look at some of the entries in that category and you might find something new and interesting! If you are unable to make up your mind then leave that category blank. Or maybe not!
- The voting (and nomination) form asks for my name and email address, what are you going to use this for?
This is solely used to track if you have accidentally voted more than once. We will not release your name or email to anyone. We will not email you unless you have indicated that you wish us to do so.
AWARDS
- Is there a cash prize given with the award?
No, absolutely not. We have no sponsors, no money, and provide no cash prizes. What you get is the honor of having won and a little icon to put on your website.
- Where can I find out who won?
The award winners will be listed on this website as well as circulated to the usual DH mailing lists and via our twitter feed.
- Are the winners the ‘best’ resources nominated?
Probably not. The ‘winners’ are the ones who get the most votes, and they may get many votes for all sorts of reasons. For example, they may have publicised the voting very well amongst their friends and communities. We hope that people doing this encourage voters to look at other resources and other categories. If so, then the greater awareness of DH resources means that all nominated resources are winners in some ways.
- Do you list exactly how many votes each resource got?
No. We’re not into embarrassing people. We list which resources were candidates for voting on the nominations page, we list the winners in each category (and 1st and 2nd runners up), we list the total number of ballots, and we list the number of votes cast per category. We do not list the total number of votes for any particular resource. We may make overall aggregate statistics available if requested by the DH community.
- Where are voters from? What languages do they speak? What browsers do they use? What data do you collect from those visiting the website?
This website uses Google Analytics and so tracks a variety of usage data of people coming to this website. This data is stored anonymously and we make no use of it other than for aggregate statistics. For 2013 we released a variety of statistics:
http://dhawards.org/dhawards2013/statistics/In 2014 nominations and voting we will be directly collecting some (optional) demographic information to produce additional aggregate statistics.