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. In fact, we encourage this!
- Does the project/resource/work I nominate have to have been completed/updated in the year of the awards?
Yes! 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 2021.
- 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 they were nominated in, created/modified in that year. If the public is unable to get to your resource without registering, paying, or some other barrier we might not include it. Also, the owner of the resource may have declined to participate. 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 add things to 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 my resource be nominated in more than one category?
While many resources could be nominated under variety of categories (dataset, visualizations, blog, etc.) there is usually one that suits them best. While in some cases a single resource will appear in more than one category, the nominations committee will try to whittle these down to a single category where feasible.
- Can I nominate multiple of my resources in a single category if they meet the criteria?
Yes, you can nominate multiple resources in the same category and there is a benefit to these appearing on the list of resources (people see them). However, it will likely dilute your voting share amongst those resources (since people can then only vote for one). Another approach is to create a single landing page about all the resources which then links all those you want people to look at.
- Can you tell me who nominated my resources?
We could tell you as all nominations store the email if provided, but we won’t. Nominations should be assumed to be in complete confidence. While we could put two parties who agreed in touch we are running the 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 accepted 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 their nomination was successful or not. Bear in mind that the owner of the resource may decline to be included. 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 nominated 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 in any way.
- 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)?
Can the DH Awards voters get to it?
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 and not communicating with people unless absolutely necessary.
- 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 it probably wasn’t that important.
- Can I nominate a commercial site?
You may nominate a commercial site, but if a site *requires* a purchase, registration, login, or has other barriers to access then we might not include it in our ballot. This is not because it is commercial per se, but because the community must freely be able to assess it if it is to be voted for by them. Providing a link that gives some form of access is always best. While we try, our nominations committee is not always successful in filtering out sites that require a login, sorry about that.
- 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. In 2019 we doubled the size of the nominations committee to further our goals of making it 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, and are nice people, 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. If you learn about one new DH resource then the endeavour has been a success.
- How does this relate to the official award given by this or that DH organisation?
It doesn’t. The DH Awards are not affiliated in any 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. Instead, publicise your resource and its nomination on all the mailing lists, blogs, and tweets in your communities. Generally, if someone has voted up to 3 times we will take only the last chronological vote. If someone has voted more than 3 times we’ll delete 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 email address, what are you going to use this for?
For the voting form this is solely used to track if you have accidentally voted more than once. For the nomination form we might contact you if we’re unable to find out information about the resource you’ve nominated. We will not release your name or email to anyone.
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. Just to say that again, there are no tangible prizes of any sort.
- Where can I find out who won?
The award winners will be listed on this website as well as 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 slightly vague and undefined way.
- 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 do tend to make overall aggregate statistics available as well.
- Where are voters from? What languages do they speak? What browsers do they use? What data do you collect from those visiting the website?
We used to use Google Analytics on the website to track this kind of information but rather that use people’s data this way we instead ask a variety of (optional) demographic questions to produce aggregate statistics. For example, here are the statistics for the previous year.