The Digits team (Matt Burton, Matthew J. Lavin, Jessica Otis, and Scott B. Weingart) convened around the question of how we might share, preserve, and legitimize scholarship freed from the affordances of print. For the A.W. Mellon-funded Digits Planning Grant (2016-2018), the PIs had three goals: - Investigate the use of software containers for research in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. - Assess the infrastructural needs of digital humanists around publishing and preserving web-centric scholarship. - Gather a team of experts to guide the above activities and plan how they might inform a beneficial intervention into the scholarly ecosystem. Through our investigation into the scholarly uses of containers, we discovered that the technical infrastructure needed to connect containers with digital publications is underdeveloped. We see potential for container technologies to facilitate existing digital scholarly publications and afford new forms of computational scholarship, but this process would first require a series of infrastructural bridges. The digital scholarship needs assessment we conducted, as well as our advisory board meetings, made it clear that a targeted technological intervention alone would not be enough to welcome web-first publications into the scholarly ecosystem; in-tandem cultural and institutional changes are also necessary
