Thanks, Kyle.  I think there's enough interest in continuing the conversation (over Zoom or F2F) about how to build such an open data repository.  That said, Frank's skepticism is worth noting.  Further discussion is on my to-do list. More soon on that front.  

I'm not sure if this directly answers your question, but one advantage of digital humanities work is that almost all of the work you produce reaches both academic and public audiences.  In the case of WMR, we've had plenty of academic (research and teaching) usage but we've also drawn people just curious about reading habits, or even people using it as a genealogy resource.  That can help with grant funding by allowing you to stress both the broad value for public audiences and the research value, sometimes stressing one or the other depending on the funding agent and the project's goal. 

I do think there is a difference between work geared generally for a public audience and that which involves collaborating with a specific group or community.  In the latter case, there are often concrete benefits to both sides of the partnership, academic and community, that can help as we seek funding. We've been involved with various projects where we've worked with labor unions, churches, nonprofits and of course the Muncie Public Library.  These groups appreciate the recognition that comes with these kinds of community-based work while at the same time we've been able to work with them in ways that advance various parts of our research agenda.

A general question for people involved in this panel - is there a difference between extra-academic engagement with particular institutions (often those we collaborate with on a given project) and engaging the 'general public'?  Anybody like to share examples of these activities?

All and all, very happy to have participated and interested in continuing the conversation. Thanks for all the work that went into making it happen!

I'd love to add my two cents to your question to Katie and Matt as well. It's such an important question. Our data is from the 18thC but our users live in the 21stC. We want to keep the integrity of the former, but if we want actual users then we have to make the project accessible to them. This has really come for Ben Bankhurst (Shepherd University) and me on a project which came out of a joint-taught course on the American Revolution. The Maryland Loyalism Project (loyalismproject.com) is a digital archive and database of the Black and White Marylanders who identified as Loyalists during the American Revolution. We built the project with our students, for whom we felt it was essential they have access to digital surrogates of original 18th century documents (in this case, the Loyalist Claims Commission and the Book of Negroes) but they also be able to navigate the information in those records in ways that 21st century folks do. So the digital archive has scans of each document with diplomatic transcriptions, structured on the format of the original manuscripts. The database, on the other hand, extracts all manner of information about individuals named in those records and allows people to search and make connections between them. Right now we are working on restoring the names of the enslaved women and men who are listed simply as unnamed property in the original records but each of whom has an individual database record, as one small step to restore their humanity.

I do worry, in general, we do not bring enough non-scholars into conversation when we design these projects and that we lose vast swaths of potential audiences by creating projects simply not accessible to them.