THE INCREASING UBIQUITY of digitally enhanced medieval research initiatives serves as testament to the “brave new world” of humanities research in which technological platforms and methodologies are closely integrated with traditional scholarship. Such digital humanities approaches are also proving to be quite fruitful to researchers who seek to promote inter-institutional collaboration in ways that defy conventional classifications of disciplinary domains. Scholarship in the field of medieval studies is no longer limited to the isolated work of lone scholars within narrowly defined domains of practice. Instead, many modern medievalists now find themselves engaged in collaboration with information technology specialists, library and information science practitioners, programmers, and other digital humanities scholars distributed across departments, institutions, and time zones. As a result of this new approach to the “digital medieval project,” institutional and external granting bodies—both national and international—have expanded their funding opportunities for faculty members, researchers, and graduate students to pursue innovative research projects and develop digital tools and platforms. These funding bodies require that scholars develop data management and project management plans, yet little emphasis has been placed on the managerial function of the primary investigators in team-oriented research settings.

We (Koivisto, Kopár, and Wicker) have learned about project management as we developed Project Andvari, an international collaborative project designed to create a free digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artefacts of the early medieval period (fourth to twelfth centuries). Through our work on this project, we have discovered that the inter-institutional and interdisciplinary nature of effective digital medieval projects presents a bevy of project management complications that represent considerable roadblocks to the planning, development, and implementation of proposed research initiatives. Proper project management approaches, custom-tailored to the needs of interdisciplinary medieval initiatives, must be implemented in order to avoid unnecessary complications or project failure. But what resources are at our disposal? Despite the acknowledged importance of project management, domain-specific approaches and resources do not occupy a primary position in overall research considerations.