Crowdfunding in digital humanities: some evidence from Indonesian social enterprises

Pages287-303
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-05-2019-0123
Date02 March 2020
Published date02 March 2020
AuthorAluisius Hery Pratono,Delta Ardy Prima,Nur Flora Nita Taruli Sinaga,Anggraeni Permatasari,Mintarti Ariani,Ling Han
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management
Crowdfunding in digital
humanities: some evidence from
Indonesian social enterprises
Aluisius Hery Pratono
Faculty of Business and Economics, Universitas Surabaya, Surabaya, Indonesia
Delta Ardy Prima
Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Surabaya, Surabaya, Indonesia
Nur Flora Nita Taruli Sinaga
Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Surabaya, Surabaya, Indonesia
Anggraeni Permatasari
Faculty of Business, President University, Cikarang Baru, Indonesia
Mintarti Ariani
Faculty of Business and Economics, Universitas Surabaya, Surabaya, Indonesia, and
Ling Han
Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy, NUS Business School,
National University of SingaporeKent Ridge Campus, Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
PurposeThis article aims to understand how social enterprises adopt crowdfunding in digital humanities by
investigating the mission drifting, risk sharing and human resource practices.
Design/methodology/approach This exploratory study uses a qualitative method by observing five
different social ventures in Indonesia. The case study involves observation of social enterprises that concern
digital humanities projects and interviews with those who manage the crowdfunding for financing the projects
as the key respondents. The analysis uses an interpretative approach by involving the respondents to explain
the phenomena.
Findings (1) Adopting the crowdfunding platform encourages social enterprises to reshape social missions
with more responsive action for digital humanities. (2) Crowdfunding allows social enterprises to share the risk
with stakeholders who focus on fostering the social impact of digital humanities. (3) Crowdfundingstimulates
social enterprises to hire professional workers with flexible work arrangements to attract specific donors and
investors.
Originality/value The result extends the principles of social enterprises by introducing some concepts of
crowdfunding in digital humanities. This study also explains the boundary conditions of digital humanities
projects and how crowdfunding can support the projects by adopting the principles of the social enterprise that
works on digital humanities projects.
Keywords Social enterprise, Digital humanities, Crowdfunding, Social mission, Sharing risk,
Voluntary workers
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Digital humanitiesis the area where computer science and humanities intersect. The wide
range of computational tools has enabled social enterprises that work in humanities project to
digitise archival materials for posterity, to map the exchange and transmission of ideas in
history and to study the evolution of common words over the centuries. However, digital
Crowdfunding
in digital
humanities
287
We would like to thank Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi/Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional from The
Government of Indonesia for funding this research through the Basic Research for Higher Education.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2050-3806.htm
Received 17 May 2019
Revised 22 October 2019
27 November 2019
2 February 2020
6 February 2020
7 February 2020
Accepted 10 February 2020
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 72 No. 2, 2020
pp. 287-303
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-05-2019-0123
humanities projects often suffer from uncertain financial resources, even though the projects
provide a clear institutional focus for information and advice on digital humanities (Terras,
2015). Over the last decade, information technological turbulence has brought a dramatic
change in the third sector by providing alternative financing channels as a form of
crowdsourcing for collaboration, which thus raises a question on how technology plays the
mediating role allowing such organisations to crowdsource for support in those digital
humanities (Agrawal and Khare, 2019).
During the early works, digital humanities refers to the technical support to the work of
humanities scholars (Berry, 2012), the concept of which then becomes an umbrella term for a
various set of practices that concern combination of digital media and humanities (Jones,
2014). The emergence of digital technology and resources in humanities enquiries resists the
challenge of a project to be sustainable (Zhang et al., 2015). Previous studies indicate that most
crowdfunding was at an early stage of digital humanities, which raises the question of
viability (Banhatti, 2016). A recent study of the interplay between crowdfunding and
sustainability occurs in countries with English-speaking users of social media, which is
arguably still at its infancy and calls for further assessment of the evolution of the
phenomenon in the coming years and different contexts (Laurell et al., 2019).
The crowdfunding platform demonstrates the revolution of the financial service industry,
including crowdfinancing and crowdinvesting (Tomczak and Brem, 2013;Moritz and Block,
2016). Crowdfunding is a kind of crowdsourcing by allowing online supporters to engage in
social projects to contribute to resources in addressing social problems, which has similar
logic as crowdsourcing in humanities projects (Terras, 2015). Crowdfunding, as a type of
crowdorganising, includes spot transactions, short-term relations, demand-based pricing,
heterogeneous demand, and reputations established through feedback mechanism
(Powell, 2017).
A social enterprise is an entity of a sub-division of the third sector (Borzaga and Defourny,
2004), which addresses social problems for the standards of humanities and care by involving
economic actors and enabling technology applied to create sustainable financial models
(Phillips et al., 2015). The idea of using crowdfunding to finance digital humanities has
become popular, but some librarians raise a question whether the shifting funds orientation
can sustain for the long term (Reinsfelder and Pike, 2018). A significant number of studies on
social enterprises examine how ventures achieve their social mission through economic
activities (Defourny and Nyssens, 2017). Other studies have attempted to address the absence
of a standard definition of social enterprises by exploring the social participation among civil
society organisations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and government and research
institutions (Bidet and Defourny, 2019); the social impact (Kelly et al., 2019); mission drifting
(Mersland et al., 2019) and social performance (Battarai et al., 2019).
This article aims to understand how social enterprises adopt crowdfunding in digital
humanities by investigating the mission drifting, risk sharing and human resource practices.
We use a qualitative method to evaluate five social enterprises, which practice different types
of crowdfunding activities in Indonesia. The rest of the article is split into the following
sections: First is a literature review, which seeks to explore the theoretical framework,
including the principles of social enterprises and the three types of crowdfunding activities.
The next section provides the results, which is followed by a discussion that compares the
findings from the case studies to the findings of the discussed literature studies. The last
section provides a conclusion, highlights some limitations and suggests future studies.
Literature review
A social enterprise is an entity of a sub-division of the third sector (Borzaga and Defourny,
2004), which addresses social problems for the standards of humanities and care by involving
economic actors and enabling technology applied to create sustainable financial models
AJIM
72,2
288

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