Well the project objective started really, with stimulating research in personal studies. I mean this was the main thing. I talked to some colleagues about possible subjects, and someone said the Shar Namé, and of course I immediately realised that this was a fantastic subject because it’s just very famous work of personal literature that it’s also a poem that’s been illustrated many times. And so we conceived the idea of collecting all the illustrated manuscripts that we could find, and creating a database which showed all the paintings in each manuscript. It would allow you to sort of interrogate this data – when things were produced, what were the most popular scenes, what’s the relation between the paintings and the texts of the poem.

Well, you have to have your clear plan at the beginning – your clear objective. The application was really talking about the interest of the text, why we wanted to collect the paintings, and so the setup was quite simple, I mean, we have this access database, it was – actually one of my students designed it. It worked really well, and then it became clear, as you say, technology moved on. It was quite obvious after 5 years that I mean, no one wanted to say “well that’s it, the job’s been done, there you are.” And so we wanted to continue. So really the project is continually being redefined, I mean that’s the point, it sort of organically grows, of course it has to grow within the parameters you’ve set out at the beginning of the initial project. I’m still as enthusiastic about the project as I was 13 years ago.

You know, there’s just so much to do, and so many people you could bring in and so much they could contribute to it, that it is evolving a living thing, and that implies flexibility. Because the longer it goes on, the harder it is to get funding because people say “well surely you’ve done this now, you know you said you were going to do this after 5 years” and then after another 3 years we got this second grant. And of course, you know, the answer is that it doesn’t want to just stand still, you want to be able to have more data, you want to be able to develop the site so that it’s more genuinely interactive.

Most funding bodies expect the output to look, in the end, something like what you say the output’s going to be at the beginning. But of course I think a certain flexibility has to be assumed on the part of the grant givers and on the managers. I mean, however strictly you set out the project aims at the beginning. Well it’s obviously got to be, you know, a sort of estimate. So it’s really keeping up, it’s partly keeping up, it’s partly anticipating and trying to bring in technology as it develops, but without ever losing sight of the overriding objective.