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Building Sustainable Projects

This page provides a list of resources for building a sustainable DH project.

See our DH Community Announcements – Publications page for recently published digital resources.

Project Resiliency in the Digital Humanities, DHQ: Volume 17, Issue 1 (2023)

This issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) by Martin Holmes, J. Matthew Huculak, and Janelle Jenstad argues that there is work to be done in getting Digital Humanities projects to the point of being archivable in the same way that libraries preserve books. This issue brings together leading DH scholars to present the following articles:

Special Issue: Open, Digital, Collaborative Project Preservation in the Humanities, IDEAH: Volume 3, Issue 5 (2023)

This special issue, edited by Luis Meneses, is a brief collection of paper submissions from the Open, Digital, Collaborative Project Preservation in the Humanities (Virtual) Conference in June 2021. The articles approach project preservation from unique perspectives and look to answer the following research questions:

    • How can we create viable, sustainable pathways for open, digital scholarship?
    • How can we design, implement, and document the best practices for the development of open, social, digital projects in the arts and humanities?
    • How can we amplify the positive aspects of collaboration to magnify the contribution and streamline the development of digital projects?
    • How can we preserve these environments in ways that speak to the needs of our communities and are open, collaborative, effective, and sustainable?

The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap

The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap (the “Roadmap” or the STSR), developed by The Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh, is described as "a module-based workshop intended to help you and your team approach the seemingly daunting task of sustaining your digital humanities project over time."

The modules of the Roadmap are categorized into three sections: Section A is designed to help you scope your project, its vision, and its sustainability goals; Section B provides templates for documenting your staff and your technologies, including their sources of funding; Section C helps you create a list of concrete sustainability actions to be taken.

"Negotiating Sustainability: Building Digital Humanities Projects that Last", Chapter 3, Doing More Digital Humanities: Open Approaches to Creation, Growth, and Development (2020)

By Lisa Goddard and Dean Seeman

Major funding agencies are putting increased pressure on researchers to include sustainability plans in funding applications, although none offer specific guidelines on the number of years for which projects should be sustained. The ideal situation is to negotiate with collaborators to release all project content under a Creative Commons license, and to clearly display this license in the project interface. The digital library platform is typically where preservation workflows begin in academic libraries. Fedora-based digital asset management systems like Islandora and Samvera provide a single place to store objects along with descriptive and administrative metadata that helps to determine the preservation actions that should be taken against each object. Storing multiple copies of a file is insufficient if those copies are not regularly checked for bit rot and other types of degradation, so file integrity tools are another necessary aspect of long-term preservation storage.

"Done: Finishing Projects in the Digital Humanities", DHQ: Volume 3, Number 2 (2009)

By Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

How do we know when we're done? This cluster of articles explores completion and incompletion in the digital humanities from a variety of perspectives.