The ongoing sustainability of digital humanities projects is of critical concern to archivists, librarians, and digital humanities practitioners alike. This NEH ODH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, which will take place at five locations scattered across the United States, is designed to help such professionals create sustainability plans and address preservation concerns at any point in the life of a digital humanities project.
These workshops will be based on the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap (STSR), a sustainability-focused project housed in the Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh. The STSR is a structured group exercise that guides participants through the practice of creating effective sustainability plans. It is based on research findings that demonstrate that the needs of a project’s social infrastructure must be addressed alongside the needs of its technological infrastructure in order to successfully sustain digital work over time.
Each Sustaining DH Workshop is designed to accommodate approximately 25 people, most working in teams of two or three, and will focus on attracting participants from the region surrounding the chosen sites. We will be able to offer $1,000 travel bursaries to those participants who will need to travel in from the local area.
We are also holding public, weekly virtual office hours in the Digital Humanities Slack in the #sustaining channel or on Humanities Commons at https://hcommons.org/groups/sustaining-digital-projects/. For Spring Term 2019, these will be held on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10am-12 pm ET. Please come by with any questions you might have either about digital sustainability in general, or applying for these workshops in particular.
The Sustaining DH project team has selected host institutions from across the contiguous United States in an effort to reach the largest, most diverse number of participants. We strongly encourage participation from humanists and librarians who work with underrepresented communities or who are being trained to work with diverse, expansive publics.
We expect the participants who attend this workshop to leave not only with a well-documented and effective sustainability strategy for their digital work, but also with the ability to employ the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap for all of their projects on an ongoing basis. We also plan on encouraging and supporting the participants, whether information professionals or humanists, to become trainers in these practices themselves.
Please use either the links provided in the site’s menu or the links below to access information on each of the workshop sites.