Last week, we discussed project sustainability through the lens of who builds DH projects and who maintains them. Project sustainability can also be viewed as the way a project connects to adjacent tools and communities, both actively and passively. Who uses your project and how easy it is for someone to create a derivative use? How interoperable is your project —how easy it is for your project to connect to other tools and data sources?

All digital humanities projects, even ones which are relatively technically simple, are built in an ecosystem of connected, interdependent technologies. Many projects will experience downtime, or even “break” as various pieces of that software are updated, rendering old connections obsolete or incompatible. Unfortunately, funding proposals in the digital humanities are structured so as to offer limited resources for technical support after the conclusion of project development. Funds may be allocated for the cost of hosting or storage, but maintenance support for a project will be limited.

The DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools that draws upon the efforts on an international community of volunteers.  Over the last few months, the DiRT steering committee and editorial board, along with our partners at the City University of New York and the Agile Humanities Agency, have been hard at work finishing up a wide range of integrations and site improvements for DiRT.  Development work has been conducted with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

On November 12 - 13, I had the opportunity to represent DiRT Directory at a workshop on user interface and software sustainability in the humanities and social sciences, hosted by the Center for e-Research (CeRch) at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.