Yairamaren Román Maldonado, a graduate student in Spanish & Portuguese with a designated emphasis in New Media, attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria for the second year in a row, after taking “Electronic Literature in the Digital Humanities: Research and Practice” in 2014. This year, she attended two classes, “Digital Humanities with a Global Outlook” and “Advanced Criticism and Authoring of Electronic Literature”.

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.

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.

As someone who studies history, I often think about how our understanding of the past is shaped by our capability to remember and also to preserve.  In my past experience at the colonial archives, I was thrilled to look through handwritten correspondence, but I always felt that my historical interpretation was like guessing at the image of an infinite-numbered piece puzzle while only possessing a few of its pieces.