Abstract
During the 2016–2017 financial year, King's Digital Lab (King's College London)
undertook an extensive archiving and sustainability project to ensure the
ongoing management, security, and sustainability of ~100 digital humanities
projects, produced over a twenty-year period. Many of these projects, including
seminal publications such as Aphrodisias in Late
Antiquity, Inscriptions of Roman
Tripolitania, Henry III Fine Rolls,
Jonathan Swift Archive, Jane Austen Manuscripts, The Gascon
Rolls, The Gough Map, and Inquisitions Post Mortem, occupy important positions
in the history of digital humanities. Of the projects inherited by the lab,
about half are either of exceptionally high quality or seminal in other ways but
almost all of them struggled with funding and technical issues that threatened
their survival. By taking a holistic approach to infrastructure, and software
engineering and maintenance, the lab has resolved the majority of the issues and
secured the short to medium term future of the projects in its care. This
article details the conceptual, procedural, and technical approaches used to
achieve that, and offers policy recommendations to prevent repetition of the
situation in the future.
Digital Humanities (DH) research has reached an inflection point. On the one hand it
appears to be in robust health, with an active community spread around the world,
well-attended annual conferences, several well-established centres of excellence (be
they labs, institutes, or departments), and new initiatives appearing on a regular
basis. Activity is particularly strong in the United Kingdom, North America, and
Europe, with significant work being done in Asia and Australasia, and important new
initiatives developing in South America and Africa. University courses are
proliferating at graduate and undergraduate level, and advances are being made to
pedagogy [
Hirsch 2012]. Intermittent criticism of the field is a sign
of increasing intellectual vitality, as colleagues in neighbouring disciplines
question its popularity and interrogate its intellectual, ideological, and ethical
foundations [
Eyers 2013]
[
Allington et al. 2016]. This activity has appeared at the same time as the
notion and utility of DH infrastructure has been questioned [
Rockwell 2010], and project teams have been forced to explore ways
projects can not only be sustained but elegantly ended
#carlin2006.
Despite inheriting a relatively deep tradition, we are only beginning to understand
the dense entanglements that accrue over time between digital humanists,
administrators, and the web servers, programming languages, and tools, we use to
produce our publications.
While technical digital humanities teams now have a vastly more sophisticated range
of options than previous generations, including corporate-grade cloud services and
free online services, this has done little to ease the problem of maintainability or
sustainability - especially for high quality digital scholarship. Idiosyncratic
solutions to specific research questions in this emerging field have left us with a
legacy corpus developed from the 1990s into the 2000s, which raises new challenges
in terms of sustainability. Problems that have been deferred for years, sometimes
decades, have become pressing. A generation of legacy projects that need maintenance
but are out of funding have reached critical stages of their lifecycles, an
increasingly hostile security context has made DH projects potential attack vectors
into institutional networks, heterogeneous and often delicate technologies have
complicated the task of maintenance, and an increasing number of emerging formats
have made archiving and preservation yet more difficult. This presents a
significant, and growing, challenge for the community – and one that needs to be
resolved by raising awareness of the issues, evolved management of digital
humanities infrastructure, attention to the full lifecycle of projects, and
inventive approaches to funding that extend the life and impact of valuable research
by sharing costs across funding agencies and institutions. This article aims to
contribute to that process by initiating a conversation and explaining the
experience and some solutions implemented in King’s Digital Lab (KDL) but does not
aim to present a straight-forward “How To” guide for other teams.
The realisation of robust and holistic approaches to the maintenance of digital
research outputs is a matter of some urgency, but no single solution will work for
every digital humanities team.
It is clear, however, that sustainable management of digital outputs that have
survived beyond their initial funding has become a major problem. It is time to
admit our problems and share our conceptual and procedural solutions. Such projects,
although of central importance to the wider field of digital humanities and
humanities scholarship generally, present a range of challenges. In the academic and
financial year 2016-2017
[1], KDL worked on 6–8 funded projects at any one time and was
involved in external grant proposals with a total value of £26m (GBP), together with
collaborators across a wide variety of universities and cultural heritage
organisations in London, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. This
constituted the lab’s primary activity and is at the core of its raison d'être. In
the same year, however, the lab completed assessment (followed by archiving,
migration, or upgrade) of ~100 digital humanities projects undertaken over twenty
years of activity at King’s College London and inherited from earlier
instantiations of DH, including the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) and
the Centre for eResearch in the Humanities (CeRch). Many projects were inherited
from the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH), which the lab evolved from and has
a close relationship to. This corpus of publications represents valuable and
impactful research as well as significant investment from funding bodies, and
research and heritage institutions. Humanities scholars rely on and make ongoing
reference to the work contained in it, and
it is increasingly being integrated into global Linked Open Data initiatives
supported by libraries, archives, museums, and other digital humanities teams.
Finding a comprehensive and scalable approach to sustainable development in digital
humanities labs is a non-trivial problem. Any solution must be tailored to the local
environment and help support not only the complexity and range of digital
scholarship, but financial and operational issues and more fundamental problems
related to entropy of software systems and digital infrastructure. It also needs to
allow for the fact that digital tools and infrastructure do not allow for perfect
process, perfect archiving, or perfect security: at some point it is always
necessary to retreat to principles of risk management and cost-benefit analysis. The
work presented here involved coordination with technical specialists, researchers,
administrative and financial university staff, and colleagues in IT and the library.
The developed process helped KDL transition many digital humanities projects from an
insecure to a sustainable basis, but the work is incomplete and will - in a
fundamental sense - never end. Some projects, moreover, cannot be
“saved” despite best intentions. Rather than aim for perfect
process, KDL have chosen to accept archiving and sustainability as a permanent issue
that requires ongoing care and attention. It has been added to the lab’s Software
Development Lifecycle (SDLC) engineering process and is considered from our very
first conversations with new project partners. Our experience is shared here to open
a conversation and, rather than proposing simple solutions or demanding policy
change, to invite discussion.
King’s Digital Lab: Background
King’s Digital Lab (KDL) was launched in November 2015 at King’s College London.
The lab evolved from the Centre for Computing and the Humanities (established
1995)
[2] and the Centre for eResearch in the
Humanities (established 2008), which merged to form the Department of Digital
Humanities (DDH) in 2012. At the time of writing, DDH delivers 5 masters
programmes, 1 PhD programme and an undergraduate programme to ~500 students and
comprises ~40 academic staff. KDL was founded to increase digital capability and
generate external grant income for digital projects within DDH, and across the
Faculty of Arts & Humanities as a whole: it is an independent Arts &
Humanities department in its own right, specialising in digital humanities
software development but increasingly working with social scientists too. Team
members sometimes act as Principal or Co-Investigators on grants but always work
in unison with colleagues in other departments and/or institutions, implementing
a model for digital humanities research at scale.
Unlike core academic departments, which engage in teaching as well as research,
KDL is dedicated to research software engineering (RSE), and the implementation
of the systems, infrastructure, tools, and processes that are needed to produce
digital scholarly outputs. The lab has 12 permanent full-time staff to support
these activities: research software analysts, engineers, designers, a systems
manager, a project manager, and the director, and maintains its own server and
network infrastructure. The team work in close collaboration with the
university’s IT department and evolving University eResearch team. KDL’s
research philosophy is evolving: it lies at the intersection of human research
and technical systems, exploring and exploiting the creative synergies fostered
by this encounter to push the boundaries of digital humanities forward. Taking
an active interest in research methodology as well as inevitable business and
technical realities, the lab embraces problems we believe are integral to the
evolution and sustainability of the field.
Conflating the scholarly and operational aspects of the lab is both an overt act
of historicisation - an acknowledgment of the reality of digital scholarship in
early 21st century higher education - and a pragmatic response to the inherited
and emergent issues outlined in this paper. The design and engineering of
software and its supporting infrastructures is a problem that needs to be
conceived as at once technical, political, economic, and human.
While the lab exists to engage in technical development, it is mandated to
explore the epistemic and methodological implications of digital humanities
development and can contribute to the broader field from a unique vantage point.
Its institutional setting, technical expertise, and exposure to research
problems that only time can generate positions it to explore fundamental issues
of digital theory and method (including but not limited to digital entropy),
while at the same time developing innovative methods for new research.
Legacy Portfolio
The legacy portfolio supported by KDL is not unique, but significant for its
range and scholarly value: it represents a key corpus in the history of digital
humanities. Digital Humanities at King’s College is indebted to a group of
people who were instrumental in developing a range of projects inherited by KDL.
Colleagues like Harold Short, John Bradley, Willard McCarty, Charlotte Roueché,
Marilyn Deegan, and Paul Spence, were involved in a remarkable array of projects
of enormous scholarly value. In collaboration with PIs, both at King’s College
and in partner institutions, their work provided the core of the lab’s
inheritance including flagship projects such as
Aphrodisias
in Late Antiquity,
Inscriptions of Roman
Tripolitania,
Henry III Fine Rolls,
Jonathan Swift Archive,
Jane Austen Manuscripts,
The Gascon
Rolls,
The Gough Map,
Inquisitions Post Mortem,
Sharing
Ancient Wisdoms,
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon
England,
Prosopography of the Byzantine
World,
The Complete Works of Ben
Jonson,
The Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus,
and the
Profile of a Doomed Elite. Work in
palaeography by Peter Stokes and Stewart Brookes has prompted a range of
projects, including
DigiPal,
Models of Authority,
Exon Domesday,
and the new
Archetype framework.
[3] This work was
delivered in close collaboration with leading technical figures in digital
humanities in the United Kingdom, including many who now work in, and with,
King’s Digital Lab.
[4]
Of the 100 projects inherited by the lab, about half are either of exceptionally
high quality or seminal in other ways. This is a sizeable
“estate” to manage, but the authors are aware of at least
one team managing considerably more projects, and more than one team who have
suffered serious security breaches because of unmaintained applications. Teams
struggling with the issues are located in the United States and Europe as well
as the United Kingdom, suggesting any issues with policy and approach transcend
national borders.
[5] Such circumstances entail a considerable
moral bind: either ignore the demands of (some) project owners that their
projects’ digital publications and data continue in perpetuity and turn them off
(risking reputational damage and reducing the number of DH projects available to
users, more often than not initially supported via public funding), introduce
financial risk by maintaining them gratis (absorbing unfunded maintenance costs
and undermining other activities), or do nothing and accept the existential
risks that accompany a major security breach.
Little support is offered from the surrounding culture. Funding agencies might
require data management plans to ensure content is gracefully handled, depending
on the country of origin, but appear unable to deal with the complex issues
associated with the systems that generate and store that data. Collaborators
often become uneasy at the use of “industry” frameworks and
“business” language, suggesting (understandably) that it
detracts from academic research culture. Meanwhile, some critics of the digital
humanities appear to be unaware that a universe of very high quality, bespoke,
but at-risk digital scholarship exists far away from the values and commercial
imperatives of Silicon Valley ideology.
[6] In that sense, this paper is an account of a course
charted between Charybdis and Scylla, seeking to protect a cargo of scholarship
from technical and financial realities, the barbs of critics, the
corporatisation of higher education, and gaps in national policy. Were it not
for the fact that this is
the precise set of operational tensions
that drives the intellectual and creative culture of laboratories like KDL, and
the support of an almost uniformly understanding group of project owners and
stakeholders, the combined pressures would be insufferable. Given this, we view
this article as an opportunity to articulate the issues facing teams like KDL,
gesture towards some of our solutions, and make it easier for other teams to
share their experiences and request the resources needed to mitigate issues.
The ~100 projects inherited by KDL range across several DH sub-disciplines, with
a focus on Digital Classics (23 projects), Digital History (23 projects), and
Digital Literary Studies (14 projects). Another group can be best described as
Digital Humanities (20 projects), with smaller but important groups in Digital
Musicology (5 projects), Cultural Studies (5 projects), and Spanish Studies (4
projects). A further 5 projects are best described as inter-disciplinary. New
projects appear on a regular basis, of course, meaning the precise numbers
constantly shift. Surprisingly, and accepting that five years is a long time in
the digital world, 77 of the projects are less than 5 years old, with only 22
projects more than five years old. Of more concern is the fact that, when KDL
was established, the majority of these projects were
“orphaned”, and left without funding for maintenance. In
lieu of merely shutting them down, they had been kept live with little or no
maintenance, resulting in some unacceptably old operating systems remaining in
production. This is by no means out of step with the situation at many
organisations (commercial or otherwise). It reflects an era in the history of
computing when technological optimism was somewhat higher and security risks
somewhat lower than they are today.
We would like to note, in this context, that our openness in publishing the
details of the situation is relatively unusual and should indicate the
importance we feel the subject holds for the global humanities and social
science communities, and the library and archival teams that support them. We
have a good degree of confidence the issues have been resolved, as far as is
possible given today’s environment and the evolving security threats it
presents, but – more importantly – feel it is time to have an open conversation
about these issues. Teams like KDL struggle with issues presented by myriad
pressures: it is neither fair nor productive for Principal Investigators (PIs),
funding agencies, and the wider community, to have the reality of those
pressures hidden from them. Significantly, rather than seeing such issues as
embarrassments, to be hidden from administrators, funders, and colleagues inside
and outside our institution, the lab recognises them as research opportunities
for developing enhanced methodologies. It can be noted, too, that this attitude
represents continuity with the history of digital humanities at King’s College
rather than a departure from it. Previous generations of colleagues, including
Harold Short, Marilyn Deegan, Lorna Hughes, and Sheila Anderson, tried to prompt
policy change at a national level (most clearly through the Arts &
Humanities Data Service, but also through regular connection with national
funding bodies and other organisations), but their efforts were not supported at
crucial moments [
Rusbridge 2007]. Our goal is to empower similar
teams to seek and secure the support needed to do their jobs, and contribute to
the development of guidelines, standards and policies that can guide digital
scholarship. This ambition needs to be seen in a wider context that includes
issues of not only technical and financial sustainability but equitable career
paths, ethical attribution, diversity, and DH in developing countries.
Although (again) by no means unusual, the details of KDL’s technical estate in
late 2015 would give many systems administrators sleepless nights. KDL projects
were running: Windows 2003 (2 servers); Windows 2008 (9 servers); Debian 4 (13
servers); Debian 5 (32 servers); Debian 6 (33 servers); Debian 7 (10 servers).
The preponderance of Linux servers reduced risk significantly,
but the age of many of them was enough to be a risk even before the potential
impact of weaponised hacking tools on mainstream institutional systems became
clear. All servers were backed up, onto older machines that were adequate but
not entirely fit for purpose, and a significant security breach could have led
to several days' downtime while the systems were restored to their previous
best-known state. It was initially difficult to communicate this to some project
owners, who were unaware of the need for infrastructure maintenance, and the
risks their servers posed. The WannaCry event prompted a marked change, however.
PIs who had previously resisted sharing responsibility for their projects’
security immediately allowed KDL to turn off servers until emergency patching
had been completed or (in the worst cases), both server and application had been
rebuilt. The lab was close to taking this action unilaterally, regardless, for
the good of everyone involved. The consciousness-raising that accompanied
WannaCry, following its impact on the UK National Health Services (NHS) and
other key digital infrastructures, made the process considerably easier [
Cellan-Jones and Lee 2017].
Solid security requires up to date and regularly patched servers, but also up to
date and patched application frameworks (the body of code that enables the
websites, databases, archives, and digital scholarly editions end-users interact
with), which can be equally difficult to maintain. As with the use of Linux,
decisions to build using open source tools lowered risk significantly but did
not eliminate the need for basic ongoing maintenance. 26 of the oldest projects
were built using Java, but 52 were built using the Python-based web framework
Django, which has proven to be relatively secure. When coupled with the bespoke
XML-based publishing solutions xMod and Kiln (used for digital scholarly
editions), security risk and associated costs were almost entirely removed - but
these tools could not be used for every project. The most problematic projects
in the legacy portfolio were built using PHP-based frameworks such as WordPress
and Typo 3, which were promptly removed from KDL servers wherever possible.
Exceptions aside, analysis of the lab’s application security validated and
renewed our focus on a more limited technology stack based on Linux, Python,
Django, and associated supporting tools. Other labs might undertake similar
analysis and conclude they should focus on a stack
including
Windows and PHP-based tools and
excluding Linux and frameworks like
Django (to better align to their technical history and capabilities): the issue
is a matter of systems maintenance and security, not a reflection of the
so-called “programming language wars”
[
Stefik and Hanenberg 2014]. Experimentation with a range of new technologies continues, particularly
in emerging frameworks to support augmented and virtual reality, but long-term
support is focused on the core tool set.
Policy Context
It is not our intention to propose national policy change in this article (either
in the UK or other countries), which requires more insight into the complexities
of strategy and funding than we possess, but it is important to note that the
projects inherited by KDL, and detailed in this paper, were developed using
funding that only supported technical development and limited post launch
hosting of projects. Limited or no support existed for significant post-funding
system maintenance. In that sense, the funders themselves signalled
that they did not expect (or were not prepared to support) the development of
long-term or permanent digital resources: without the goodwill of colleagues and
the host institution most of them would have been closed years ago. Their future
was often only discussed tangentially, elided in conversations between technical
teams and PIs during the development process, in the optimistic hope
“something” would happen eventually, and that either the
funding agencies would see the value of the scholarly assets being built, or a
national solution would be implemented to protect them – or, in the absence of
the realisation of such hopes, that hosting institutions would support them
gratis in perpetuity. PIs shifted emotional responsibility onto technical teams,
and vice-versa: actual contractual responsibility was normally left
undefined.
With the benefit of hindsight this was unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable given
the lack of knowledge about the many intersecting issues in play. Many of the
projects hosted by KDL were produced during seminal years in the history of the
field, when flagship digital humanities projects demonstrated the potential that
digital tools and methods held for arts and humanities research, and they are
consequently of considerable cultural and scholarly value. The spirit of 1990s
cyber-utopianism - which assumed electronic media would be cheap and technically
straightforward to maintain, and that libraries would develop subscription
models able to support bespoke non-commercial projects - held back proactive
funding of archiving and sustainability initiatives [
Turner 2008].
Funding agencies and researchers alike assumed that their role was to prompt
expansion and illustrate possibilities, and that issues of maintenance and
sustainability would be resolved in the future. This attitude was
understandable, but it is having a serious impact on teams who have inherited
multiple high profile (and now unfunded) projects that are well beyond their
initial funding periods. That is not to suggest that earlier generations of
digital humanists did nothing to plan for the future, however. UK colleagues
often cite the defunding of the Arts & Humanities Data Service
[7] and the AHRC ICT Methods Network
[8] at the start
of the millennium as signal events that undermined the future of multiple
projects.
It is reasonable to view this as an international problem. Other UK digital
humanities teams report similar issues to KDL, and colleagues inform us that
policy gaps have created similar problems in the United States. The problems
exist in continental Europe but are less pronounced because of longer-term
commitments to infrastructure development and better alignment to STEM-based
initiatives that are actively exploring ways to improve Research Data Management
(RDM) infrastructure and processes [
European Commission 2017]
[
Rosenthalter et al. 2015]. It is important at the outset to recognise
that the issue runs deeper than straightforward problems of IT “service
delivery”, however. In large part the issues inherited by KDL are
the result of a wider conceptual failure, and an inability (or unwillingness) to
search “for critical and methodological
approaches to digital research in the humanities
grounded in the
nature of computing technology and capable of guiding technical
development as well as critical and historical
analysis”
[
Smithies 2017, 3]. If practical work in the digital humanities is to continue, this
attitude needs to be fostered, and extended towards the ongoing maintenance,
archiving and preservation of projects as well as their development. In an
article in
Aeon in 2017, historians of computing
Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel point out that the technology industry is so
ideologically biased towards “newness” that it glosses over
the need for maintenance despite it being a significant aspect of the
contemporary digital world [
Russell and Vinsel 2016]. More pointedly in the
context of digital humanities, Paul Edwards et al note that “
sustainable knowledge infrastructures must
somehow provide for the long-term preservation and conservation of data,
of knowledge, and of practices…” and that this “
requires not only resource
streams, but also conceptual innovation and practical
implementation”
[
Edwards et al. 2013, 8].
The issue has cascading implications for digital humanists and policy makers
alike. If digital humanities projects become known for not only soaking up
valuable money that could be used in other disciplines, but using that money on
unsustainable projects, the central
raison
d'être of the wider tradition - using digital tools and methods to
answer research questions in the humanities - will be undermined. However, there
is no reason the worst scenarios (permanent loss of multiple flagship digital
humanities projects) should come to pass. As Smithies has argued elsewhere, a
wider view of digital humanities infrastructure, in its technical as well as
intellectual and ethical dimensions, can provide perspectives that aid not only
technical development and management, but the development of ethical
perspectives, and greater purchase over business decision-making and funding
policy [
Smithies 2017, 113–151]. Only by exploring this wider
perspective can an appropriate understanding be gained, and supporting policy
developed. Patrik Svensson takes a similar approach in his recent book about DH
infrastructure [
Svensson 2016]. That book aligns well to emerging
trends in critical infrastructure studies [
Liu et al. 2018], platform
studies [
Montfort and Bogost 2009], maker culture [
Sayers 2017], minimal computing [
Smithies 2018], and various critical and
philosophical approaches perhaps best described as “epistemologies of building”
[
Ramsay and Rockwell 2012].
The problem is that this work tends to be only tangentially related to, or simply
ignore, the seemingly pedestrian problems associated with technical design and
development, archiving, and sustainability. Work on humanities research
infrastructure is often written by people more invested in the easy development
of new projects (and thus the easy availability of development teams and server
and hosting infrastructure) than their ongoing maintenance, which hinders rather
than helps the sustainability argument [
Anderson 2013]. The
situation is further complicated by widespread cynicism about large-scale
infrastructure development resulting from the failure of programmes such as
Project Bamboo in the United States [
Dombrowski 2014], which aimed
to create a large national cyberinfrastructure in the humanities but foundered
due to poor requirements elicitation, a focus on service-oriented architecture,
and over-use of dominant STEM models. Geoffrey Rockwell is correct to suggest
that digital humanities needs to assess its own requirements, and not assume
that infrastructures designed for one purpose will fit another, but it is
sensible to at least align the digital humanities to approaches in other fields
[
Rockwell 2010].
The work of researchers like Deb Verhoeven and Toby Burrows, who explore the
political and aesthetic implications of large-scale Research Infrastructures
(RIs) alongside issues of sustainability and maintenance, provides a new model
for thinking through these issues [
Verhoeven and Burrows 2015]
[
Verhoeven 2016]. The value of such work issues from its
connection of DH infrastructure development and its maintenance with
sociological and anthropological work in infrastructure studies capable of
normalising technical infrastructure as a
human and
community asset in need of maintenance and support, rather than
a technical artefact in need of service management [
Bowker 1997]
[
Dourish and Bell 2014]. Well financed infrastructure combined with careful
requirements analysis, tailored to the needs of humanities researchers and their
local institutions, can dramatically increase the quality (and lower the costs)
of digital humanities support, maintenance, and archiving, but lack of technical
leadership has stymied development. Effort also needs to be directed towards the
development of best practice and quality assessment frameworks for digital
scholarship that include sustainability and maintenance at their core.
These perspectives are informed by changes in the policies guiding the
development and management of STEM RIs which, although larger in scale, deal
with many of the same issues and are not as focused on technology as sceptics
might assume. A 2017 European Commission working paper on sustainable research
infrastructures noted the centrality of both people and technology to the future
of reproducible science [
European Commission 2017], and a number of reports on
e-infrastructure at the European level and in the United Kingdom have made
similar recommendations [
ESF 2011]
[
Ciula, Nyhan, and Moulin 2013]
[
Open Research Data Task Force 2017]. The 2017 “State of the
Nation” report of the UK Research Software Engineering (RSE)
association overtly positions permanent career paths at the core of both
high-quality science, and technical sustainability [
Alys et al. 2017]. If
there is a failure of post-millennium digital humanities, it could well be
related to this human aspect, rather than anything overtly technical: setting
aside all other considerations, permanent DH development teams will resolve most
issues of sustainability and maintenance.
The experience of KDL suggests that the most effective strategy is to offer
open-ended contracts and then embed archiving and maintenance deep into the
culture of technical development, from requirements definition and the
identification of digital research tools and methods, through to infrastructure
design, deployment and maintenance. This is based on a conception of
infrastructure that moves beyond material technical necessities, templates, and
process documents (as essential as they are), towards one that acknowledges the
centrality of people, funding, ethics, technology strategy, software engineering
method, and data management to the long-term health of our research
infrastructures. This becomes even more pressing if we acknowledge the wider
epistemological and methodological shifts occurring across scientific and
humanistic disciplines, related to the emergence of data science but also myriad
new forms of research dissemination and product development. The community needs
to recognise that high quality research requires attention to long-term digital
sustainability if quality is to be maintained. This extends well beyond the
specifically digital humanities, of course, and relates to all
disciplines and interdisciplinary efforts that use digital tools and methods.
Importantly, the failure (or sub-optimal performance) of previous large-scale
infrastructure efforts supports the argument for greater attention to the need
for investment in human capital and process maturity alongside capital
investment. This suggests the need for a range of initiatives from institutions
engaging in DH activity and funding agencies supporting it, from the development
of viable technical career paths, to training in basic software development
methods: archiving and sustainability is only one aspect.
Software Development Life-cycle (SDLC) & Infrastructure
A key part of KDL’s work concerns improvements to the engineering and procedural
frameworks that enable digital scholarship. Much like research, software
development rarely takes a linear path, and the relative volatility of the open
web and rapid development of new technologies presents an ecosystem within which
published work needs to be protected and maintained over time. Rather than
presenting a pristine environment for artefacts, the digital environment, much
like the physical one, presents challenges of an economic, political and
entropic nature. The precarious existence of artefacts in the physical world,
and the evolving responses from the research community to their preservation and
documentation, therefore inform our digital practices. To this end, KDL uses an
approach to the funding and management of research projects that considers the
complexities of not just the research, but also software development and its
ongoing sustainability in a changing digital landscape. While slightly
increasing initial costs, the benefits of this approach accrue over time -
particularly in relation to academic impact, but also medium and long-term
maintenance, archiving and preservation.
To support this, the team have added System, Application, and Data Lifecycle
Management to our Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), along with Research
Data Management. This has resulted in a process of analysis, development, and
maintenance underpinned by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defined in
collaboration with PIs and management. The SDLC is based on the Agile DSDM®
method [
Agile Business Consortium 2016], adapted for a research context. A range of
archival products (static sites, removal of front-end, data migration, graceful
shutdown, visualisation etc.) are now considered at the initial requirements
gathering phase of projects, for implementation when funding ends. Although our
concern here is with archiving, maintenance, and sustainability processes for
the projects themselves, the work functions within a wider context of not only
ongoing research activity but software engineering process and infrastructure
management.
[9]
The laboratory inherited significant infrastructure from the Department of
Digital Humanities (DDH): rack servers supporting 400GB RAM, over 180 virtual
machines, 27TB of data, and over 100 digital projects ranging from simple
WordPress and Omeka sites to ground-breaking scholarly editions and historical
prosopographies. At the time of writing a full infrastructure upgrade has been
completed, including the deployment of new enterprise backup servers and core
infrastructure that has upgraded capacity to ~1TB of RAM and additional disk
space running on Solid State Drives (SSD). Network capacity has been upgraded
from 1GB to 10GB. The new infrastructure has capacity for significantly more
than 200 virtual machines, and planning has already started for a renewal cycle
starting in 2023, to ensure continuity past the life of even the new
infrastructure. This information is provided less as an advertisement for KDL,
than as a reminder that sustainability requires maintenance of supporting
hardware as well as the software that is the focus of this article. Coordinating
maintenance of all levels of the technology stack requires considerable effort
when it needs to support more than a handful of projects.
Principles
Our experience suggests that, much as with traditional production and publication
of research materials of archival quality, digital projects benefit from being
planned and executed with their longevity in mind from the start. This often
involves updating scholarly content, but always involves technical maintenance
to ensure the publication remains accessible. This places additional importance
on consistency and transparency in approach, supported by effective
dissemination and internal peer review of technical documentation. Maintenance
and ongoing hosting of a digitally published research project needs to be
included in grant application budgets, reflecting the life-cycle of the project
beyond the date of publication, with a set of maintenance milestones determined
at the outset. This is not merely good operational practice, but an indication
of the intellectual maturity of the project. Proper understanding of digital
scholarship requires an acknowledgement of its entropic nature; the absence of
forward planning implies a misunderstanding of the object being produced at a
fundamental – perhaps ontological – level. KDL’s process is thus guided by a
desire to enable high quality digital scholarship, balancing technical and
financial issues with the intellectual and historical significance of the
project alongside a consideration of its impact, future funding potential, and
potential contribution to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). The
process blends experience with common sense, rather than being anything
particularly complicated. It also assumes, significantly, that not all projects
should be maintained in perpetuity. Some are better conceived as short-term or
even momentary interventions in the scholarly conversation, to be archived
online for the historical record but not worth the intellectual, technical, and
financial overhead of ongoing maintenance. Convincing PIs of this can sometimes
be difficult but the more they consider the wider epistemological context of
their work (and often more importantly, the methodological and even ontological
purpose of the output they aim to produce) the more open they become. The
realisation they don’t need to bind themselves to a project permanently -
forever concerned about its future maintenance - usually comes as something of a
relief.
KDL’s archiving process (see
https://www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/our-work/archiving-sustainability/) has
been, and is still being, developed in response to emergent tensions between the
envisioned and manifest material, financial, and political conditions in which
legacy projects exist. As Paul Conway has noted, transforming archiving and
preservation practice entails fundamental decisions about how the practice is “
conceived, organised, and
funded”
[
Conway 2010, 69]. Our findings will ideally contribute to a conversation across the
digital humanities community, funding agencies, and policy makers with a view to
identifying and implementing (or at the least recommending) frameworks,
infrastructures, and funding mechanisms that can ensure the sustainability of
digital projects and their data in a way that shares the burden between
universities and cultural heritage organisations, and funding agencies. While it
is unreasonable to expect funding agencies to provide ongoing funding for all
projects, it does seem reasonable to ask their support for projects that are
managed according to transparent processes and accepted frameworks, that include
a range of archival approaches, and integration into Research Data Management
(RDM) systems that leading research agencies advocate greater use of [
Open Research Data Task Force 2017]. As indicated earlier in this article, we do not feel
it is our place to provide detailed recommendations here, however: the issue
needs ongoing dialogue and careful consideration across the community.
By developing open approaches to the development of archiving and sustainability
frameworks, even if they are merely the “
least bad” option [
Conway 2010, 72], the digital humanities community might
aspire to deliver on the promise of earlier initiatives like the Arts &
Humanities Data Service and safeguard the future of both the community and
public investment in digital research projects. It is worth noting here that
additional technical work has been initiated behind the scenes at King’s
College, in a self-funded collaboration between the lab and the DH department.
The goal is to create a “data lake” of metadata and digital
objects collected over the history of DH at King’s, and comprising over 5
million digital objects, for use in teaching as well as research (see
https://data.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/).
This is part of a commitment to the implementation of deep infrastructure to
support DH archiving, which will be aligned to institutional research data
management infrastructure and made openly available to the wider community. Work
is progressing slowly, as time and funding allows, but the goal is to create a
suite of approaches that can be used in the future.
Digital curation has been described as a “
new discipline”
[
Adams 2009], evolving from archives and libraries tasked with assessing digital
material for collection, use, and preservation. KDL’s process for archiving
inherited “legacy” projects reflects this. Rather than
relying on rigid assessment matrices or requiring slavish attention to
cost-benefit analyses, it is self-consciously oriented towards relatively
subjective issues of “scholarly and intellectual value” and
“cultural heritage value”. These need to be balanced
against hard operational and financial realities, but it was decided relatively
early in the process that it would not be possible to create a procrustean
assessment framework that could be applied rigorously to all projects: the
heterogeneous nature of the projects (technically as well as intellectually),
the frequent mismatch between scholarly value and straight-forward impact
metrics such as web traffic, as well as uneven access to funding meant that a
more holistic - but still consistent and transparent - process needed to be
adopted.
KDL analysts therefore assess each project in terms of scholarly value, technical
complexity, security risk, maintenance cost, infrastructure cost, PI engagement,
institutional support, value to KDL, and value to King’s College London. Early
assessments used a tabular matrix to guide analysis, but this was quickly
abandoned as too limiting: recommendations are made in prose form, allowing
quantitative and qualitative issues to be taken into account. A brief
“business case”, including recommendations and costs, is then presented
to the Vice Dean Research, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and a decision is
made. Problematic cases can be referred to the Faculty Research and Impact Team
(FRIT), and upwards to the Dean if necessary. The process, at this high level,
works very well. Simon Tanner’s notion of a “balanced view”, assessing value using both subjective
and objective measures, allows the lab to act as liaison between the projects
and University, and thus support the projects and the wider DH community [
Tanner 2012]. The key principle is that KDL acts as facilitator
rather than decision-maker, providing professional digital humanities analysis
to both PI and management. This requires resources to engage in due diligence,
willingness to steward sometimes difficult conversations, and occasional
recommendations that projects be archived rather than maintained in their live
state, but the process ensures all stakeholders have equal access to information
and that escalation paths exist.
Implementation
It is worth detailing the effort required to work through KDL’s archiving and
sustainability issues. During the financial year 2016/2017, the lab undertook a
complete audit of all projects held on its servers, including inherited legacy
projects, and developed processes for realistic costing of their maintenance and
hosting. In tandem, the lab set up contractual agreements that supported the
reintegration of the updated legacy projects brought under Service Level
Agreements (SLA) into the broader production processes of the lab. During the
final four months of the financial year 2016/2017, one full-time member of staff
was dedicated to the implementation of the new processes, with the intention to
bring all prior legacy projects into current processes under SLA, migrate
projects not suited to further managed hosting at KDL to the university’s IT
department (ITS), external hosting, or a static legacy server, and archiving the
remainder. A pilot phase was conducted using the portfolios of two prolific
King’s College London researchers. Business cases for those projects were
submitted to the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, resulting in approval for 5
years’ support and maintenance.
It quickly became apparent that lengthy documents could be replaced with
straightforward, fully itemised and costed Service Level Agreements
(SLAs),
[10] to
clarify the extent and duration of KDL’s commitment. These are now issued as
part of the release process of any project approaching finalisation and launch,
and discussed with PIs in the earliest stages of project definition. As the
pilot phase progressed, technical and supporting data about additional projects
was gathered, including historical information about funding, PIs/Co-Is,
external stakeholders, and infrastructure. This required the identification and
synthesis of multiple historical sources but enabled KDL to gain an overview of
the extent of the legacy projects, including dependencies and risks. The
information was collated and included in documentation that supported the
reintegration of each project into the lab’s active production cycle, whether
that be via managed decommissioning, migration, or defined support and
maintenance underwritten by key stakeholders. Based on this high-level
assessment, 29 projects were dealt with almost immediately in a first phase that
involved them being taken offline and archived by storing database dumps and
content files in zip files, because they were incomplete, or incurred security
risk out of all proportion to their scholarly value.
[11] Others required only basic maintenance to make them
secure. A further 35 were scheduled for Phase 2,
[12] and 35 for Phase
3.
[13] Only legacy projects that were no
longer in active development were considered. Another class of project,
inherited from DDH but still in active development, were dealt with using a
different process. A second key document - the Statement of Work (SoW) - evolved
to fit a subsidiary need: to detail and cost work required to bring projects up
to an acceptable standard for ongoing hosting. That might only involve simple
server upgrades, requiring half a day, or several weeks of active development to
rebuild the site in its entirety.
[14]
King’s College London Faculty of Arts & Humanities approved all the business
cases presented to it for support of ongoing maintenance and hosting of projects
led by Principal Investigators at King’s College. It should be remembered that
the approved SLAs are all finite - ranging from two to five years - but equally
important to note that agreement was reached only after robust business cases
were produced, detailing the scholarly and cultural heritage value, the
significance to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the
“brand” value to the university, and the PI’s future
career. This created a new, and essential, level of clarity and made the value
of the projects more apparent. The process, which made cost, value, and mutual
expectations transparent, was a necessary first step towards the faculty
managing its digital assets in a more transparent and cost-effective way, and in
alignment to its wider strategic direction. It is perhaps not an ideal solution,
which would involve limitless funds and assurances of perpetual support, but it
is practical and (we think) sensible given the complexities of long-term
technology management and the need to accept competing needs for finite
funds.
If some projects are eventually moved towards archiving, a decommissioning
process is followed, aligned with wider university research data management
requirements. It is highly unlikely now that any projects will simply disappear.
At the very least their data and a public metadata record will be retained: the
future of each project can be discussed on a case-by-case basis. Enhanced
transparency has also facilitated co-funding arrangements (between College,
Faculty, Department, external partner, and funder, for example), reducing the
average SLA cost of ~£2000 GBP per year to an extremely reasonable level for
each party. It is equally important to note that KDL is currently authorised to
charge maintenance and hosting at cost recovery level, far below commercial
rates (this is the case for normal project work too). This might need to be
adjusted in future years, to manage demand if nothing else, but was a crucial
element in explaining and justifying the archiving and sustainability projects
to colleagues.
The process has made us keenly aware of gaps in contemporary funding models,
which would ideally incentivise projects to manage their future according to
similarly transparent and flexible models, but instead incentivise researchers
to produce “orphan” projects with uncertain futures. If a
tone of frustration is detected in this article it stems from the relatively
common-sense nature of the solutions, coupled with the significant stress placed
on teams like KDL by a lack of robust policy. This is not to criticise funding
agencies, who have been learning about the implications of digital scholarship
alongside the communities they serve (they do an excellent job, with limited
resources) but it is important to recognise the human cost of poorly managed
projects and infrastructure. It is concerning that recent updates to the UK Arts
& Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant application process is likely to
worsen rather than improve the situation in that country, by requiring data
management plans but nothing related to system quality, infrastructure, or
lifecycle management.
Conversations with PIs outside King’s College London were often the most
difficult, as is to be expected given differences in administrative alignment
and awareness of KDL as a new initiative. Expectations of ongoing hosting and
maintenance were often ill-defined, and reliant on memory rather than crisp
documentation: a result, again, of the loose requirements for archiving and
sustainability in past years, as well as changes in personnel and restructuring.
In many cases, the production of a SLA was all that was required for the PI to
request support from their university (so that they had a simple document to
present to administrative teams, usually with only a modest cost attached). If
it could be demonstrated that a King’s staff member was closely involved in the
project or stood to benefit from its ongoing maintenance, King’s College London
would support a proportion of the SLA. Discussions could become difficult in
more complex cases, such as when significant work needed to be undertaken to
upgrade the project, or maintenance costs were above the average (normally due
to significant use of disk space) but all PIs, internal and external, were
offered three scenarios:
- Service Level Agreements, and (where appropriate) software updates,
which guaranteed hosting, regular software maintenance, and server
updates under renewable two to five-year contracts, costed on the basis
of individual project requirements and including Statements of Work
(SoWs), when required, for necessary additional upgrade work.
- For non-King’s staff, migration to the partner institution for local
hosting.
- Archiving of websites no longer in active use. This option did not
result in the destruction of research data and could entail rendering
websites static for migration to a legacy server, or packaging for
archival storage.
The last option can present problems, given the complexity of some of the
projects and the state of the art in digital archiving. Technical issues abound.
A range of “archival solutions” have been considered, ranging
from removing complex front-end websites and archiving data, to software
emulation, and packaging sites as virtual machines for offline use. The basic
philosophy is to embrace heterogeneity of archival solutions, in line with the
heterogeneity of the projects themselves. Bespoke approaches are developed on a
case-by-case basis, although always in alignment with wider university, national
and (where appropriate) international infrastructure initiatives.
Other initiatives are being considered too. At the time of writing, KDL is
discussing an arrangement with the British Library National Web Archive to
improve technical and procedural alignment. King’s Research Data Management
system is likely to be used for preservation of raw research data along with the
lab’s own server infrastructure. A project has been completed with the British
Museum to produce static sites (more conducive to future archiving) from one of
their legacy projects [
Jakeman 2018], and a collaboration with
Stanford University Press is exploring new modes of digital publishing to
balance advanced features with sustainability and maintainability [
Ciula 2017]. The internal project referred to above, with the
Department of Digital Humanities, aims to aggregate Digital Humanities content
stored at King’s College and making it publicly available for reuse so that even
if some projects do lose their active web presence, their data will still be
accessible. The lab is beginning to consider in some technical detail the
different options available for archiving and preservation, including the
difference between presentation and data layers, the possibility of preserving
functionally limited but usable “static” websites rather than
complete systems, the possibility of packaging publications into downloadable
“virtual machines” that can be run on the desktop, and
coupling all of these approaches with “snapshots” stored in
the British Library National Web Archive and Internet Archive. The work
described in this paper only becomes tractable through a range of solutions, in
other words, conducted using a research-oriented frame of mind that seeks to
embed archiving and preservation deeply within core digital humanities theory,
method, practice, and policy. Improved policy and infrastructure at a national
level would help significantly, but this is a multi-faceted issue that will
require broad-based input and support.
When it was clear the best possible approach to assessment had been found,
transparent processes were in place, and clear options determined, emails were
sent to PIs en masse to accelerate phases Two
and Three. It had become essential the assessment process not drag on,
undermining the future of the lab, so there was a degree of nervousness about
potential responses. In the initial email to project partners, a deadline for
responses within 6 weeks from the sending date was given, after which Faculty
would be notified of the status of the resource. After a further month, the
permission would be sought from Faculty to archive the projects of
non-responsive project partners. This timeline was clearly set out in the emails
and followed to the letter. Responses were largely swift and positive, allowing
mutually acceptable solutions to be identified in collaboration. Project
partners generally responded to initial contact well within the stated time, and
often immediately. Responses were broadly appreciative, and the rationale for
putting older digital research outputs on secure footing appeared intuitively
clear. This raises the question of whether resistance to adopting best practice
across the wider research community is exaggerated: it is perhaps more the case
that robust methods and clear processes are lacking, and funding policy acts
against their development.
The lab’s attitude, enabled by decisions made within Faculty, prompted progress.
King’s Digital Lab operates on a non-profit basis (with accordingly slim
margins), so one of the most fundamental stages in assessment of the legacy
projects was the audit of not just the digital resources held on KDL servers,
but also defining the costs involved in their responsible ongoing management and
hosting. In this sense the lab performed an administrative and communicative
role, rather than acting as judge and jury. The inherently positive nature of
the process made it more likely PIs would respond well and allowed the lab to
streamline the further processing of legacy projects, and minimise detailed
negotiation and problem solving for which there is limited resource. The aim was
to conclude the financial year of 2016/2017 with no undocumented or out of
contract legacy projects remaining on KDL servers, and all legacy projects that
were neither migrated nor archived being brought under Service Level
Agreements.
That was not completely achieved, but results were satisfactory. At the time of
writing all assessment and decisionmaking has been completed, Service Level
Agreements are in place for projects that are to remain hosted on KDL servers,
migration has occurred or is scheduled for other projects, and archiving of the
remainder will occur when time and resource allows. Given no perfect final state
will ever be reached the initial task of rationalising and safeguarding the
lab’s project inheritance can be considered to be complete. The newly
established processes will be used to manage the lab’s project estate for the
foreseeable future. Security risk has been brought within significantly more
acceptable tolerances. At the end of the process dozens of once uncertain
projects will have been given clarity, and a valuable corpus of digital
humanities projects will have been brought under robust management.
Surprisingly, given the anxiety that attended the start of the initiative, 46%
of the projects were placed under Service Level Agreements, guaranteeing between
three and five years of secure maintenance and hosting. Where the end date of
projects passed less than five years ago, the lab issued backdated, zero-cost
Service Level Agreements, itemised with future costs for each component, to
clearly signpost future hosting and maintenance needs. This effectively gave
several major projects no-cost extensions to their hosting and maintenance, as
well as giving them time to consider their options and plan for the future. At
least two significant sites will be rebuilt using new funding, and several
others will be subject to follow-on funding proposals. It is worth mentioning
that a very small subset of projects (five in total) await full resolution,
while discussions around creative funding (e.g. crowdfunding and archiving
options) continue.
In conjunction with the upgrade to KDL’s core infrastructure, this gives our
community 3-5 years to continue seeking new options and align to evolving
archiving and preservation efforts in the wider research data management and
eResearch communities [
Nicholson 2018]. 39% of the inherited
projects have been archived in some form, 13% on a static HTML legacy server
that allows their basic content to remain live but incurs no further
maintenance, and 26% on local backup servers. No data, in the form of image
files or otherwise, has been removed from potential circulation. Plans are in
place to migrate the remaining 15% of the projects to other institutions, in a
very pleasing move that signals that they also see the value in investing in the
future of digital scholarship. 6% will be migrated to a WordPress service hosted
in King’s College IT department, and 9% will be migrated to external hosting
providers. The onward cost of our current project archiving services are
negligible; local backup is supported from baseline operating costs, and the
running cost of the two static HTML legacy servers is ~£600 per annum. The major
costs, naturally, stem from the 12 months of effort, including 4 months with a
dedicated full-time team member, to undertake assessment, produce documentation,
and communicate with PIs. It is possible that significant additional costs will
appear when more complex sites need to be archived, too, but these cases will
appear in a staggered way and therefore be more manageable as part of the lab’s
normal software development and maintenance process. The end result, in simple
terms, is KDL’s new “maintenance schedule”: a list of ~50 projects, all
covered by Service Level Agreements and generating modest internal and external
income to offset costs. Concerns remain about some projects, and others remain
“in process”, but that – in our estimation – is the best that can be
expected: maintenance and archiving of digital scholarship is an iterative,
continuous process, that does not allow for perfect endings.
Conclusion
King’s Digital Lab has implemented pragmatic processes that take into account the
human, as well as the technical, financial and political perspectives implicit
in digital scholarship. It has reinforced the lab’s commitment to producing
digital research within a holistic and scalable framework, supported by
straightforward documentation to ensure mutual clarity about what can be
expected from research partnerships. A key component of this framework includes
the enhanced Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process, which is now
implemented from the inception of a project, to align its development with
post-publication maintenance and, where appropriate, archiving plans. Early
clarity about the feasibility and cost of maintaining projects beyond the funded
period allows all parties time to plan ahead, with sufficient time to
accommodate the development and turnaround time of follow-on funding
applications, negotiations with partner institutions, infrastructure resourcing
and requisite allocation of staff time. In addition to optimising maintenance
and management of legacy digital research outputs, this approach minimises
ambiguity regarding responsibilities and expectations, and contributes to
reputation risk management in more than one dimension. Contrary to what might
have been expected, KDL’s experience of introducing the level of transparency
and process described in this article was almost uniformly positive.
Successive generations of software (to support visualisation, AR/VR) and other
efforts to enhance research methodologies and impact mean the urgency of the
questions addressed in this paper is unlikely to diminish in future years,
requiring ongoing interrogation of what is an “ideal”
technology stack, and best practice. While experimentation with new technology
is vital and the precise details of future process design cannot be rigidly
determined, more attention to its sustainability, particularly where there is
significant investment from public funds, will enhance the field, enhance the
benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration outside of the Arts and Humanities,
and strengthen arguments for robust funding of the digital humanities sector.
Here, it is necessary to differentiate between established technologies and
experimental ones. We need to accept brittle code and the possibility of failure
in the shorter term for developing technologies but incubate emerging
technologies within a context of “legacy risk assessment” informed by
industry standards and including upfront analyses of wider infrastructures and
technological limitations. Software sustainability will, in all likelihood,
remain a pressing issue for the foreseeable future across all research
disciplines. The broader conclusion from the experience of KDL is that entropic
factors should be taken into account at early planning stages and be accepted by
all parties to the project including PIs, developers, and funders. Here, the
degree of orientation towards (or away from) archiving and sustainability are
core concerns. Funding and associated policy is central to sustainable
development, maintenance and archiving. Assuming that future technologies will
make it easier or cheaper to solve problems associated with digital entropy is
no longer adequate. Sustainable funding strategies need to be based on
transparent costing that includes infrastructure and maintenance costs and made
simpler and more reliable by established best practice. For this to be
effective, realistic costing methods need to be developed and shared between
product partners, and embedded within funding policy.
Acknowledgements
King’s Digital Lab is indebted to the many PIs who initiated and led the projects
described in this paper. Special thanks to Harold Short and colleagues (too many
to list) in the Centre for Computing and the Humanities (CCH), Centre for
eResearch (CERCH), and Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) for many years of
ground-breaking work. We would also like to thank Paul Readman, and King’s
College London Faculty of Arts & Humanities, for their generous support and
wise counsel in establishing King’s Digital Lab. Paul Readman, Tobias Blanke,
Charlotte Roueché, Paul Spence, Simon Tanner, and anonymous DHQ reviewers provided valuable feedback on drafts of the article.
Notes
[1] The financial year runs from August to July at our
institution.
[2] CCH itself evolved from an initiative known as the Research Unit
in Humanities Computing, established in 1992. For more information see [Short et al. 2012] [3] Projects
URLs with associated Principal Investigator (PI) acting as current signatory
of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) with KDL: Charlotte Roueché (PI),
Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity (2005)
<http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/ala2004/index.html>; Charlotte Roueché
(PI), The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania
(2009) <http://inslib.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009/index.html>; David Carpenter
(PI), The Henry III Fine Rolls Project (2009),
<http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk>; James McLaverty (PI),
Jonathan Swift Archive (2009) <http://jonathanswiftarchive.org.uk/index.html>; Kathryn
Sutherland (PI), Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts
Digital Edition (2010) <http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html>; Anne Curry (PI),
The Gascon Rolls project 1317-1468 (2011),
http://www.gasconrolls.org/en; Keith Lilley (PI), Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great
Britain (2011), <http://www.goughmap.org>; Michael Hicks (PI), Mapping the Medieval Countryside Places, People, and
Properties (2012), <http://www.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk>; Charlotte Roueché
(PI), Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (2013), <http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk>; John Martindale (PI), Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (2014),
<http://www.pbe.kcl.ac.uk>; Martin Butler, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (2014),
<https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson>;
Charlotte Roueché (PI), Heritage Gazetteer for
Cyprus (2015), <http://www.cyprusgazetteer.org>; Stephen Baxter (PI), Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (2010),
<http://www.pase.ac.uk>;
Dauvit Broun (PI), Models of Authority: Scottish
Charters and the Emergence of Government (2017), <https://www.modelsofauthority.ac.uk>; Julia Crick, The Conquerors' Commissioners: Unlocking the Domesday
Survey of SW England (2017), <https://www.exondomesday.ac.uk>. [4] At the risk of forgetting important contributors we
would like to acknowledge Miguel Vieira, Elliott Hall, Jamie Norrish, Paul
Caton, Geoffroy Noel, Gabby Bodard, Arianna Ciula, Neil Jakeman, Charlotte
Tupman, Ginestra Ferraro, Elena Pierazzo, Simona Stoyanova, Paul Vetch,
Tamara Lopez, Gerhard Brey (†), Raffaele Viglianti, Valeria Vitale, Eleonora
Litta, Zaneta Au, Hafed Walda, Richard Palmer, Alejandro Giacometti, Michele
Pasin, Faith Lawrence, Peter Rose, John Lee, Jasmine Kelly, Artemis
Papako-stoulis, Caroline Bearron, Osman Hankir, Felix Herrman, Martin
Jessop, Tim Watts, Brian Maher, Andrew Wareham, Juan Garces.
[5] We have chosen not to name them in this article, out of
respect for their situation.
[6] See Allington, Daniel,
Brouillette, Sarah and Golumbia, David, “Neoliberal
Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.”
Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2016 for an
example of the neoliberal critique of digital humanities, and Smithies,
James, The Digital Humanities and the Digital
Modern. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 for a
rejoinder.
[9] Future articles are planned to detail our SDLC, which is
too involved to describe in detail here. It is based on the Agile DSDM®
method for those interested in exploring more. See https://www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/how-we-work/why-work-us/ for a
high-level overview. [11] For phase 1, projects
were selected on the basis of low research value and minimal complexity,
e.g. underused blog sites, orphaned pilot sites, low relevance to King’s
College and King’s Digital Lab (e.g. hosting of personal Wordpress sites,
conference sites without updates since the main event, etc). A template
email, offering four options (Service Level Agreement, migration to own
host, migration to ITS microsite (if a King’s partner), or archiving) was
sent to projects partners. Recipients were asked to respond within six
weeks, after which we said that permission would be sought from Faculty to
decommission the web resource. A further month from this, the site would be
decommissioned. The majority of project partners responded in a timely
fashion, and we successfully agreed on a future path for individual
resources.
[12] Phase 2, analysis of the
remaining legacy projects (more complex digital research outputs, primarily
REF-able and perceived to be of mid- to high research value) began with an
investigation within the lab to unearth institutional memory of the affected
projects. They were prioritised according to the categories “SLA
supported” (where no moneys would be charged to the project in the
contractual period), “SLA paid” (charged according to cost recovery
including overheads for services rendered over the contractual period),
“migration” (to static legacy server maintained gratis by KDL at
low cost, or to another host), or “archiving” (with AWS Glacier or
similar). Responses were requested within 6 weeks.
[13] In the final phase, we aggregated preferred outcomes from the
pilot, first and second phases.
[14] Although we weren’t aware of it at the
time, this approach aligns well to Matthew Addis’ notion of “Minimal Viable Preservation”, which recommends an
“engineering approach” to preservation that takes
care of straight-forward issues before moving onto more complex (and
therefore costly) cases. Matthew Addis. “Minimum Viable
Preservation - Digital Preservation Coalition.” Digital
Preservation Coalition, November 12, 2018. https://dpconline.org/blog/minimum-viable-preservation (accessed
November 28, 2018). Works Cited
Adams 2009 Adams, Wright R. “Archiving Digital Materials: An Overview of the Issues.”
Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery &
Electronic Reserve 19, no. 4 (2009): 325–335.
Allington et al. 2016 Allington, Daniel,
Brouillette, Sarah and Golumbia, David, “Neoliberal Tools
(and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.”
Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2016.
Alys et al. 2017 Alys, Brett, Croucher, Michael,
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