[1]
We invited National Digital Stewardship Resident [2] Jen LaBarbera to discuss her upcoming event, “Preserving our scholarship: A conversation at the intersection of digital preservation and digital humanities,” [3] an exciting discussion that will take place this Thursday at Northeastern.
During the analog age, archivists and scholars became adept at preserving scholarly work; manuscripts, drafts, and research products were donated to institutional archives, papers were conserved in acid-free boxes, and finding aids were developed to preserve the scholarly output of researchers and instructors. Now that researchers and instructors use digital tools to conduct, create, and present their research, though, how are preservation efforts matching up with this volume and format of scholarship? How and when do digital humanities scholars interact with digital preservationists? What are the best options for ensuring that the scholarly output created by digital humanists is preserved as the tools and work products used by digital humanities researchers continue to evolve? What happens to a digital humanities project when its creator moves on to their next project? How can digital humanities scholars take digital preservation of their work into consideration while they develop their projects?
One of my projects as a resident at Northeastern (through the National Digital Stewardship Residency [4]) involves developing a workflow and best practices for ingesting the Our Marathon archive [5] into our new digital repository for long-term digital preservation, and during this process, the above questions have come up often. Although Northeastern’s Digital Scholarship Group [6] is an excellent example of a close collaboration between the library and digital humanities scholars, we’re still actively considering these questions of how and when to preserve digital humanities projects and work products. We may not have all of the answers to these questions, but we hope that this event will provide a platform for continuing and enriching that conversation. Our panel will include perspectives from both digital humanists and digital preservationists/archivists in Northeastern’s community:
- Giordana Mecagni, Archives & Special Collections [7]
- Julia Flanders, Digital Scholarship Group [8]
- Jim McGrath, Digital Scholarship Group / Our Marathon [9]
- Elizabeth Hopwood, Early Caribbean Digital Archive [10]
- Ben Doyle, Early Caribbean Digital Archive
If you also wonder about the longevity and long-term access and preservation of the ongoing evolution of digital humanities, please attend and share your thoughts, ideas, and questions!
Thursday, March 12th
3:00-4:30pm
Snell Library, room 90, Northeastern University
Please send non-Northeastern-affiliated
Photo caption: “Three students with computer in Snell Library, ca. 1980.” Photographer: Eric Roth.