Workshop "Sustainability of digital editions"

17.09.2018, 9.30-17.30, North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (AWK), Palmenstraße 16, 40217 Düsseldorf, Germany

In September 2018, the DCH and the CCeH organized a workshop on the sustainability of digital editions in cooperation with the state initiative NFDI (now fdm.nrw) of the Digital University NRW and AWK. The workshop was funded by the DFG as part of the DFG-LIS project SustainLife and was organized by Dr. Claes Neuefeind and hosted by the AWK in Düsseldorf for around 80 participants.

Abstract

One of the fundamental problems of the digital humanities is ensuring the long-term availability of digital resources. This is particularly true for digital editions, whose sustainable provision is a widely known but still unsolved problem. While there are signs of increasing standardization in the area of primary data in the form of various TEI dialects, this does not apply to the layout and presentation of editions. There is still a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of appearance, functionalities and technical architectures.

Concepts to address this problem have been under development in various areas for several years. In Switzerland, for example, a National Infrastructure for Editions (NIE) is currently being set up with the aim of homogenizing edition projects, and in Austria, the Digital Editions Competence Network (KONDE) is an extensive joint project that also aims to set up and further develop a national research infrastructure for digital editions. In Germany, too, there are comparable, albeit more locally oriented initiatives that aim to create a common infrastructure for edition projects and thus to standardize digital editions in the longer term.

In order to get to know the existing activities and initiatives better and to discuss them with the specialist community, the Data Center for the Humanities (DCH) at the University of Cologne, together with the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH), is organizing a workshop on the sustainability of digital editions in cooperation with the state initiative NFDI of the Digital University NRW and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. Against the background of the ongoing debate on the creation of a National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), we would like to initiate an exchange of experiences with this workshop in order to better incorporate the needs of the DH community. The workshop aims to present and discuss existing solutions and activities dedicated to the sustainable provision of digital editions. The aim is to bundle the ongoing discussion and continue the discourse in the community.

Course of the workshop

Dr. Patrick Sahle gave an introduction to the topic of sustainability in the context of digital edition projects. This was followed by ten contributions on the concretization of the problem area, on current research activities regarding the whereabouts, accessibility and reusability of digital editions as well as on approaches to reducing obsolescence. Prof. Dr. Brigitte Mathiak and Dr. Claes Neuefeind presented the DFG-LIS project SustainLife, as well as a survey accompanying the workshop among the participants (57 participants, 31 projects), which asked about the use of technology stacks and standards in the development of digital editions.

The first survey results presented already highlighted the heterogeneity of previous sustainability strategies and technologies used and thus showed the need for standardized methods for the long-term archiving of research software. Even against the backdrop of discussions about the establishment of an NFDI, the fully booked workshop was able to continue the current discourse and contribute to the exchange of experiences among the speakers and participants as well as to the bundling of different approaches and needs.

Peter Dängeli has written a workshop report for the DHd blog in which he sheds light on the sustainability strategies discussed there.

Further materials

Program flyer | Workshop report