Sustaining DH

Principled approaches across the digital humanities, libraries, and other memory institutions—such as the FAIR, CARE, Endings, and minimal computing—have all sought to address the affordances and challenges of creating and maintaining sustainable digital infrastructure. The “danger of disappearance,” to use Amy Earhart’s term from Traces of the Old, Uses of the New (2015), looms over much of the work we do in DH, affecting all levels—for better or worse—of development, infrastructure, and planning. This talk thinks through “sustainability” across multiple registers to ask what we mean, and to whom we refer, when we invoke “sustainability” in our discussions of the digital humanities. Beginning with an overview of the Endings Principles, this talk will reflect on some of its more contentious dictums—such as “no dependencies”—as a way to consider not only the formal technical mechanisms for creating sustainable projects in the digital humanities, but also the social and political stakes of enacting them.