[INDOLOGY] Projects, websites, universities

Fri Jul 18 00:50:30 UTC 2025

Dear Dominik and esteemed INDOLOGists,

Many thanks to all those who participated in the NGMCP Wiki
thread--especially Tyler Neill and Dominik Wujastyk.

Forgive my naivete, as I am a complete novice on the topic of digital
humanities and digital preservation. However, as a philologist I have a
deep interest in the preservation of digital texts and data, and as an art
historian I have a natural concern for conservation and I've been thinking
a lot about the place of museums in the 21st century and beyond.

With increasing academic and public discourse around stolen and looted
heritage objects in their collections (among other controversial topics),
many museums in the West are in a "soul searching" moment. COVID decimated
museum attendance and, in many cases, public confidence in museums (as with
many institutions) is at an all-time low.

As major institutions like the Rubin are even shifting away from
traditional brick-and-mortar models and embracing digital (and other
experimental) models, I wonder if museum's might be well-positioned to step
in to assist with this type of long-term digital preservation. This kind of
long-term digital preservation seems to fit well within museums' broader
conservatory mission.

Do you think this is a viable idea? Or do you think it might run into some
of the same issues Dominik has raised with regards to university hosting? I
do like the GitHub idea, but I cannot help but wonder if relying on a
business like GitHub (which has a profit motive) really is a viable long
term solution.

I'm just thinking out loud here, but I'm keen to hear what other
INDOLOGists think.

*Sincerely,*

*Westin Harris*
Ph.D. Candidate
Study of Religion
University of California, Davis
https://religionsgrad.ucdavis.edu/people/westin-harris
<https://religions.ucdavis.edu/people/westin-harris>

2021 Dissertation Fellow,
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies

Sarva Mangalam.

On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 4:32 PM Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> The recent scare about the Nepal-German descriptive cataloguing data has
> yet again shown that universities are unreliable hosts for the preservation
> of digital resources.  Long-term members of this forum might remember when
> U. Washington shockingly unplugged Blackbox
> <https://blackbox.hacc.washington.edu/>, a major repository of
> Indological texts, fonts, and software in the 1990s, maintained by Tom
> Ridgeway. The Indology website and archive of etexts used to live on a
> machine at UCL, but it was closed after I left  that university, without
> consulting or warning me.  The University of Cambridge refused to continue
> hosting John Smith's Bombay website when he retired.  The Indology website
> has been able to take over <https://bombay.indology.info/> the hosting of
> that incredibly valuable asset (think: Pabuji, fonts, software,,
> Mahābhārata, Rāmāyana) .  There are many more examples of websites and
> archives being just shut down when faculty members move, or a couple of
> years after project funding ends.
>
> I don't have a great answer to any of this.  But I do think that the
> persistence of digital assets is a vital question for us all and something
> we should all think about carefully if we put valued resources on the
> internet.
>
> For example, the results of my last funded project are accessible through
> http://sushrutaproject.org.  I have tried to push as much important stuff
> as I can tot Github and Zenodo (and http://archive-it.org).  But as soon
> as I stop paying personally for the registration and hosting at
> sushrutaproject.org that gateway website will close down within a few
> weeks.  Do I really want to keep paying, out of my pocket, for the rest of
> my life?
>
> For the new project that I announced yesterday, I've built the website at
> Github.  This costs nothing, so the worry about annual payments is gone.
> And as far as I can tell from reading the Github documentation, they do not
> delete project repositories, even if they become inactive.  If repositories
> are "archived" they simply become read-only (docs
> <https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/archiving-repositories>).
> Github seems very enlightened about long-term preservation.  They save
> offline archives at the bottom of a mineshaft in Svalbard - I kid you not.
> There are many good features for project work at Github, and it's all
> free.  Building a simple one-page website is also extremely quick and
> easy.  Building something more complicated, with menus etc., is more
> troublesome.  It's significantly harder than using Wordpress (the Microsoft
> Word of website creation).  But the up-side is that you get a website that
> will persist for years and doesn't require payment.
>
> Within the university world, departments and computing centres are not
> going to look after project data and websites in the long term.  The one
> institution that actually does think long-term is the university library.
> But as far as I can tell, most university libraries are still working out
> what their place is in the digital landscape.
>
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
>
> --
> Dominik Wujastyk, Professor Emeritus, Classical Indian History
> University of Alberta
>
> "The University of Alberta is committed to the pursuit of truth,
> the advancement of learning, and the dissemination of knowledge
> through teaching, research and other scholarly and creative activities and
> service."
> -- Collective Agreement
> <https://www.ualberta.ca/human-resources-health-safety-environment/media-library/my-employment/agreements/2020-2024-collective-agreement---working-version.pdf>
> 3.01
>
>
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