Dear Dominik, dear all,
Thank you for raising this vital question about the long-term persistence of digital infrastructure in our field.
My honest opinion is that university projects, when in doubt, should better not build platforms. The more sustainable and powerful answer is what you suggest: focus on creating high-quality, open data, and distribute that freely, not behind the walls of gated databases. Platforms like GitHub (and private harddrives, websites etc., I get the concerns about only betting on one horse here) are fantastic for sharing and collaborating on these datasets, and their lightweight website functions can satisfy the needs of most academic projects as you point out. It might sound less exciting than a platform with impressive visualizations, but ultimately, the data is the asset that will survive institutional changes.
Its easy to get this wrong but software is a service, not a static object. Without the people who make it work, it's not going to work, and the academic project-funding system is simply not built to support this long-term reality. This is why the most successful DH projects are, not by coincidence, so often centered on key, mission-driven individuals.
Arguing against platforms might sound contradictory coming from someone primarily known as a platform builder. But that's exactly the point I want to make: people and software are fundamentally inseparable, and your list of project examples in the first email demonstrate that very clearly. A project needs to have a very good answer to the question of long term development when trying to create digital assets. With data on github or comparable platforms, that question is easily answered.
Best wishes,
Sebastian
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, 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 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). 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 HistoryUniversity of Alberta"The University of Alberta is committed to the pursuit of truth,the advancement of learning, and the dissemination of knowledgethrough teaching, research and other scholarly and creative activities and service."-- Collective Agreement 3.01
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