DH Project Maintenance, Care, and Migration

Description

Building, creating, and launching a digital humanities project can be the glamorous part of the work and often what DH trainings focus on. But how do we keep these DH projects healthy and updated, and when is it time to transform and/or migrate to a new theme, template, or system either for long-term longevity or to ease maintenance management or to fit in your institution’s digital ecosystem? When we consider migrations, what does that work actually entail and how might you project manage the process?

Accompanied by lectures and discussion, participants will get hands-on experience of migrating one of the 18 Colored Conventions Projects digital exhibits into a new WordPress theme. Participants will have the opportunity to not only learn about Colored Conventions history and how the Colored Conventions Project brings 19th-century Black organizing to digital life, but will also engage with the considerations of managing a mature DH project (10+ years old) and migrating the digital exhibits into the third generation by: giving thought to when to update, migrate, or sunset; learning technical aspects of digital publishing, visual/digital narratives, and content migration; incorporating an ethics of care into digital work; and implementing project management methods.

This is a crowdsourcing experiment for DH practitioners of all varieties — scholars, technologists, librarians — to collaborate and learn from each other so we can more fully understand the process and how our areas of expertise contribute to the final outcome.

This workshop will be held in-person. Experience with WordPress or other digital publishing/digital exhibit platforms will be useful. Please apply and share your experience working on DH projects.

Instructor

Lauren Cooper (she/her) is the digital scholarship librarian and managing director for the Center for Digital Research/#DigBlk at Penn State University. #DigBlk is home to the Black Women’s Organizing Archive, Douglass Day, and the Colored Conventions Project. Lauren works with students, colleagues, and partners to implement, develop, and manage digital scholarship and publishing projects with an attention to centering the humanity in digital humanities. Lauren has been the project manager of several major website development projects, migrations, and updates. Lauren has a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland, College Park with a concentration in Archives and Digital Curation and has previously co-taught “Nuts & Bolts of DH Project Development” at Dream Lab (2021-2024).