The metaphor Dr. Otis used in her “Managing the Digital Backlist: Sustaining, Preserving, and Deleting Old Projects” instantly made a lot of sense to me. Digital projects are kind of exactly like the car rusting in your front lawn… or maybe if we’re more optimistic, the car that you use your weekends to meticulously restore or maintain on the clean side of your garage. “You bought it, it’s on your land, it’s your responsibility.” True. Sustainability and preservation are responsibilities and in the digital education realm I don’t think this has been given enough attention. When I was a kid, I played Cool Math Games and Star Fall at school, eventually graduated to making powerpoints and little documentaries, and now I’m in my PhD program at a university that specializes in the marriage between technology and storytelling. Why have I never had this conversation of “Cool, you made this thing… so now what?” My mom has CDs of all my plays and performances from when I was younger. Should I be treating my work in the same way?
While this topic unleashed a flurry of these thoughts and questions, I really enjoyed that we also got to read about and experiment with some practical solutions. First, Dr. Otis‘s delineation of what constitutes preservation vs sustainability was helpful because each will provide a different path forward. She highlights that identifying your audience is crucial in making these kinds of decisions, specifically RRCHNM’s commitment to K-12 education. Using wget to flatten sites is the more practical solution she presents, and with a bit of practice, I could see myself employing this down the line.
During the class demonstration and in reading for this week, I couldn’t help but make connections to my work this last week. As GRAs for RRCHNM, my ~unofficial~ work partner Hannah and I sometimes are pulled in multiple directions. Recently, we’ve been asked to help out with the center’s digital publication, Current Research in Digital History, by copy editing and then creating necessary html (etc…) files in order for the new articles to be eventually uploaded. Though not from a digital sustainability point of view (I think), CRDH produces static pages instead of dynamic ones. This is a concept I’m starting to grasp, loosely I might add. That being said, Hannah and I will eventually be taking Word document versions of articles and turning them into the proper html (etc…) formats so they can be stitched together as static publicly visible pages. We are taking a written document and making it digital in a flat way, rather than taking a site and flattening it like we learned about this week. I suppose this makes the pages more low maintenance and more secure, both of which would be ideal for a digital scholarly publication run by a very busy research center.
Our conversations in class really made me confront the reality of what I feel it means to do digital preservation and sustainability work. The idea of choosing, even amongst my own work, what is worthy of saving feels weird, but I’ve been doing it my whole life. Maybe it is just the case that with scholarly work, the stakes feel higher than when I’m deciding to throw away a bunch of receipts. In Trevor Owens’ book The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, he writes, “Digital preservation is not merely a technical problem, but one that is deeply rooted in social, organizational, and ethical contexts.” This, in my mind, echoes almost every other module we’ve had this semester… digital tools are powerful, innovative, and important, but cannot and should not be separated from the humanities that gave them life.
Truthfully, the fact that not everything has survived is what keeps historians employed, because we take what’s left and reconstruct our guess as to what used to be. I can appreciate that, but I also know that when I’m recounting a story to my family or friends, I give every possible detail (ad nauseam probably) because everything is equally important in my brain. I also thought about the drawer full of flash drives in my room. The many silly USB drives with silicone casings made to look like an owl , Winnie the Pooh, or some other nonsense that I nerdily curated over my years in elementary and middle school. This is in some ways my early 2000s archive. There are old powerpoint presentations, pictures and videos of me and my friends, and way too many “Keep Calm and [insert niche fandom reference]” thumbnails. Do I keep these? I have this far so maybe yes? It might be a good idea to go turn some of those things into txt files or copy them over to a second location. I shouldn’t be a hoarder… AND for the small price of keeping a flash drive for every finger on my hands, I get to have nearly endless embarrassing and tender memorabilia of my own life 🤷♀️
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