Guideline 3: Write it down for you. Write it down for your team. Write it down for all who come after you.
An overarching theme in best practices centers documentation. Not only are these useful over the course of a project, but, critically, they also allow for future scholars to better use your work. Documentation is tied to sustainability, not in making a “static/permanent” work, but in making scholarship built to be reused and repurposed.
The authors provide an overview of the key challenges to sustainable scholarship in DH including, but not limited to: temporality of users, obsolete tool, the digital wasteland of 404 errors, and data sharing. One suggestion they offer is detailed documentation that does not only describe content but also process. In this way, even if a tool/resource is no longer used, the process that made it can always be reused.
Many metaphors have been utilized to explore digital sustainability, and the authors underscore how too often we consider digital sustainability only in relation to analog material sustainability. Instead, they argue that documentation for reuse and future understanding should be the foundation of these concerns. This includes documenting and crediting clearly not only academic/humanist work, but also what tools were used and who made them.
Koeser as a software developer and humanist discusses how problems of credit are exacerbated by existing humanities systems. Often reviewers are unable to understand the coding involved in a DH project, and so it’s left out of the review. The tools and software used by humanists is seen often as lesser to the interpretive work rather than essential to it. She discusses how standards of metadata and coding documentation should be normalized to properly credit tool creators.
Parikka incorporates theory of care to confront that DH projects are meant to be used immediately, rather than thinking in long-term. She asks if we can expand our ideas of collaboration to include the technology and detritus that are part of our work. How do we collaborate ethically to think long-term, in human relationships and in the relationships with our tools?
The authors, through analyzing several case studies and interviews, identify key aspects to digital humanities projects and tools that are well-used long after publication. Some key highlights include writing good documentation as the project develops, disseminating the project widely, and consulting potential users throughout the design process.
Digital community archives have become ubiquitous examples of humanities crowdsourcing: an institution or scholar provides the infrastructure for hosting, searching, displaying, and storing materials that are voluntarily supplied by individuals within a community. The materials provided could range from discrete pieces of information (e.g., identity of a person in a picture; transcription of a short passage of handwritten text) to more expansive and creative works (e.g., artwork created to commemorate a traumatic experience; personal recollections of an historical event). In some of these cases, the contributors have copyright in the materials they provide to the research project; in others, the information they contribute may be protected in other ways, such as their status as minors or the personally identifying information they provide.
While the IRB process can help to ensure some protections for participants, others aspects, like copyright considerations for participants' creative contributions, aren't part of what they typically address. For any digital humanities project in which you are engaging others' assistance, consider what rights may inhere in that work, what rewards or compensation may be desired or expected (or warranted) from that assistance, and how to ensure that you clearly articulate the terms of that relationship.
A general purpose guide to rights issues in digital humanities projects. Provides a checklist of considerations, from legal (jurisdiction, copyright, fair use, license), to ethical (vulnerable populations, contingent or student labor), to compensation (appropriate rewards and credit)
Addresses the concerns of creating non-profit digital archive. Limitation is that this assumes a library or archive is creating, which automatically gives them some protection under the law; these don’t transfer to other organizations and individuals creating public-facing and public-developed digital archives.
Intended for use "by a wide range of cultural institutions and communities with an interest in quickly setting up a digital collection site and in developing a plan for emergency digital collecting.” As such, provides a soup-to-nuts overview, including use of Omeka for managing content. Offers example of a “Statement of Values” as a way of communicating intent to potential collaborators, along with example of “terms of service” language and “summary of terms” as examples of how to clearly communicate rights, privacy, restrictions, and other aspects of content use to potential contributors. See pp. 11-13.
Local Contexts: Respecting Indigenous Rights and Cultural Sensitivities
Long histories of misappropriation and misuse of indigenous cultural objects and data understandably create barriers to and mistrust of scholar collaboration with these communities. Organizations like Local Contexts (https://localcontexts.org/about/about-local-contexts/) seek to reset agreements around display and use of cultural artifacts by centering and clearly communicating indigenous sovereignty. Traditional Knowledge Labels (TK Labels), for example, signal community rights and authority in these cultural objects and limits on others' reuse. Such labels serve in addition to (not in place of) copyright notices and, as labels developed with and by indigenous communities, help to ensure that local communities retain control over how their cultural heritage is shared. Following are some of the different mechanisms Local Contexts has developed to help ensure more ethical collaboration between indigenous groups and researchers / institutions.
Traditional Knowledge Labels, developed by indigenous and local communities and based in their existing laws and practices, communicate to outside groups how digital objects and their analogues can be appropriately used. The labels are specific to communities, while the icons for these labels remain consistent, helping to ensure they are recognizable across global audiences. Labels fall into three main categories: (1) Provenance, identifying the group that is the cultural authority for the materials; (2) Protocols, detailing culturally appropriate practices for accessing materials; and (3) Permission, designating community sanctioned and prohibited uses of the materials.
Biocultural Labels, grounded in indigenous and local communities' rules and governance practices, help to set ethical expectations for research collaborations by "defin[ing] community expectations about appropriate use of biocultural collections and data." In addition to helping ensure that the data is connected appropriately to communities, these labels also set expectations for ensuring that the communities that provide the data also see future benefit by contributing to this work. Labels fall into three main categories: (1) Provenance, identifying the group that is the cultural authority for the materials; (2) Protocols, detailing culturally appropriate practices for accessing materials; and (3) Permission, designating community sanctioned and prohibited uses of the materials.
When a label is not yet defined or available for indigenous materials, a researcher or institution can still signal the authority of that community by using a Notice. Traditional Knowledge Notices (for cultural objects) or Biocultural Notices (for biological data) provide a placeholder for eventual TK or BC Labels and communicate community prerogative in defining how the materials are accessed and used.
Modeled after Creative Commons licenses, the TK Licenses were originally a starting point for the Local Contexts project, then sidelined when indigenous communities indicated that managing cultural objects held in institutions or by researchers was of greater priority. Work has resumed on the licenses, with an expectation to release these in 2022.
