Departing from the oft-asked question of “How do I know when my project is finished?”, this presentation centers around the question “How do I end my digital project, even if I don’t think it’s done?” Though various criteria have been proposed for evaluating the “done-ness” of a project (see, for example, this Digital Humanities Quarterly 2009 article), there has been little discussion about how to ensure that your project is archivable, accessible, and stable even if the project’s primary objects—say, an edition of a text—do not completely meet your project’s definition of “done.”
The Endings project, based out of the University of Victoria, is a collaborative project between digital humanities programmers, project directors, and university librarians that focuses less on content-based “done-ness” and more on best practices for archivable and sustainable scholarship. While the digital projects that form the core of the Endings project—The Robert Graves Diary, Le Mariage Sous L’Ancien Régime, The Nxaʔamxcín Dictionary Project, and The Map of Early Modern London,—are all at varying stages of completion, they share a common set of principles that lead to maximum archivability and accessibility.
In this presentation, Takeda discusses two of these projects at either end of the completion spectrum: The Robert Graves Diary, which was technically finished in the mid-2000s but required significant upgrades throughout the last decade; and The Map of Early Modern London, a long-standing project whose many objectives include a complete set of the extant mayoral pageants of London from 1585 to 1639 by 2022. Through these projects, Takeda explores and shares what makes a project “Endings-compliant” and offers up some best principles for thinking about how to end your digital humanities project from the start.
Bio:
Joey Takeda is a digital humanities programmer for a number of number of projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, The Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Stratford Festival Online. He is currently an MA student in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream) at UBC, specializing in indigenous and diasporic literatures in Canada.
(Date changed to Thursday, June 28, 2018, 12.00pm)