There’s a level of excitement that I feel when I visit – and potentially use material from – a good-looking digital history website that looks well-maintained, attractive, and scholarly. Conversely, I often get an icky feeling when I visit a digital history site that is clearly not maintained (or at least not maintained well) and whose functionality is limited or clearly not up to snuff in terms of being intuitive for the user/viewer/reader.
As I seek to create my own digital presence, these are issues that I think of not only as I choose design elements and make certain choices about content, but about the attention my project will require of me going forward. At some point digital projects may be “done” content-wise and presented for public consumption, but they aren’t ever quite “done” if the creator wants them to remain available and used/read. I get excited at the thought of producing attractive digital history projects; I get a bit intimidated at the thought that, as Bradley Daigle at UVA has stated, digital stewardship “involves care and feeding” requiring keeping up with ever-changing technologies. (1) This especially because I’m a self-funded historian with little prospect of obtaining a grant or being financially able to hire tech people to help me maintain anything I build.
In addition to storing something as simple as a database’s password and backing everything up in multiple locations and in multiple formats, a good suggestion is potentially donating administration of it to an organization like a library or, in my case, the Shiloh National Military Park’s Corinth division. Yeah, the source for that seems a bit dated at year 2006, but the suggestion to find like-minded people or organizations who might be interested in carrying on your work (and not to mention potentially have the money to do so) is well taken. (2) The opportunities digital scholarship presents are many, but comes with unique challenges and responsibilities.
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1: Jennifer Howard, “Born Digital, Projects Need Attention to Survive,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 6, 2014). https://blueline.instructure.com/courses/1183664/assignments/6402261. Accessed May 2023.
2: Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “The Long Term Fate of Your Site” in DigitalHistory (2006). https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/preserving/6.php.html. Accessed May 2023.