September 2024 Community Gathering with The Endings Project
We were graciously joined by Dr. Janelle Jenstad and Martin Holmes of the University of Victoria in British Columbia’s Humanities Computing and Media Center and their initiative The Endings Project. The Endings Project was initiated in 2015 to address the persistent and pernicious problem of precious academic work being lost in digital shuffles. The work grew out of the findings of Dr. Bethany Nowiskie’s Graceful Degradation Survey, in which she spoke to scholars about the ongoing maintenance of their scholarly work in digital form. Here are some of the themes that were touched upon in our gathering.
Complexity vs. Longevity
Martin has worked with the UVic humanities department for nearly years, so he was able to share a deep history of the department’s digital presence. In his presentation, he emphasized the ease with which he was still able to access websites from 30 years ago and highlighted the fact that there was no support burden. He rarely had to touch the websites that were constructed in HTML; whereas those sites built after the introduction of more sophisticated web frameworks would break often and sometimes couldn’t be supported by older web browsers. He also noted that without the ongoing maintenance, pages and sites could easily become security vulnerabilities for themselves and the larger system.
In addition to the technical challenges, complex technical systems work different to the way traditional paper publications work in academia. Versioning and links to references can be broken in an instant.
“So this Tamagotchi model that we adopted in the 2000s turns out to be really bad for developers like me because we spend our lives on maintenance. It’s bad for scholars, because their work seems to be untrustworthy and un-citable.”
The Digital-Analog Convergence
When considering how to archive projects for the long haul, books still have a lot to teach the digital preservation community. In addition to being constructed with durable materials, the best books, the books that survive put many copies in circulation in many different locations.
Janelle shared that at the same time that more complex frameworks were being introduced the scholarly community continued to make it clear that it did not take kindly to sources that changed constantly. The modern model of rolling updates is entirely ill-suited to the norms of academia. When a source changes too frequently, it begins to be regarded as something more akin to a wiki rather than a product that other scholarly work can build upon. In order to address this, the academic publishing world began to modernize the traditional convention of the edition to more closely model one common to the software world: the version.
“Books from the earliest days of the hand press period, which begins in 1475, probably will survive for hundreds more years, and they don’t require much to be operational other than our own eyes. So if books were like digital projects.
we wouldn’t be able to read a book from 1475, unless we still had a Gutenberg style handpress.”
Memento Mori
The Latin phrase memento mori means “remember that you are mortal”, and Janelle notes that this reminder is important in the space of digital building. Funding cycles end, interests change, and academics must turn their attention to other topics. The Endings Project helps academics start their digital documents with the end in mind. The Endings Project five principles provide a valuable checklist to ensure these projects are published “endings ready”. That said, the two insist that being ready for the end is a mindset and not a tool.
“In other words, we want our sites not to be Tamagotchis, but to be pet rocks ... If you lose interest and walk away for 3 years and come back. It’s still a pet rock. It still works exactly as it did before.”