Let me second Peter's points here, especially about the scandalously underused aspect of repositories.

Something else to think about, which a number of journals are now in the process of considering, is /publishing/ your data. At Digital Medievalist and at Digital Studies (two journals I'm associated with) the editorial boards are trying to work out the best way of doing this, as well as discussing its implications for peer review and quality assurance. I understand that Digital Humanities Quarterly has already started publishing datasets (and in fact I have an action item on me to find out how they've resolved some of these issues). The Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD) is a commercial project that is already handling things like transcriptions, visualisation sets, scans, and the like, though I'm told they have pretty significant page charges.

Publishing data means that it is citable as well as reusable, and the journals that are publishing them are using adherence to archival standards as a refereeing criteria. JOAD requires you to have put your data in a repository and received a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which you then pass on to them. If your institutional repository doesn't give datasets DOIs (ours doesn't, unfortunately), an alternative is to submit your datasets to figshare.com, which is a free repository service that will give out DOIs. My only concern about figshare is that is is run by a recent postdoc and I'm not sure what his long-term preservation strategy is.

One reason for publishing datasets is that it means they are discoverable: I heard a talk by a data librarian at Beyond the PDF2 this past Spring in Amsterdam that examined all references to publicly available datasets mentioned in articles since 1990 or so in some specific natural science discipline: 90% were now irrecoverable, mostly because the URLs were broken: the PIs had died, changed institutions, or reorganised their webspace, without indicating where the material had moved.

If somebody is interested in publishing citable datasets along the lines of JOAD, I believe that both DM-J (the Digital Medievalist Journal) and Digital Studies are interested in experimenting. This is a very hot topic in publishing circles, and it is gaining some traction in DH, where we lag behind the natural scientists.


On 13-06-21 11:05 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
HI David
I think you are hitting upon a very sore point in the DH/editorial communities.  We have had editorial projects launched all over the place, with great enthusiasm and often, substantial funding.  Many now face exactly the problem you outline: what happens after the PI/institution move on?
So, here are three things you can do which will help immensely:
1.  Explicitly declare all your materials as Creative Commons Share-alike attribution: that is, **without** the 'non-commercial' use restrictions so often (and wrongly) imposed by many projects.  
2.  Place the data, so licensed, on any open server.  The Oxford Text Archive is, after so many years, still the best place I know to put your data.
That alone should be enough to make your data live forever.  And wonderfully, these two options will cost you not a cent, and maybe just  a few hours of your time to deal with the OTA deposit pack.

Optionally, you could also:
3.  Place the data within an institutional repositiory.  This gives you the option to use the IR tools to construct an interface, and provide basic search and other tools.  In my mind, this option has been scandalously underused by DH projects, for reasons which might be the subject of another post.  But this does provide the opportunity for you to present your project in a way that will connect its metadata with the whole world of OASIS etc tools, and offer a sustainable interface.  The University of Birmingham Research Archive gives some idea of how this might work: see (for example) the entries for the Mingana collection (eg http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/84/) and Codex Sinaiticus ( http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/1690/).

There is another answer:
1.  Keep the 'non-commercial' licence restriction on your data.  You can thereby claim that you are allowing all your fellow academics to use it freely, while (if you choose) not actually making it freely available outside your interface.
2.  Create an elaborate and very attractive interface to your data
3.  Persuade your university, or someone, to set up a DH centre, with a minimum staff of a director and programmer, space and dedicated equipment (say, 100K a year if you can swing this with part-time staff etc).  This DH centre will then have the task of maintaining your data (which of course, only the centre has), interface and project.  This centre can then deal with all the issues you raise in your post.
4.  Persuade your university, or someone, to support data, interface and project, in perpetuity

Well, good luck with that!

Peter


On 20 Jun 2013, at 23:28, Michelson, David Allen wrote:

Dear Colleagues,

I'd like to add a follow up question to this very informative discussion.

I am also in the process of building a DH sub-community for a specific disciplinary niche.

I would like to ask your advice on governance and standards.
I am looking for models and best practices to ensure long term sustainability of my collaborative DH project once it hopefully outgrows its incubation stage. 
Could you please point me to long running DH projects whose protocols for governance, editorial oversight, institutional ownership/hosting I might emulate? I am thinking of medium sized DH projects as models, so bigger than one scholar publishing a digital project, but much smaller than the TEI consortium or Digital Medievalist. 
Given the concerns over sustainability inherent in DH, I am also interested in advice on how to transition a project from the stage where a grant-funded PI is the leader in getting content online to where a volunteer editorial board (and institutional hosts) maintain a project longer term. Also, how do DH projects handle the preservation of content for such a project? The data will be licensed open source, but who should hold the copyright and renew the domain name after the project is launched? A university library? An s-corporation independent of any institution (like some non-profit scholarly journals or professional societies)? the public domain, the original scholarly contributors?
Please suggest links to examples to follow from existing projects if you are aware of them. 
Thank you!

Dave

David A. Michelson

Assistant Professor
Vanderbilt University 
Digital Medievalist --  http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
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Peter Robinson

Honorary Research Fellow, ITSEE, University of Birmingham, UK

Bateman Professor of English
9 Campus Drive, University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5, Canada










Digital Medievalist --  http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org
News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/
Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval
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Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca
Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

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