0.17 Sustaining digital scholarship in archaeology

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I approach the issue of sustainability from the perspective of an archaeologist who has been involved for the last eight years in the construction of a digital research archive ( www.chacoarchive.org ) that focuses on the prehistory of, and the history of research in, Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Native American groups of the American Southwest in northwestern New Mexico fashioned a remarkably complex and rich culture in and around Chaco Canyon between approximately AD 850 and 1130. Key questions about the historical trajectory of the Chaco culture—aspects of demography, ritual, and social organization—continue to be debated despite over a century of archaeological research in the canyon. The Chaco Archive is designed to integrate widely scattered published and unpublished texts, drawings, photographs, and inventories to allow contextual studies of Chacoan settlements that have not previously been possible. Both the Chaco Research Archive and a very similar endeavor, the Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery ( www.daacs.org ), have been created with the support of the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

I will not focus on the details of the Chaco Archive here, but provide the background to emphasize that I come to this discussion as an archaeologist interested in resolving research questions through empirical tests of alternative answers to those questions. I thus will use the phrase “digital scholarship” purposely because I see limited value in restricting our discussion to the humanities as opposed to social sciences or sciences. Much “scientific” research ultimately addresses humanistic concerns. Moreover, sustainability issues—as well as many other concerns—crosscut the many worlds of digital scholarship and have done so since intensive academic use of computers began in the middle of twentieth century.

As scholars in more and more disciplines embrace the research and educational tools available in the digital world, however, there is little question that sustainability issues have become more complex and more critical. As the British Library has recently emphasized ( (External Link) ), we face the prospect of a digital black hole in our history if we don’t begin to place more emphasis on digital archiving. Here I focus on organizational aspects of sustainability, followed by a brief consideration of the specific nature of some approaches to digital scholarship.

In my experience, within the realm of archaeology and history there are at least two organizational paths toward sustainability that are not mutually exclusive, with some maintained by universities or foundations and others by professional organizations. Projects developed by faculty of the University of Virginia, for example, have been maintained, some for almost two decades, by university institutions. The latter range from the University of Virginia library to the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH - (External Link) ) to even more specialized institutions such as the Virginia Center for Digital History ( (External Link) ) that have evolved from individual projects into institutions with somewhat broader goals. The long-term sustainability of the individual projects has thus been dependent upon the sustainability and budgets of the supporting organizations. Libraries hopefully will always be with us, but more specialized organizations such as VCDH face much more long-term uncertainty as they are often dependent on soft money or, as institutions with more specific foci, more subject to budget cuts during times like the present, when state support of universities is dropping. The University of Virginia, for example, has decided to end funding for the directorship of VCDH after this academic year.