Digital humanities initiatives now span multiple generations of scholars, infrastructures, and institutions. As projects, platforms, and partnerships mature, questions of leadership transition and succession have become central to the future of the field. Many project founders have devoted time, energy and intellectual engagement to ensure that their initiative survives shifts in technology over time and endures as key scholarly infrastructure but have done relatively less to facilitate the successful transition and succession of people as they retire, change institutions, pursue new research projects or step back for other reasons. At present, little is written beyond anecdotes and cautionary tales to provide guidance. This paper aims to add to that body of knowledge through the examination of a series of success stories from digital humanists who have navigated various transitions and successions to ensure projects are transferred, transformed and sustained over time.

This paper will present the newly migrated and redeveloped DigitalDonne as a case study in the necessity of placing sustainability at the center of scholar-led, open-access digital resource development. After fifteen years at Texas A&M University (https://digitaldonne.tamu.edu/), where it was built with substantial external funding and institutional support, DigitalDonne suddenly found itself in search of a new home. With no faculty member remaining to champion this important resource, its host institution could no longer commit to its ongoing support. This situation is far from uncommon as mature digital projects age, faculty retire, and hosting units within universities face increasing resourcing constraints. In assuming responsibility for the site, we determined to do so in a way that will minimize the chances of a similar crisis down the road when its new champion of this resource at USask (Nelson), eventually, retires from his faculty position. In this presentation, we will present the strategic choices we made in our redevelopment of the site in the interest of sustainability. A key point of departure for our thinking were the principles set out by the Ending Project for ensuring digital longevity (https://endings.uvic.ca/principles.html), chiefly 4.1: “[n]o dependence on server-side software.” A common point of resistance in university hosting support is the database. Such was the case with DigitalDonne, which in its pre-migration state relied on databases to coordinate and serve content. A second important point of reference was established best practice in web development aimed at ensuring the legibility, maintainability, and transferability of responsibility to future developers who might inherit responsibility for this resource. We begin by elaborating on these two considerations, then describe the strategic methodological and procedural choices made during redevelopment and conclude by discussing the results of these decisions as embodied in the final product, including a brief demonstration.

Digital humanities research which is both accessible and public facing, is also susceptible to unintended and unexpected changes, yet these changes—the degradation of online projects which occurs gradually, constituting an understated and misunderstood complex problem—strike at the heart of the “irreducibility” of the aesthetic, those “untranslatable” elements or components that contribute to the holistic nature of artistic and/or cultural understandings and works. “Irreducibility”—a key word and concept across the entirety of Cassin, et al’s, work on the untranslatable, carries two competing definitions: the technical resistance to being broken into constituent parts, and the metaphysical transcendence of those parts (OED’s “invincible, insuperable” etc); we argue that both definitions intersect in the public awareness and the desire to protect and preserve culturally open web-based DH projects. However, while recommendations are in place for creating stable and long-lasting resources, they can be difficult and problematic to implement for projects that have been running for some years.

Our previous work has addressed digital preservation questions. In this presentation, we align with the conference theme by exploring the “untranslatable” features of projects: how has the digital representation of documents introduced biases, reductions, and simplifications—affecting our preservation efforts and current practices. How can aspects that resist translation be preserved?

We have been analyzing projects published in the DH Book of Abstracts for 18 years (2007 to 2025), analyzing their changes and shifts over time. We store periodic snapshots for each project as WARC files, examine functioning and non-functioning components, extract their text using Python’s BeautifulSoup], and retrieve HTTP response codes and headers with Requests library. We do this to classify the snapshots by their year of publication into groups depending on the status of its server response. We also plan to apply deep learning, real-time computer vision and AI-assisted software development on cases that are human-perceivable, but currently not algorithmically identifiable by machines. Computer vision is a way of giving intelligent machines ‘eyes’ to see data, bringing our methodology into new visual dimensions of access and interpretation. Our purpose is to provide systematic methods to sustain and preserve culture and the digital scholarly infrastructure in the humanities over time, preventing their degradation and decay.

It is our intention to also preserve the researcher’s intent and perspectives. Through this process, focused on ethical/academic data collection and feature extraction, we can visually track the changes of these projects to their potential points of abandonment—furthering the conversation on the preservation of knowledge. We conclude that identifying and collecting features from online projects is feasible and can be utilized to develop metrics to identify changes in content and knowledge in the digital humanities. At the same time, we are invested in preserving the untranslatable aspects of DH research, and we would like to expand this discussion with other members of the community. We aim to provide insights and preservation strategies that could be applied to other online projects in the digital humanities, ensuring a long-term future so that more widespread access and exploration of these resources becomes possible.