Sustaining Humanities Research with Data Collectives

Sarah Reiff Conell

If you want to spend your time doing something besides maintaining a bespoke, digital project indefinitely, what can be done with the underlying scholarship? A predilection for novelty has led to a proliferation of tools, increasing the risk of Humanities research-data loss. While some projects merit the cost of constant maintenance, creating alternative solutions to preserve key elements of scholarship is crucial. Data collectives, or Humanities research data journals, offer one powerful and lightweight solution for preserving valuable digital humanities scholarship within disciplinary contexts. Through the description of one example, I hope to reduce the labor and resources needed for others to start a data collective. Such collectives provide trustworthy homes for digital scholarship, engaging in rigorous practices recognized by academia. Through peer-review and data-level curation, they support the creation and preservation of high-quality Humanities datasets. Lessons from the Century 19 (C19) Data Collective illustrate a path for launching and running a sustainable data collective journal. One sustainable solution we found is using low-maintenance, static websites for publications and leaning on dedicated repositories for the storage and preservation of files. I describe two options for launching this type of publication: one supporting institutional data repositories preserved by dedicated information professionals across institutions, and the other leveraging trustworthy generalist repositories. I conclude by discussing our ongoing work and highlighting a few common pain points in the publication pipeline.