Our mapping incarceration project is a Digital Humanities project. It uses the affordances of digital media to make an argument, and the media are a crucial part of our argument, I hope you will agree. We could do the same project on paper, or with string and paper and glue, but it would lose some thing or many things.
Question: What would an analog version of our mapping project look like? What would our mapping project lose if it was done without digital media? What would it gain?
Digital projects almost always require collaborative labor; computing resources; and project planning for building, sustaining, sharing, and ending a project, which we sometimes call “sunsetting.” It is our responsibility as scholars who made a digital thing to think critically about its “life” after launch, create a care plan, and execute that plan.
What does it mean to sustain a digital project? That depends on the project and its goals. Basically project managers consider how to:
- Continue to build on the project – who will build on it, when will this happen?
- Continue to maintain the project – who will fix bugs, update broken links, and make sure the project continues to work?
- Continue to support the project, in terms of resources (hardware, software, hosting, etc.). Who supports the project now and who will do so in the future, until the sunset date?
- Continue to share the project: who is in charge of sharing it now, and in the future, and how will this take place?
What does it mean to “sunset” a project? Project managers plan for the end-of-life of a project and consider:
- How long should this project live for? Set a date to begin and end the “sunsetting” period.
- Decide if the project can and/or should be archived in a non-digital form? If so, make a project plan to achieve that.
- Consider that for some projects, the right “sunsetting” plan is to simply pick an end-date to delete the project. Do you think this is the case for our project? Why or why not?
Relate this to our own mapping incarceration near SCU project
- Get together in groups by site type.
- As a group, select the color and type of icon for site types.
- Edit metadata to display for each site.
- Consider: do these sites need a short description in 1 sentence added to their metadata? Or not?
- Links to essays need to be public. Essays need to be copied/pasted into a public (non-SCU) Google Doc account. Email me (Dr. Leuner) if you do not have a non-SCU personal Google Account. I will make you a public Google Doc.
With your small group, come up with a plan for SHARING our map
- How do you want to advertise it? Innocence Project? Twitter? Listservs?
With your small group: envision a plan for SUSTAINING our map.
- How long will the map remain public?
- Will the map continue to grow after the term ends? If so, how — who adds to it and what gets added? Do you want to invite the next 68/56 class to add to it, though that class may not take place until Fall 2021?
- Who will be in charge of it after the last day of class?
Last, describe a plan for SUNSETTING our map.
- On what date should it begin it’s “sunset” process.
- What should the sunset process look like? (Do we simply delete the map? Does it get transformed into an analog version? If so, who does that?)