People Behind the Interface: Sustainability as a Social Process in DH

People Sustain Projects—But Who Sustains the People?

In Digital Humanities (DH), sustainability is often discussed in terms of infrastructure: servers, standards, and repositories. But as I began to explore what sustains—or quietly erodes—a DH project over time, it became increasingly clear that infrastructure alone is not enough. Projects are not only built on servers, schemas, and software, but also on people: their communication, their turnover, their sense of purpose, and their evolving relationships with one another and with the work itself.

Recent scholarship, such as Claire Battershill’s The Stories We Tell, invites us to see DH projects as narrative and emotional spaces—held together not just by code and metadata, but by human intention and care. Taking inspiration from this perspective, I was eager to explore sustainability not as a technical checklist, but as a lived experience within a team.

To ground this exploration, I turned to a long-running DH project that combines rigorous philology with innovative digital practice. I spoke with three members of the team—each at a different career stage—to hear how they navigate continuity, change, and the question of what remains once the funding ends.

The following sections share insights from these three vantage points—not as isolated anecdotes, but as interdependent reflections on what it takes to sustain a project not only technically, but relationally.

Insights from the Principal Investigator: Leading for Longevity

The interview with the Principal Investigator (PI) illuminated how the sustainability of a Digital Humanities (DH) project is shaped not only by technical foresight, but also by leadership choices, institutional negotiation, and the evolving social fabric of a research team. From the outset, the project was grounded in a critical response to the underrepresentation of non-Western texts—particularly Arabic wisdom literature—within the prevailing frameworks of world literature. What began as a curricular intervention gradually developed into a long-term DH initiative, made possible by the collaborative funding structures of the German academic landscape.

While the PI brought a strong scholarly vision to the project, the transition into team leadership was initially marked by uncertainty. “I was scared,” they admitted. “I had never led a team before. I was learning on the job.” Over time, however, a leadership model emerged that prioritized intellectual trust and distributed agency. By deliberately avoiding micromanagement, the PI fostered an environment in which team members could internalize the project’s goals and develop their own methodological approaches. Weekly one-on-one meetings—often unstructured and occasionally lasting several hours—provided a consistent framework for communication, mentoring, and mutual learning.

Despite this intentional structure, staff turnover presented recurring challenges. The departure of key team members—whether for academic appointments or professional advancement—was described not only as a logistical concern but also as a form of emotional and epistemic loss. Individuals carried with them deeply embodied forms of project knowledge that could not easily be documented or replaced. The PI acknowledged the uniqueness of each team member’s contributions, noting, “There’s no one like anyone else. You can’t replace a person, only reconfigure the team.”

In response, the PI adopted a practice of promoting from within. Junior researchers were provided opportunities to assume greater responsibility, and in doing so, many exceeded expectations. What initially emerged from necessity evolved into a strategic approach that balanced continuity with capacity building. This form of internal promotion addressed immediate gaps and supported professional development across career stages—an outcome the PI framed as both intellectually and ethically valuable.

Yet human dynamics were only one axis of sustainability. The PI’s concern extended equally to the preservation of digital outputs—particularly in relation to non-Latin scripts and complex textual traditions. Standard editing models, such as TEI/XML, were deemed ill-suited to the structure of Arabic manuscripts. The team therefore opted to develop custom tools that responded more intuitively to the demands of right-to-left script encoding and fluid textuality. While such decisions enhanced usability and philological rigour during the project, they also introduced new risks regarding long-term interoperability and institutional adoption.

“I knew from the beginning,” the PI explained, “you don’t work on an 8th-century tradition and let it disappear after ten years.”

Although sustainability planning was not explicitly required by the funding agency at the time of application, the PI took proactive steps to secure the long-term viability of the project’s outputs. These included negotiating with the university for post-project hosting, advocating for the integration of the edition into broader research infrastructure, and insisting on detailed internal documentation—ranging from GitHub repositories to graduate theses outlining software architecture.

Nevertheless, structural limitations persist. Institutional uncertainty, shifting IT policies, and ongoing budget constraints complicate efforts to formalize preservation pathways. The PI described this situation with a tempered sense of realism: “It’s an uphill battle. But it’s one worth fighting.”

Perhaps most notably, the interview underscored a broad and inclusive definition of sustainability—one that encompasses intellectual, technical, and relational dimensions. The project has cultivated a diverse team in terms of disciplinary background, gender, and academic rank. Credit is shared generously, including co-authorships with student assistants. Mentorship is embedded in daily routines, and collaboration is understood as a mutual investment in both knowledge production and professional growth.

In this sense, the project has come to function not only as a research endeavour but also as a sustained community of practice. Its continuity does not rest solely on software or servers, but on the relationships, values, and adaptive strategies that allow it to evolve in response to change. 

Insights from the Research Associate: Carrying the Technical Legacy

The RA’s journey offers an on-the-ground view of how knowledge transfer, role expansion, and emotional investment intersect to shape project sustainability—often in invisible but critical ways.

Originally hired as a student assistant to convert TEI-encoded XML files and upload them to the platform, they eventually developed a deep familiarity with the technical infrastructure of the database. When a key collaborator—their closest programming partner—left the team, they faced a sudden and overwhelming shift in responsibility. Much of the work had not been documented, which necessitated intense daily meetings to transfer knowledge. While this gave the RA greater control and understanding of the project, it also diverted them from their regular tasks and concentrated essential knowledge in a single person: themselves.

The weight of this experience was not just technical but psychological. While the RA valued the learning process and grew into their expanded role, they now worry about what will happen when they, too, eventually leave. The project’s workflows have grown increasingly complex, making it difficult to break tasks into smaller, trainable components for newcomers. As they explained, “it was also very hard for me to create tasks for a new programmer because it’s now so interconnected.”

The RA’s reflections also touched on the broader infrastructure of digital sustainability. They noted that while the team had successfully published parts of the edition on the University server, true longevity would require a long-term maintenance strategy—something they felt was missing. Without clear institutional plans for post-project preservation, and without standardized workflows across DH projects, the future usability of the data remains uncertain.

Yet, despite these systemic limits, their narrative remain grounded in pragmatic optimism. The RA is currently mentoring a new student on programming tasks, trying to rebuild a more shareable, modular workflow. Their reflections call for a deeper institutional responsibility: “Maybe the university should provide tools or standardized ways to make these projects more sustainable—not just leave it to researchers who have to reinvent everything.”

Insights from the Student Assistant: Fragmentation and Emotional Distance

The perspective of the student assistant (SA) offers a valuable lens into how early-career contributors engage with and interpret sustainability from their unique position within a Digital Humanities project. Over the course of their three years on the team, their responsibilities centred around preparing and uploading XML files to the platform, based on the team’s transcriptions and segmentations of Arabic manuscripts. These contributions, though often seen as peripheral, play a crucial role in the overall functionality and accessibility of the digital edition.

What emerges from the SA’s experience is a sense of structured participation: while their tasks were clearly assigned and executed with autonomy, they remained distinct from the project’s overarching design or decision-making processes. Still, their account demonstrates the ways in which student assistants become deeply woven into the fabric of a project, particularly through interpersonal connections. They noted the strong bonds formed with earlier team members, and how their departure left a noticeable absence—emotionally and professionally. The early phase of their involvement was also marked by team-building activities, which facilitated a strong sense of belonging and familiarity among members. As those activities tapered off, newer team members came to play a smaller role in her day-to-day work, subtly reshaping the social dynamic.

Interestingly, while the concept of sustainability had not been explicitly discussed during team meetings that included them, the interview itself prompted them to reflect on its importance for the first time. When invited to imagine a scenario in which all project data vanished without lasting output or publication, they responded with genuine concern. The SA expressed a strong desire to see the project reach its conclusion and hoped to witness its results publicly realized—suggesting that a deeper sense of investment does exist, even if not always made visible in daily tasks.

Their reaction to the interview underscores an important insight: sustainability awareness often emerges not only from formal training or top-down directives but also through moments of dialogue, reflection, and contextualization. That they were thankful for the interview initiating such reflection illustrates the transformative potential of including all team members in discussions about a project’s long-term goals and outcomes.

Sustaining the Human Infrastructure

Across the three interviews, a clear picture emerged: the long-term sustainability of a DH project is never solely a technical or institutional issue. It is also deeply interpersonal. The PI emphasized vision, delegation, and the emotional labour of letting go; the RA described the burden of undocumented knowledge and the fragility of continuity in the face of staff turnover; the SA highlighted how task specialization and clear roles can support workflow efficiency while also expressing appreciation for a team culture that welcomes new ideas and encourages personal growth.

Taken together, their perspectives reveal a project that is held together not just by platforms or preservation plans, but by a human infrastructure—an evolving network of relationships, expectations, mentorships, and affective investments. When this infrastructure is strong and transparent, transitions become opportunities, not crises. When it is neglected, technical robustness alone cannot guarantee sustainability.

Digital Humanities often prides itself on collaboration, yet too often the emotional and structural conditions of that collaboration remain invisible. If we are serious about sustaining the outputs of our field, we must also sustain the people who produce them—through inclusive planning, reflexive leadership, and honest conversations about what will happen after the funding runs out.

In the end, digital sustainability is not simply a matter of keeping data alive. It is about making sure that the stories, skills, and people behind those data are not forgotten.

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