The twin scholarly booms of the 2010s, digital humanities and public humanities, introduced a relatively accessbile suite of platforms for managing digital and digitised content. Sudden interest in developing and implementing digital collections, paired with the popularity of public-facing (if not purporting to be public-serving) community projects, often framed as educational endeavours as projects began to gain momentum. Since the Internet also turns over regularly, huge swaths of internet (and, by extension, digital project) history is gone. Naturally, creators and curators want to encourage the use of their collections. The Santa Barbara statement and the many use case scenarios Collections as Data has produced offer potential routes for users, but without adequate discovery layers, we are at a loss if all these collections are created only to be never used again. In this essay, I will argue that investment in longer-term digital preservation becomes a question of vulnerability, using three examples of platforms that are well-loved by communities of users: Omeka (for digital collections), Github (for code and software, often used in analysis of born-digital content), and digital storytelling platforms (such as Scalar and ArcGIS’ storymaps) for multimodal dissemination. Even with the best of intentions, it is rare that web archiving techniques can adequately capture these kinds of digital projects easily. I will show how these sites contribute to the danger of creating what I shall call “cultural heritage wastelands”: a set of islands hosting lovingly created content which have been abandoned without champions to support their existence.
Heather Froehlich (Sun,) studied this question.