No Boutique or Fashionable Technologies: Project Development, Mentorship, and Sustainability in an Innovation-First World

In recent decades, university research has become bound up in the expectation of innovation, often at the expense of sustainability. As a guiding principle, innovation has shaped the goals of universities and funders; the recent turn to sustainability, signaled by the rise of data management plans and data deposit requirements, may indicate a welcome discursive shift. This article explores the interplay of knowledge creation and mentorship in the development of digital humanities research projects, with the aim of articulating how to resolve the artificial tension between innovation and sustainability. While often framed in opposition to each other, or used in a neoliberal framework to force researchers to do more with fewer resources, innovation and sustainability can, this article argues, be dual goals in the development of lasting digital humanities scholarship, with a focus on XML serializations’ role in this scholarly ecosystem.