The Stories We Tell: Project Narratives, Project Endings, and the Affective Value of Collaboration

This paper considers the the affective and narrative dimensions of considering project lifespans. How do collaborators feel about endings and how does that impact project outcomes and project planning? How might we consider digital projects as temporal and narrative forms deserving of analysis? How do professional relationships, team dynamics, and precarious labour conditions impact the longevity of projects? I argue in this paper that in addition to thoughtful sustainability planning on the technical side, there is value in thinking from a literary perspective about digital humanities projects, about the stories and relationships we are making along with the websites, digital archives, databases, tools, marked-up texts, maps, and innumerable other digital artifacts that arise from large-scale collaborations in this field. The provocation I offer is that applying some of the discursive analytical structures of literary genres to the construction of a digital project and foregrounding its human components of affect and relation can also show a team its ideal duration and ending. Thinking about these matters requires a multi-dimensional approach: we need to think beyond institutional repositories and mirror sites and consider the lived experience of project making and about the structure of the stories we tell about digital work. The paper uses examples from two collaborative projects of different types and durations that I have undertaken.