Shelf life: Identifying the abandonment of online digital humanities projects

Abstract

A large portion of the research carried out in the digital humanities has an online digital object (usually referred as a project) as one of its components. In turn, these online digital objects can be catalogued as distributed resources, which implies that the administrative control of information related to a topic may be spread across online resources and/or collections maintained by multiple scholars in different institutions. This administrative decentralization can lead to changes in content that are often unexpected by a researcher, which can be caused by different factors or circumstances. This reasoning led us to formulate the following question: When can online digital humanities projects be considered abandoned? In this article, we carry out a study on the persistence and average life span of online projects in the digital humanities. More specifically, we will elaborate on their reliance on distributed resources and methods for measuring their shelf life: the average length of time that a digital project can endure without updates until it can ultimately be considered abandoned by its researcher.