Dr James Cummings
 

http://slides.com/jamescummings/endingsproject2021

Adventures in Hosting and Storage

James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk

@jamescummings

CC+BY   (press space to cycle through slides)

 “Endings” Project Symposium on 'Project Resiliency in the Digital Humanities', University of Victoria, 2021

Overview

• Looking at two legacy projects:
  • CURSUS: An Online Resource of Medieval Liturgical Texts
  • William Godwin’s Diary
• They both had problems, that we can learn from with regards to:
  • Hosting problems
  • Maintenance problems
  • Backup problems
  • Long-term storage problems
• Building Resilience: Some common sense lessons

CURSUS:
An Online Resource of Medieval Liturgical Texts

Original URL: http://www.cursus.uea.ac.uk/
Working URL: http://www.cursus.org.uk/

About the Cursus Project

• AHRB-funded project (2000-2003) at University of East Anglia to produce resource of medieval liturgical texts and explore XML publication possibilities
• Principal Investigator Professor David Chadd and Research Assistant Dr James Cummings produced editions of 12 medieval manuscripts
• Desire of research project to investigate and compare order of antiphons, responds, and prayers in these manuscripts which detail order of service in different places in England
• Project produced full XML copies of Corpus Antiphonalium Officii, Vulgate Bible, and other supplementary information 

Cursus Project Challenges

• 2000-3 – Main Cursus project completed UEA School of Music
• 2003 – I moved Oxford, project continues with Richard Lewis as developer to keep it running
• 2006 – Sadly, in November 2006 the Principal Investigator Professor David Chadd died
• 2009 – ‘Climategate’ (hacking of emails relating to climate change data) caused UEA to close all off-campus access
• 2010 – Richard and I unable to access departmental server; it is later replaced without  Cursus project website.
• 2014 – UEA School of Music is closed.
• 2016 – After 6 years of negotiation I get confirmation of CC+BY+NC license of data, allowing Richard and I to put it up elsewhere

Cursus Project Challenges

• Hosting problems
  • Using departmental server rather than centralised institutional VMs (but these were in short supply 2000-3)
• Maintenance problems
  • Climategate and loss of external SSH access to campus
• Backup problems
  • PI continued to work on his laptop, updates did not get added to the site when he died
• Long-term storage problems
  • TEI P4 XML data was always safe but (until 2016) not stored in open repository, although declared as 'freely available' on original site it had not been explicitly licensed
  • That university department had closed made it hard to get 'approval'.

William Godwin's Diary

http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

About the Godwin's Diary Project

• Godwin was a political philosopher and writer, Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband and Mary Shelley’s father
• University of Oxford project (2007-2010) to create digital edition of William Godwin’s Diary with funding for project from Leverhulme Trust
• Diaries purchased with Abinger Collection based on National Heritage Memorial Fund and donations
• 48 years of diaries in 32 octavo notebooks, written in highly abbreviated daily entries
  • People’s names often given as initials
  • little detail of substance of meetings
  • networks of relationships with people, and aggregate lists of information able to extracted from richly encoded TEI

Project work

• I trained PI, RA, and 2 PhD students in TEI in 1.5 days
  • But had customised the TEI to be about 15 custom elements total
  • These were automatically converted back to 'pure' TEI for display and dissemination
• Bespoke website built on top of early version of
  eXist-DB (a native XML Database)
• Encoders worked in phases adding structural markup, then meetings, then names, etc. 
• Each phase they started with a diary year they had not seen before, proofreading each others work
• As technical consultant I was on hand to answer all and any technical problems
• As to be hosted by the Bodleian, I asked to build it on one of their VMs but was refused

Godwin Diary Project Challenges

• Hosting problems:
  • Not adopted into Bodleian VM infrastructure during project development
  • Hosted on old VM infrastructure, ancient version of software which needs occasional restart, potential security problems
• Maintenance problems:
  • No funding direct to Bodleian library to support, only funding/donations to purchase Abinger Collection
  • Single developer (me) who continued to support on best-effort basis after project ended in 2010
  • Entire Project: Developer, PI, Research Associates, etc. all now at other institutions
  • Did not use IIIF (or related standards) but created bespoke pan/zoom image browser using dated Google Maps API
• Backup problems / Long-term storage problems:
  • Until November 2019, underlying data and code not in open repository (now in my github account)