Dr James Cummings
 

Academics Retire & Servers Die:
Planning for failure in DH projects

James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk

@jamescummings

CC+BY   (press space to cycle through slides)

A brief presentation for DHOxSS 2021

CURSUS:
An Online Resource of Medieval Liturgical Texts

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 

Project Afterlife

  • 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 us to put it up elsewhere

Sustainability Issues

  • 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 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'.

Conclusion:

Planning For Failure

Some Endings Project Principles

  • Data: 
    • Use open formats, preferably archive standard
    • Use version control and continuous integration
  • Outputs: 
    • Remove dependency on server-side software
    • Avoid fashionable recent technologies
    • No dependence on external libraries
    • No query strings in URLS
    • Graceful degradation without JS or CSS
    • Massive pre-generated redundancy of outputs
  • Documentation of all tech aspects, data models, etc.
  •  Stable release management when data is coherent and complete

The Future

  • Crystal balls are unreliable, but...
  • We're on the cusp of an explosion of archival-based websites owing to HTR and ML
  • Over a few years we're going from:
    Single Hand -> Single Script -> Single Collection
  • If $HumanitiesFunding then transcribe($archive)
  • But transcriptions need:
    • up-conversion,
    • named entity recognition (still hard for pre-modern sources),
    • translation,
    • interpretation,
    • editing?
  • AI/ML will give big data but keep an eye on outputs

Dr James Cummings
 

Academics Retire & Servers Die:
Planning for failure in DH projects

James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk

@jamescummings

CC+BY   (press space to cycle through slides)

A brief presentation for DHOxSS 2021