Sustainability: problematizing fragility and ephemerality in digital research - Workshop

404 not found, closed and opaque corpora, websites disappearance after a few years, obsolete tools, problems of maintenance … this workshop wishes to explore the instability of data, of their digital (digitalized or/and born-digital) heritage, of digital technologies and tools, the numerous transformations of devices, platforms, terms of use and the tensions between this instability and the necessary stability and reproducibility of research. How should researchers deal at the same time with the ephemeral, the flow, the obsolescence and the concern of knowledge production? How is it possible to reconciliate the temporality of research and the short cycles of technologies?
This workshop aims at introducing and identifying the challenges of sustainability and durability which are too often underestimated in digital research and rarely presented to students when introducing tools and research methods.
This 120 minutes workshop will be organized in three parts as follows:
- Identifying the levels, steps, in which sustainability and durability of a digital research are challenged, from the shaping and sharing of corpora to the maintenance of research results and digital productions. This will be based on the participants experiences and on several examples of research projects;
- Mapping the issues and existing solutions such as digital research infrastructures, permanent identifiers, licenses, but also obstacles and limits (such as author rights …) that researchers have to face or take into account;
- Creating practical guidelines that could be used by scholars and students.
This workshop expands a research project conducted by Christine Barats (Céditec, Université Paris-
Est Créteil), Andreas Fickers (Head of C2DH, University of Luxembourg), Valérie Schafer (C2DH,
University of Luxembourg).