The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap


The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap and Sustaining DH workshop series were outcomes of an NEH grant received by Dr. Alison Langmead and the Visual Media Workshop Team for the Sustaining MedArt project. Based on findings from that initial grant, we decided to build a curriculum prototype that would walk project teams through the process of developing custom sustainability plans for their work.

The result was the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, a module-based workshop designed to guide participants through the process of sustaining their user-facing, web-based digital humanities projects over time. The workshop takes an approach that emphasizes the importance of project management, staffing, and funding in digital preservation.

In August 2018, the project team received funding for an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. In the 2018-2019 academic year, we facilitated the 5 workshops funded by this grant, and and additional 2 funded by local hosts. 


In Fall 2022, we released the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap Facilitator’s Manual: A Guide to Leading Workshops on Sustainability for Digital Projects. This manual is designed to guide others through the process of facilitating their own digital sustainability workshops using our Roadmap and road-tested teaching strategies. You can download it, along with supplemental workshop materials, here.




2023