Preserving Digital Humanities Prototype Projects Using the Knowledge Commons

Digital humanities (DH) projects often suffer from limited funding, which leads to the abandonment of prototype applications. This typically occurs when teams shift from unfunded projects to those with financial backing or to developing new proposals. Even funded projects encounter difficulties, as current models primarily support the early phases of development—planning, designing, and launching—while providing minimal support for maintenance. Core issues that arise include the disappearance of valuable work and ideas such as codebases, user interfaces, and interaction designs; limited opportunities for scholars to iterate on prior knowledge; and challenges with discoverability and citation due to scarce documentation, especially as teams are redirected. This talk introduces an emerging workflow for archiving born-digital web applications using Knowledge Commons (KC), a scholarly communications platform with a global audience of nearly 50,000 users. KC is academy-owned and operated, free to use, and offers robust tools for open scholarly collaboration, communication, and archiving. The workflow provides a lightweight process for archiving prototype applications in an open, socially connected environment. This approach ensures that previously hidden work becomes discoverable, citable, and persistently visible, thereby preserving the contributions of projects and their creators.