Front-End Loader: Modern Web Technologies for Digital Humanities Collections

Digital humanities collections present a software maintenance challenge, as the useful life of a collection to researchers and the community far outlives that of the typical tech stack. Standards have been developed which allow us to preserve these collections in file-based formats with greater longevity, but once a collection is exported and stored in a repository or archive, it will usually lose the interactive, exploratory interface which made it useful to researchers. This situation is a legacy of software patterns from the first decades of the web, which located databases and code on a central server. Modern front-end technology provides a new pattern for developing generous, performant interfaces which run in the browser. We demonstrate the use of the Observable Framework to provide a sustainable, interactive version of collections exported from the Heurist digital humanities platform as RO-Crates, and look at some of the ways in which WebAssembly can be used to deploy digital humanities tools which previously required a specialised backend.