Static Web Methodology as a Sustainable Approach to Digital Humanities Projects

The web platforms adopted for digital humanities (DH) projects come with significant short- and long-term costs—selecting a platform will impact how resources are invested in a project and organization. As DH practitioners, the time (or money paid to contractors) we must invest in managing servers, maintaining platform updates, and learning idiosyncratic administrative systems ultimately limits our ability to create and sustain unique, innovative projects. Reexamining DH platforms through a minimal computing lens has led University of Idaho librarians to pursue new project-development methods that minimize digital infrastructure as a means to maximize investment in people, growing agency, agility, and long-term sustainability in both the organization and digital outputs. U of I librarians’ development approach centered around static web-based templates aims to develop transferable technical skills that all digital projects require, while also matching the structure of academic work cycles and fulfilling DH project needs. In particular, a static web approach encourages the creation of preservation-ready project data, enables periods of iterative development, and capitalizes on the low-cost/low-maintenance characteristics of statically-generated sites to optimize limited economic resources and personnel time. This short paper introduces static web development methodology (titled “Lib-Static”) as a provocation to rethink DH infrastructure choices, asking how our frameworks can build internal skills, collaboration, and empowerment to generate more sustainable digital projects.