Digital Longevity: Learnings from the (Digital) History project Stadt.Geschichte.Basel
Legal History Meets Digital Humanities, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
Moritz Mähr 
This session explores the critical challenge of digital longevity in the field of digital history, with a focus on the public history project Stadt.Geschichte.Basel. It highlights the Endings Project at the University of Victoria, which proposes a comprehensive framework of principles to ensure the sustainability of digital projects. These principles emphasize the importance of open data formats, detailed documentation, rigorous editing, user-centric product design without server-side dependencies, and a strategic release management protocol to mitigate the risks associated with a potential “digital dark age”. The Stadt.Geschichte.Basel project exemplifies the application of these principles and demonstrates how a publicly funded digital history initiative can achieve long-term preservation and openness. The project emphasizes the need for ongoing stakeholder engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the application of user-centered design for inclusive and effective user participation. It emphasizes the importance of iterative refinement in the development process to address the technical and organizational complexities inherent in multi-stakeholder settings. By extracting best practices from the Stadt.Geschichte.Basel experience, this session contributes to the discourse on project management in digital history and serves as a guide for creating resilient, user-centered, and sustainably managed digital resources.
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@inproceedings{mähr2023,
author = {Mähr, Moritz},
title = {Digital {Longevity:} {Learnings} from the {(Digital)}
{History} Project {Stadt.Geschichte.Basel}},
booktitle = {Legal History Meets Digital Humanities},
date = {2023-12-12},
url = {https://moritzmaehr.ch/talks/mahr2023.html},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.10368874},
langid = {en}
}