The Project Endings Interviews: A Summary of Methodological Foundations.

Comeau, Emily

Project Endings is a collaborative SSHRC-funded project conducted by a team of faculty members, librarians, and programmers at the University of Victoria in BC, Canada, that explores questions about the ending and archiving of digital humanities (DH) projects. The main goals of Project Endings are to align the aims of faculty researchers and archivists in the long-term curation and preservation of DH projects, and to develop practical tools to assist with the archiving of both data and interactive elements of digital projects. To achieve these goals, we conducted a survey followed by a series of interviews with DH scholars across Canada and internationally about their experiences ending and archiving digital projects. In April 2021, we also hosted the Endings Symposium, where we brought together members of the Project Endings research team as well as a number of interview participants to further discuss some of the issues facing DH work. This paper will summarize the methodological foundations of the Project Endings interviews and illustrate how these foundations have been reflected in the interviews and subsequent analysis conducted by the Project Endings team. The interview process was guided by constructivist grounded theory, narrative inquiry, and phenomenology. These principles have allowed us to collaboratively co-construct knowledge with each other and with research participants. This paper will discuss the ways in which knowledge has been co-constructed over the course of the Project Endings interviews and analysis, as well as through the 2021 Endings Symposium. Co-constructing knowledge through the Project Endings interviews

CANADA; UNIVERSITY of Victoria (B.C.); DIGITAL humanities; DIGITAL libraries; GROUNDED theory; UNIVERSITY faculty; RESEARCH teams

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2023, Vol 17, Issue 1, pN.PAG

1938-4122

Academic Journal