We create for a wide variety of reasons, but the impetus for work in the humanities usually has a permanent, or at least long-term, goal. The digital tools that we use and files that we create, whether for research or publication, should last until we consciously decide to erase them. In honor of the American Libraries Association’s Preservation Week 2016, I propose a session to discuss the basics of personal digital archiving to ensure that our hard work, research, and final projects remain available, whether for private use or portfolio building. We can discuss the basics of organization, metadata, storage, formats, and migration before sharing personal tips and tricks for how we make our projects sustainable and accessible for future users.

According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside, “The ‘challenge’ of the born digital is thus at least as much  social as it is technological.  New textual forms require new  work habits, new training, new tools, new practices, and new instincts.”

This session examines ENG 3817 Digital Archives, a course I teach at UCF to undergraduates.  The course examines the development and function of digital “representation” from a practical “hands on” perspective.  In focusing on the creation, management, and preservation of electronic texts and images as it relates to personal and public archive practices, students gain experience with image scanning, Optical Character Recognition use, text-encoding processes, and other skills. They also study platform delivery, interface usability, copyright laws, and metadata creation by using Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform, as part of a course project. In addition to understanding how metadata is used with electronic records, they  examine the “Wayback Machine” and the basics of “web archiving” efforts to preserve what is on the Internet.

I would like to use my course as a springboard for discussion of similar courses at other institutions and of how to foster a digital humanities curriculum in general.