Digital Humanities 2023 Community-centric factors in sustaining digital scholarship Fenlon, Katrina kfenlon@umd.edu University of Maryland, College Park, United States of America Reza, Alia areza@umd.edu University of Maryland, College Park, United States of America Grimmer, Jessica jgrimmer@umd.edu University of Maryland, College Park, United States of America Wagner, Travis twagner@umd.edu University of Maryland, College Park, United States of America While the term sustainability has proliferated across the dis- course of the digital humanities over the past two decades, the meaning and implications of the concept vary significantly across different projects, communities, and organizations. What it me- ans to sustain digital scholarship is necessarily context-dependent (Edmond / Morselli 2020; Drucker 2021). Yet many projects face common, interrelated obstacles to remaining viable over time— whether technically, intellectually, effectively, etc.) These com- mon challenges include resource-scarcity, vagaries of institutional support (e.g., Maron / Pickle 2014), reliance on volunteer labor (e.g., Risam 2018), impediments to shared technical infrastruc- ture (Smithies et al. 2019; Dombrowski 2014), disconnect from broader systems of scholarly communication, and systemic insta- bility and inequity across the humanities, cultural heritage, and higher education sectors more generally. The prevailing paradigm of institutional stewardship, in which digital humanities projects ultimately fall back on the preservation or maintenance resources and expertise of digital humanities centers, academic units, and libraries, has so far failed to adequately accommodate the diver- sity, complexity, and community-centeredness of digital huma- nities scholarship. A widespread challenge is that many digital humanities resour- ces resist institutional stewardship because communities wish to retain control over the resources they have created. Digital huma- nities scholarship, whether public-oriented or not, is often com- munity-centered. Collaborative teams of technologists and rese- archers create and maintain digital resources to meet their own research needs, for example, or to fill gaps in the mainstream cultural record with new forms of evidence about underrepresen- ted communities. These teams are surrounded by wider commu- nities, including research communities within specific domains or disciplines, communities of practice organized around shared methods or other topics, and groups unified by shared identity, place, memory, and other shared interests. These teams and com- munities build shared resources—from digital editions to data- bases, from software to data models, from corpora to digital ar- chives—to serve their constituents (Poole 2017; Cooper / Rieger 2018; Palmer et al. 2009). Digital humanities projects are active, generative, dynamic hubs for collaboration and communication. Such resources are sustained not by transfer from communities to preservation institutions, but through continued life and develop- ment. The digital humanities discourse about the sustainability of digi-tal scholarship focuses on financial, organizational, and technical factors in the longevity of digital resources. These factors are vi-tally important, but our collective conversation about sustainabi-lity has often elided the roles of communities themselves—as ne-bulous entities that transcend institutions, individuals, and teams. There are important exceptions. Prior work has considered, for example, how research on community needs factors into sustaina-bility planning (Edmond / Morselli 2020; Smithies et al. 2019; Langmead et al. 2018; Warwick et al. 2008), community-building practices (Mahony 2017; Skinner 2018; Arthur 2014; Clement et al. 2013), and how cultural knowledge serves communities them-selves (Cifor et al. 2018; Caswell et al. 2018; Stevens et al. 2010, etc.). Nevertheless, there is little empirical research on how com-munities of different shapes and sizes surround and support digi-tal humanities scholarship and digital community archives. We need a foundational understanding of how research communities affect the sustainability of digital scholarship. In our definition of community-centered sustainability, a digital humanities resource is sustained as long as it responsively supports the endurance of the communities it serves—as a locus of memory, communication, and knowledge production—for as long as useful, and in whatever forms are useful (Fenlon / Muñoz 2020). This paper describes the outcomes of the “Communities sustai- ning digital scholarship” project, a qualitative study of how com- munities interpret, impact, and implement the sustainability of their own projects and resources. Through case studies of four di- gital humanities projects, conducted from 2019 to 2021, we sought to understand how communities define sustainability for themsel-ves, and how their emergent approaches to sustainability cente-red or relied upon various invested communities. Each of our four case studies serves a different core community by gathering and providing access to evidence in new forms, to support research, collaboration, and community- building: • Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (https://ens- laved.org/) is an online, open-source linked data hub focused on the history of enslaved people. • The Lakeland Digital Archive (https://lakelandchp.com/) is an effort to document a 130-year-old African American commu- nity adjacent to the University of Maryland through a digital community archive. • The Music Encoding Initiative (https://music-encoding.org/) is a community-driven, open-source effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable struc-ture. • The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (http://kitab-projec- t.org/openiti/) is a multi-institutional effort to construct a ma- chine-actionable corpus of premodern Islamicate texts. These cases diverge in topic, discipline, size, and geographic distribution—and in how they relate to various communities and institutions. Through interviews with members of each project and surrounding communities, along with participant-observation and analysis of project documentation, our case studies have identified community-driven factors in sustaining digital scholarship. We offer a framework of six factors that affect the commu- nity-centered sustainability of digital scholarship. How commu- nities interpret, plan for, and implement each of these factors pro- 1