Preserving Access to Three Decades of Digital Humanities Research: Infrastructure Modernisation as Sustainability Practice

This repository contains supplementary materials for the poster presentation on King's Digital Lab's year-long migration from local VMware infrastructure to centrally managed OpenStack infrastructure.

About the Project

King's Digital Lab (KDL) successfully migrated 85 research projects spanning three decades of digital humanities research. This migration resulted in a 98.4% reduction in hosting costs while maintaining accessibility to valuable research outputs.

Key Metrics

• Projects Migrated: 85 projects
• Converted to Static: 52 projects
• Annual Cost Savings: £130,000 reduction in operational costs
• Per-Project Cost: Reduced from £2,500/year to £40/year
• Overall Cost Reduction: 98.4% reduction in hosting costs

Resources & Documentation

Technical Documentation

• Migration Blog Post - Detailed technical overview of the migration process
• Static-First Approach Presentation - Methodology and implementation details
• KDL Sustainability Strategy - Long-term preservation framework

Example Projects

Containerised Projects

• Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition

Static with Enhanced Features

• Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity
• Mapping the Medieval Countryside

Basic Static Version

• Mozart and Material Culture

References

• Nowviskie, B. (2015). "Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 30, Issue suppl_1, December 2015, Pages i4–i15, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv015
• Ciula, A. and Smithies, J. (2023). "Sustainability and Modelling at King's Digital Lab: Between Tradition and Innovation", in: Nyhan, Rockwell, Sinclair (eds.): On Making in the Digital Humanities. Essays on the Scholarship of Digital Humanities Development in Honour of John Bradley. London: University College London Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800084209
• Smithies, J. and Ciula, A. (2020). "Humans in the Loop: Epistemology & Method in King's Digital Lab", in: Schuster & Dunn (eds.) Routledge International handbook of research methods in digital humanities: 155-172. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429777028-13
• Ciula (2022) in De Roure et al. Digispec: Scoping Future Born-digital Data Services for the Arts and Humanities: Case Reports. Zenodo: 22-28, https://doi:10.5281/zenodo.4716148
• Smithies et al. (2019): "Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab". Digital Humanities Quarterly 13.1. https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/13/1/000411/000411.html

Contact

For questions about this migration project or KDL's digital preservation strategies, please contact:

• King's Digital Lab: [email protected]
• Website: kdl.kcl.ac.uk

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This repository supports the poster presentation "Preserving Access to Three Decades of Digital Humanities Research: Infrastructure Modernisation as Sustainability Practice" presented at the Digital Humanities 2025 conference in Lisbon, 14-18 July 2025.