Mutual Sustainability among Communities and Their Knowledge Infrastructures

Digital, community-based knowledge infrastructures confront complex, systemic challenges to their sustainability over time. From digital community archives to computationally amenable corpora, databases, or data models created by and serving research communities, these sites of grassroots knowledge production tend to be maintained without long-term institutional commitments. Yet, they hold unique cultural evidence of enormous value. Prior work on the sustainability of digital humanities scholarship has surfaced numerous factors in project sustainability, including technical, organizational, and financial concerns. The roles of communities themselves in sustaining community-based knowledge infrastructures, however, are under-studied. This qualitative, multi-case study of digital humanities projects and digital community archives addresses community-centered approaches to understanding and implementing sustainability for digital knowledge infrastructures. This study finds that communities of various kinds—from public communities to networks of research practice—conceive of the sustainability of their digital projects as inextricably linked to the sustainability of communities themselves. We offer an exploration of factors in the mutual relationship of sustainability between communities and their knowledge infrastructures, including how they support the wellbeing of individuals and cohesion among communities, and how they promote activism and advocacy efforts within broader publics and disciplinary cultures.