The Digital Documentation Process

This website will serve as a guide to the Digital Documentation Process (DDP), a set of best practices for cataloguing and preserving digital projects. The DDP makes digital humanities (DH) scholarship findable and citable for all scholars, stores and makes available durable versions of digital objects created in DH work, and facilitates a suite of documentary products for DH practitioners to communicate the value of their work to DH- and non-DH scholars alike.

The DDP can be used either prospectively, to help scholars organize and categorize data during the active phase of their project, or retrospectively to archive DH project work once it is no longer actively maintained. In either case, the DDP will help scholars and information scientists collaboratively create three documentary products, including:

  1. A Catalogue Record;
  2. A Persistent Identifier; and
  3. An Archiving Dossier Narrative.

Click through to the ingredients page to take you step-by-step through the process.

Because project documentation should ideally occur at the first stages of DH work, the DDP also features a Project Itinerary for New and In-Process Projects with an accompanying wizard. This form helps plan out a project in its early stages, and encourages documentation throughout the production process.

Begin exploring the DDP by clicking on any of the menu items above. If you are interested in using the DDP to catalogue a project at your institution, contact us with your questions.

Please use the following citation style:

Fostano, Katherina and Laura K. Morreale. “The Digital Documentation Process.” The Digital Documentation Process. January 31, 2019. Accessed [date]. https://digitalhumanitiesddp.com/.

For the theory behind this approach, see Morreale, Laura. 2019. “Medieval Digital Humanities and the Rite of Spring: Thoughts on Performance and Preservation.” BodoArXiv. July 18. doi:10.34055/osf.io/7p2t6.