Thinking Backwards, Walking Ahead: Guiding Humanities Researchers through Digital Project Life Cycles

In order to avoid outdated projects, unpreserved knowledge, uncredited labor, and privacy or consent issues with digital projects University of Michigan has started providing a series of workshops that emphasize a change in culture and process in the project life cycle. Workshop participants learn how to visualize the life cycle of a project using human-centered design and backwards modelling when planning their projects to better understand how to version, archive, and preserve their research projects. This poster shares our experience with designing and running this workshop series at the University of Michigan and will give us an opportunity to connect with peers to build a community of practice for digital humanities scholars who develop and lead workshops. Materials from the workshop series will be shared as open data.