About

<desc> lab, or the Digital Editing and Scholarly Communication Lab at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, addresses research questions such as: How do we disseminate primary sources (documents and other artifacts from the past) digitally? How is scholarship around them modeled and processed as data? How are research results communicated to a variety of audiences?

The projects at <desc> lab focus on hands-on and practical solutions to explore these research questions. This is primarily done through careful data modeling using standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative format and through software development towards complex UI and reading environments using front-end technologies for the web.

Low-infrastructure

The Lab’s projects take a low-infrastructure approach without foregoing features expected of complex Digital Humanities projects.

Those in charge of infrastructure are also determining, particularly in the long term, the scholarly worth of a project, whether it should remain online, and in what form.

Viglianti, Raffaele, and Gimena del Rio Riande. 2025. Against infrastructure: global approaches to digital scholarly editing in “Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century” eds. James O'Sullivan et al. Scottish University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.4

Image from https://submarinecablemap.com

This approach is fundamental to increasing the likelihood that digital editions and other humanities research websites will remain online in the long term. To reduce infrastructure requirements, we typically rely on static site generators to publish content online. No databases, tricky security updates, and other server-side maintenance.

Whenever possible, we strive to follow the recommendations of the Ending's Project Principles for Digital Longevity, such as principle 4.2 use only standards with support across all platforms, whose long-term viability is assured. Our choices are HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.