Chapter 9: Digital Ephemerality in Wartime: Reflections on Archiving, Text Encoding, and Teaching Digital Humanities in the 2020s

Digital resources are at especially grave risk in war zones, where museums, art galleries, community centers, and schools can be targeted purposefully to destroy community connections and stop heritage work. International scholars can form resistance networks to preserve digital records of threatened cultural memory. One such preservation effort, Saving Ukrainian Heritage Online (SUCHO), formed immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to archive Ukraine’s threatened internet resources. SUCHO volunteers from 38 countries scraped ∼5,400 websites, sometimes moments before they were pulled off the grid, to establish a partial backup for Ukrainian developers to rebuild someday. Yet the future of these resources is uncertain, and internet resources are fragile. Perhaps scholars a century from now will be able to work with the SUCHO materials we archived, much as contemporary digital editions like the Letters 1916 project are rebuilding a record of a war-torn past.