Session 14

FAIR, CARE and digital sustainability

Authors
Affiliation

Tobias Hodel

Walter Benjamin Kolleg / Digital Humanities, University of Bern

Elena Spadini

Francesco Beretta

Published

15 December 2026

Modified

2 September 2026

Course team Taught by the course team: Tobias Hodel, Elena Spadini and Francesco Beretta.

In this session

  • The FAIR principles
  • The CARE principles, and the tension between them and FAIR
  • Digital sustainability: what happens to a project after the funding ends
  • Closing the semester

FAIR

(Wilkinson et al. 2016) — principles for data, addressed as much to machines as to people:

  • Findable — persistent identifiers, rich metadata, indexed in a searchable resource
  • Accessible — retrievable by their identifier, with metadata that survives the data
  • Interoperable — formal, shared, broadly applicable vocabularies
  • Reusable — richly described, with a clear licence and clear provenance

Note what FAIR does not say: it does not say “open”. Data can be FAIR and closed.

CARE

(Carroll et al. 2020) — principles for Indigenous data governance, formulated because FAIR is silent on power:

  • Collective benefit
  • Authority to control
  • Responsibility
  • Ethics

The productive friction: FAIR pushes towards maximum circulation, CARE asks who gets to decide about circulation. Both are needed, and they do not always agree. This applies well beyond Indigenous data — to any material about people who did not consent to being data.

Digital sustainability

  • The lifespan of a DH project versus the lifespan of its funding
  • Repositories and persistent identifiers: Zenodo, DOIs, institutional repositories
  • Formats: open, plain, documented — and why your database is a liability
  • Documentation as the actual preservation strategy
  • Licensing: for data, for code, for text — three different decisions
  • Exit planning from day one: what will still exist in ten years, and in what form?

Applying it to your own work

Take your project site and audit it:

  • Is it findable? Does it have an identifier that is not a GitHub URL?
  • Is the data separable from the presentation?
  • Is there a licence? Is there a README that explains the provenance?
  • If you stopped working on it tomorrow, what would someone else be able to do with it?

Closing

  • Where to go next in the MA programmes
  • Projects, colloquia and infrastructure at DH Bern
  • Final questions on the assignment
TipIn parallel in the Lab

The DH Lab hosts the final-year presentations for Master Minor and Master Major students.

Back to top

References

Carroll, Stephanie Russo, Ibrahim Garba, Oscar L. Figueroa-Rodríguez, et al. 2020. ‘The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance’. Data Science Journal 19 (1): 43. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043.
Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, et al. 2016. ‘The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship’. Scientific Data 3: 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.