What is the role of digital humanities during wartime? Since February 24th, 2022, Ukraine is enduring attacks from Russian troops. A broad majority stands by Ukraine with various initiatives – humanitarian as well as cultural. We spoke with Stanford University’s Quinn Dombrowski about an initiative that aims to save Ukrainian cultural heritage digitally.
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Copernico:
You are one of the coordinators of SUCHO – Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online. When, where and by whom was SUCHO launched? How quickly could action be taken after the war began?
Quinn Dombrowski:
For the first few days of the war, I – like so many others – was just doomscrolling the news and feeling miserable. It was Anna Kijas, a music librarian at Tufts University, who sprung into action first. The first weekend (Feb. 27th, 2022), she tweeted about a data rescue event she was planning for the following weekend. I loved the idea of actually doing something to help, even from the other side of the world, but was worried that waiting a week might be too long. Sebastian Majstorovic from the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage also saw Anna’s tweet, and we all got together that Monday along with a few other colleagues to talk about doing more, faster. The next day, March 1st, SUCHO launched: we were making the website as we were writing the web archiving tutorials as we were setting up the Slack as we were creating volunteer sign-up forms. We had 400 volunteers by the next day.
 
Copernico:
Your website states that 1,300 cultural heritage professionals work for SUCHO. Where are they based, which institutions are involved?
Quinn Dombrowski:
While a lot of our volunteers have a background in cultural heritage, we also have people in our group who just want to help – their ages range from retirees who want to put their free time to use, to elementary-school children who are just learning about web archiving as well as the war. SUCHO is a volunteer effort, not associated formally with any organization, and that’s been important: cultural heritage organizations have processes and procedures that make them move a lot more slowly than we needed to in this situation. The organizations I work for, Stanford Libraries and Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, have been extremely supportive, allowing this work to take over most of my job, and encouraging many of my colleagues to get involved as well. But most of our volunteers are juggling their “regular jobs” as well as their SUCHO work. Our volunteers come mostly from North America and Western Europe, and the time zone span makes it so that the work never has to stop: when I’m going to bed in California, the day is beginning in Western Europe.
 
Copernico:
How does the rescue of Ukrainian cultural heritage work in your initiative in concrete terms? Which methods do you use and which challenges occurred?
Quinn Dombrowski:
We use two major approaches to archiving cultural heritage websites: sending links to the Wayback Machine run by the Internet Archive, and creating web archives in a distributed way using the free, open-source Webrecorder software our own laptops and servers. It’s important to have both: not only for the sake of redundancy (there’s a library saying, LOCKSS – Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), but because it means that we’re not dependent on any one system or platform staying up. Early in the project, there was a power outage at the Internet Archive, which took the Wayback Machine offline for a morning. Normally this is fine, but in a war where every hour counts, we didn’t want to risk a single event like that stopping all our work.
People often ask us about cyberattacks and whether that’s been a problem. We’ve seen less of that than people seem to imagine, but our web archiving work – which involves loading multiple pages from a website at the same time – can sometimes look to a server’s automated processes like a cyberattack, and there’s no way to convey our good intentions. So sometimes we have to work more slowly, or manually load websites in the browser and capture them using the Webrecorder browser plugin.
 
Copernico:
What existing infrastructures and networks could your initiative draw on, what had to be newly created?
Quinn Dombrowski:
The Internet Archive is a major one, both in terms of the technical infrastructure they set up for the Wayback Machine and also the legal precedent they’ve established for the legitimacy of web archiving, at least in the US. (The US appeals court ruled again that web archiving and scraping public websites are legal, after we had already started our work.) Wikidata was also a valuable resource for finding Ukrainian museum and library websites, though we discovered that quite a bit of that data was out of date, with some websites being down or moved. We’ve been able to send Wikidata updated information about those resources as part of this process.
What we discovered, though, is that while there’s some precedent for urgent web archiving (e.g. of climate data on government websites in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016), there seems to not be a precedent for doing this during a war. It’s a very different situation, trying to do wartime web archiving when sites are up and down (on an average day, 14-20% of the URLs on our list are offline), vs. a more controlled situation where you can work more methodically. We hope to write up some of the processes we’ve developed and lessons learned in an open access book when we’re done, so that people doing this in the future don’t have to make up so much from scratch.
 
Copernico: 
Is there a prioritization for the rescue of digital cultural assets?
Quinn Dombrowski:
We have people doing situation monitoring – following, hour by hour, air raid and other alerts intended for people in Ukraine – and we do reprioritize the links we have outstanding based on their location. We also have people digitally walking through the streets of cities under siege using Google Maps, looking for the cultural heritage / museum icon, then checking to see if those places hae websites.
 
Copernico:
Is there a particular "treasure" that you personally are especially happy to have saved or that you are still anxious about?
Quinn Dombrowski:
Sebastian managed to archive the Kharkiv State Archive website, along with all its digitized contents, hours before it went down, and hasn’t come back since. Everyone has a different focus, the things that they seek out and get excited about. For me, maybe because I have three young kids, it’s children’s libraries, music schools, and after-school programs. We don’t often think of those as cultural heritage, but they’re the sites where young people engage with their country’s culture, and co-create its future. One of my favorites was an after-school program that had been updating its blog daily before the war. One of the last posts was of a children’s art project entitled “I’m Ukrainian, and that sounds proud!” There were photos of the children’s creations – paintings of sunflowers and hearts, and a map of Ukraine. I archived the site, but checked back in on it later, only to find that those posts had been deleted, probably to avoid making it a target. I’m glad we have a copy of how it originally was, so we can give those images back to the people who run the program when they’re in a position to rebuild.
 
Copernico:
Why is the rescue of digital cultural property especially important in a war situation?
Quinn Dombrowski:
Statements from the Kremlin indicate that this war, in particular, is about who gets to decide that they have a country, a language, a culture, and the assertion that Ukrainians do not have that right. These websites represent Ukrainian cultural heritage as Ukrainians have framed it for the world, and as everyday people in Ukraine live it. Furthermore, things like photos and catalogs of library and museum holdings may be useful in the future, for instance in war crimes tribunals if those materials are looted or destroyed.
 
Copernico:
How do you assess the situation of Ukrainian cultural heritage in the current war?
Quinn Dombrowski:
The Ukrainian government is documenting crimes against cultural heritage, here: https://culturecrimes.mkip.gov.ua/. The focus is on physical destruction, and there’s reason to think that this is only a fraction of the damage that has been done, but it’s a start.
 
Copernico:
What do you hear from your Ukrainian partners about the situation there? How much digital infrastructure in the cultural sector is lost already?
Quinn Dombrowski:
It’s hard to say. It’s difficult to get in touch with people on the ground, and even more difficult to stay in touch with them. We and our partners have offered unlimited storage, but people physically in Ukraine have so many things they need to do at the same time, from looking out for themselves and their families to protecting physical cultural heritage. Servers are, understandably, often an afterthought, although we are reaching out to institutions that have expressed an interest in digitizing more of their collections, to try to supply them with the necessary equipment. But any thorough survey of the state of digital infrastructure will probably have to wait until after the war.
 
Copernico:
How can we - and our readers - support you in your work?
Quinn Dombrowski:
At the moment we’re at capacity for our web archiving project, but we are looking to spin up a few additional initiatives that will be able to take on more volunteers. Anyone can fill out the volunteer form on our website to be added to that stand-by list. We also have a link to our OpenCollective on our site, to help fund some infrastructure costs for our current and future initiatives.