What is Maintenance Mode for Digital Dwellers?
Maintenance Mode for Digital Dwellers is a capstone project for the Digital Humanities Master’s program at the CUNY Graduate Center. This adaptable pedagogical digital workshop encourages participants to engage their digital maintenance and archival practices through a critical lens by exploring personal digital creation and collection as a practice of digital memory, underscoring the significance of digital agency, and interrogating the “digital self”. Through each module, the workshop offers an overview of how these topics, techniques and systems can be utilized to help secondary and early post-secondary students maintain their digital life and materials. The approach outlined in this project is built with principles rooted in intersectional and critical digital pedagogy and methodologies of the Digital Humanities.
Why this project?
The project was conceived around the critique of the precariousness of digital spaces and digital ownership. Across all sectors of human experience, from learning to leisure, digital technologies have become increasingly proprietary, exploitative, and extractive, diminishing individual and collective user control and agency.
While it seems insurmountable to regain or reimagine that control and agency, individual and collective efforts are available to mitigate some of these issues. This workshop is one of those individual interventions that create an entry point for creating awareness and empowerment. When users are empowered, they can more easily protect themselves from malicious uses of their digital output, demand greater consumer-friendly regulations from governing bodies and advocate and rally around digital tools and services that align with human and environmentally ethical values.
How to use this project
While this workshop is designed to be used linearly, it is important to acknowledge that capacity and time constraints exist. Please use all or some of the workshop, whatever best suits participants’ needs. If there are parts you want to take and remix for your own needs, do so with proper attribution.
For a quick explainer and where to start the workshop, go to this page: How to use this workshop
MMDD is a work in progress and will be updated to finish the complete workshop. A notice at the end of this page will show when it was last updated. A static downloadable version exists here on GitHub. If you notice mistakes, inaccurate or missing info, please contact me to send feedback and suggestions at macimorris20[@]gmail[dot]com.
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Last Edited: January 20th, 2026
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Maci Morris
The CUNY Graduate Center
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