After more than a quarter century of pioneering community building, interdisciplinary collaboration, and digital exploration, the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory—universally known as HASTAC and pronounced “Haystack”—is officially preparing to go offline. Long celebrated across higher education and digital humanities circles as the world’s first and oldest academic social network, the organization will soon cease supporting interactive posting, user registration, and active community commentary.
The closure of the interactive platform marks a significant milestone in the history of digital scholarship. While the active social networking features are being turned off, the legacy of the organization will not be lost to the digital ether. HASTAC’s interactive environment is transitioning into a permanent archive hosted on the Knowledge Commons platform. Simultaneously, the organization will shutter its biannual newsletter, and the current academic year will mark the final cohort of the prominent HASTAC Scholars program, bringing a definitive close to several of the organization’s most visible contemporary initiatives.
The decision to shutter the platform was formally announced in a joint message released by HASTAC co-founders Cathy N. Davidson, distinguished professor emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Duke University, and Shelly Eversley, a professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center. According to the co-founders, the escalating financial costs and the sheer technical complexity of maintaining a bespoke, interactive social platform in the modern web ecosystem ultimately motivated their difficult decision. Running a dedicated digital social network requires continuous administrative oversight, security updates, and infrastructure investments that have simply become unsustainable over time.
“A social network is costly and tremendously complex to run and, after more than 25 years, is no longer sustainable,” Davidson and Eversley stated in their joint announcement. Rather than allowing the vibrant community to slowly dwindle, lose engagement, and fade away quietly, the leadership team chose a path of deliberate stewardship. “Rather than let HASTAC dwindle and die, we are sunsetting it with dignity and enormous pride in a quarter century of thinking together about, through, with, and sometimes against new technologies and their application in society,” they explained.
When HASTAC was originally founded in the year 2000, the digital landscape looked vastly different. Conceived as an online, interactive, and international network, the organization was created specifically to address the vast social and technological questions introduced by the emerging, interactive World Wide Web. Over the ensuing decades, the network expanded far beyond its initial vision, growing into a massive global community encompassing over 18,000 individual members alongside approximately 400 institutional affiliates, including major research institutions such as Arizona State University.
Throughout its long history, HASTAC served as a vital digital town square where scholars, researchers, educators, artists, scientists, and students could converge. Users utilized the platform to create individual and collaborative blog posts, initiate complex pedagogical and theoretical discussions, post job advertisements, and share professional opportunities across traditional academic boundaries. It functioned as an early incubator for digital humanities, bridging the often-rigid gap between the humanities, arts, and the hard sciences long before interdisciplinary studies became a standard institutional framework in higher education.
Reflecting on the organization’s expansive history, Davidson and Eversley noted that the alliance deliberately avoided being boxed into a single, narrow institutional mandate. Instead, the network evolved organically alongside the shifting currents of digital technology and higher education policy. “HASTAC has never had a singular mission but, rather, has grappled with the many different technological and educational twists and turns of the last quarter century, always with a joint and balanced emphasis on equality and innovation,” the co-founders said.
As part of the orderly wind-down of the platform, preservation efforts are already well underway to ensure that a quarter century of intellectual labor, discourse, and community building remains accessible to future generations of researchers. The Knowledge Commons technical team has formally begun the intricate process of archiving HASTAC’s extensive digital content spanning from 2017 to the present day. This contemporary archive will provide scholars with continued access to the digital output of the network’s later years.
Meanwhile, the earlier chapters of the organization’s history have already been secured for posterity. HASTAC digital content generated between 2004 and 2017 has been carefully preserved and archived on a physical computer housed securely within the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, ensuring that the foundational digital artifacts of the world’s oldest academic social network remain protected within a premier archival institution.
