One of the most striking features of life on earth is the dramatic diversity and creativity produced by Darwinian evolution. As the field of artificial life has matured, interest has grown in recapitulating similar levels of diversity in silico. It is immediately obvious that artificial life has not yet reached this goal (Bedau et al., 1998). On the other hand, there is no reason to think that artificial life systems are missing some fundamental component of the evolutionary process. Emily Dolson and her coauthors have worked towards formalizing an approach focused on identifying (thus potentially overcoming) barriers to open-ended evolution (Dolson et al., 2015; Taylor et al., 2016). The goal of this work is principally to operationalize part of this framework to study whether or not coevolving host-parasite communities in Avida exhibit ongoing open-ended evolution. While doing so, we will introduce a few quantitative measures of evolutionary change that are rooted in traditional ecological theory and are suitable for coevolving communities.