Digital Humanities Center
Potential roles (vary from institution to institution):
- director
- dh librarian
- dh developer
- faculty and student collaborators
Work style
- Work is generally project-based, completed in cycles that include intense collaborative development periods followed by long-term maintenance
- Labor generally separated such that faculty/student collaborators prepare project content/data, dh center staff prepare and implement the technical structure
- This can change depending on the goals of the project; some projects may require collaborators acquire varying levels of technical proficiency
Static web integration
- Depending on your institution’s resources, you may or may not have access to and support for non-static dh tools. If you do, then you’ll need to make choices when it comes to when to use static web development for your dh projects. The following scenarios might help you make a decision:
Digital scholarship project
You receive a project proposal from a humanities faculty member, the purpose of which is to make some content available via the web, and provide exploratory ways of encountering that content using visualizations. You estimate that the development timeline to set up and publish the site is about 10 months, start to finish. After that deadline, the professor would like to occasionally update or edit the site, but won’t be making any major changes. The professor is technically curious.
You establish a system for translating that content into data (probably in Google Sheets), teaching the professor data management concepts as you go, so that she can gather and organize the data while you begin work on the technical scaffolding. You set up a GitHub repository and start a Jekyll project, either drawing on template code you discover through the Lib-Static site, or code that you develop locally. You serve the site using GitHub Pages. Once the site is set up, you teach the professor how to make updates to the site data (csv/yaml format) and content (markdown format). You complete the work by the deadline, and provide minimal maintenance (such as updating assets) to the site moving forward.
Why did you choose static in this scenario? The faculty collaborator was technically curious, and you saw an opportunity to teach some transferable data skills (maybe you taught her some formulas in Google Sheets, gave an overview of version control and ensured a familiarity with GitHub workflows) that are potentially beneficial beyond the project. You also were aware that your dh center doesn’t have a lot of personnel resources to spend on maintaining projects long-term, so you needed to produce a site that would remain secure while still allowing for content and code updates when desired.
contributor:
Olivia Wikle (University of Idaho Library)
last update: 2021-08-04