This page describes the purpose behind this particular experiment in building a digital library of student sample work using Wax–a minimalistic website-making process through github pages. While I am submitting this mockup/draft of a DL for LIS 6514, I am also exploring the possibilities of using tools like Wax and CollectionBuilder–a similar Jekyll environment–as opposed to more full featured sites like Omeka or Scalar for small-scale digital libraries dedicated to a specific research problem.
I’m interested in the ways that small digital libraries can work in concert with my traditional research. When writing my dissertation, I submitted to my advisor a descriptive handlist of the 20+ early modern manuscript transcriptions that made up my corpus of research materials. I called it Appendix A. My advisor called it Chapter 3, and he was right. The art of collecting, describing, and making available for further research a selection of primary documents is itself a scholarly contribution. These 20+ manuscript transcriptions were a record of early steps in the field of medieval studies and my descriptions of the various hands at work–each of them writing in an imitative medieval script–brought into focus the working process of Matthew Parker’s scribes and librarians. Since graduating, I’ve been planning to develop a digital library of those selected manuscripts alongside other antiquarian transcripts, but I haven’t yet found a format that works for me. Because most of the libraries that house the manuscripts I studied use IIIF-based digital libraries, it would make sense to build my own DL off of that same platform–the interoperability of digitized resources from multiple collections would be a key component of my project.
I started with Scalar. As a mockup for a presentation on this digital project last February, I was able to get an install of Scalar up and running on my own server without too much trouble. I figured out how to embed Universal Viewer and learned a little bit about how that site works as a kind of guided digital exhibition. At that time, I also learned a bit about Omeka, which is kind of the standard resource for digital exhibitions like this. I came away from that phase of the project a little frustrated. The tools I was using were, in effect, overkill for the project. Scalar’s visualizations, metadata backends, and ebook stylings were really fascinating, but far too much for the project. Omeka’s plugins offered a wide range of possibilities, but left me paralyzed for choice. And neither of them had easy, native support for IIIF manifests and viewers (and using an embed code for UniversalViewer worked, but wasn’t sustainable). I was happy with the presentation and the idea for a site, but needed more proofs of concept.
This semester, I’m taking both LIS 6514 and DIG 6585, the DH Capstone. I’m using both courses to test out different methods of building a small digital library exhibition as a way of building my own skillset in this field before I work on my own project. For the DH Capstone (and hopefully for real in the Spring), I’m planning and building a mockup of a DL for the medieval manuscript fragments housed in USF Special Collections (not those already digitized in the Sacred Leaves Collection, but the two or three boxes of fragments from a various donors and teaching collections). Running into the same problems with that project that I had while building my demo last spring for my Matthew Parker project, I began looking for other alternatives, which is where this class comes in.
After reading the discussion board posts about the various tools, I remembered seeing an ad for a course at DHSI on CollectionBuilder. Looking into the project, it seemed like a great resource. I even started building a mockup with it, but I found that it didn’t really have support for multi-page documents (like those in my DL), so I began looking for similarly designed sites and that’s when I found Wax. The sample sites used IIIF-viewers (both openseadragon and Mirador) and had native support for even building my own IIIF manifests when running the site, so I’ve spent the last week working with Wax to get this mockup up and running. I didn’t want to double-dip with my other class this semester, so my DL is something that should be more useful to me as a teacher than as a researcher–a repository of sample student work for one of my Lit course’s more individualized assignments.
The Commonplace Book assignment is one of my favorites to read, but I’m often met with a lot of questions when I assign it. It is, after all, a six-week (maybe digital, maybe artistic) reading journal of thoughts, connections, quotes, art, and creative responses to our course readings and students want to know how to best complete it. In the assignment sheet, I’m able to provide them links to some previous work, but those links are limited to the few web pages my previous students have given me permission to share. I do bring in a few physical copies, but those aren’t always available for reference. And I want my students to feel free to experiment wildly with form on this project, and not just be limited to tumblr gifs or bullet journals (although both are cool). Since I have a personal/professional website and I’m wanting to do more digital pedagogy with my lit classes, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to build a digital library of student samples.
To be most useful, the site would need to be searchable and browsable by text, date, and format. I’d be able to provide a range of sample versions that would hopefully inspire my students to do their own great work. While I’ve taught with a couple of different themes in my lit course, there are some similar texts across semesters–Usrula Le Guin’s “The Ones who Walk away from Omelas” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example. By tagging each item with the texts and authors they cover, my students would be able to see how others have been inspired by the same stories and performances. Eventually, I’d like to tag their external references as well, but I would need to do some more development in the Wax and Jekyll backend to make the tagging system more useful (maybe stealing some code from CollectionBuilder?). Sorting by semester and by type (journal, handmade journal, and various websites) also made sense. These were all new metadata fields that I plugged into the sample .csv provided by the Wax demo. Because the Wax uses static web pages and minimal system resources, it can store the metadata for a small collection more efficiently in a single spreadsheet without the need for a full database (like Omeka, Scalar, or even Wordpress requires).
I’d also like it too look nice and be easy to navigate. The Wax demo page looked like a great starting point.
I found the documentation to be well-written and easy to follow. The principles of how the site worked and how to fit my own content needs within its framework clicked early on in the process. I was able to build my metadata spreadsheet without much problem, with only a couple of exceptions. You’ll notice that Amy’s tumblr site doesn’t have an image–that’s because I included her metadata in the spreadsheet, but forgot to place an image in the right file folder before I ran the script to build the site’s pages. I also ran into some trouble with the title to one of the books–by using the quote: “It isn’t right, it isn’t fair” in the label field, I messed up a string of code for the display of the thumbnails and gallery on the front page. Those two little apostrophes looked like an identifier to the html gremilins who all of a sudden needed a closed parentheses to display the thumbnails like they should have done.
It took me two days to figure out that little typo.
For future development of this page, I’d like to clean up those little remaining issues in the metadata files, add more samples from this semester’s group of students, and perhaps even set up a second collection of samples from our final Unessay assignment, which would bring in even more forms of media to be a part of this library. I’d potentially be interested in using a site like this with my students, as a way of having them develop their own DL of material related to the course.
Finally, I’d be interested in seeing what this framework could do for my own research. While this site worked miracles in making my own IIIF-manifests of images in a folder, I’d be interested to see if it could work just as well with manifests from remote locations. Could I have a page displaying my own camera images for a manuscript from the Bodleian (used with permission, of course) and another page displaying the IIIF-manifest from a Parker Library manuscript? It should be possible, and the Wax developer has already experimented with it. Could I also convince Wax to work with the Mirador viewer instead of OpenSeaDragon and allow for annotation? What about a transcription window or metadata field? Finally, would it make more sense to build my (or even the USF special collections) DL exhibition through a framework like Wax or through the more fully-featured sites built by Omeka or Scalar?
I would, at the very least, be interested in considering the possibilities.