By: Alex Gil,
Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Humanities and History Division, Columbia University Libraries
Location: Studio@Butler
Time: 2-4 pm, 2017, 1 March
Weather:

Starting about minimal computing. - reduction in the use of algorithm and hardware to the minium that any given project can bear. you must have your research questions well formulated in order to use minimal computing. These conversations were stsrted a few years ago because institutions sometimes attempt to beat google or be left out of digital humanities conversation because one did not get enough grant. It is also part of impetus to increase the production of digital scholarship in an age of hybrid scholarship. The problem is, our institutions and publishing houses are all designed to support the analog, the paid license to content. We are going through difficult times where certain monopolies dominate production of scholarship at our expense. We are giving our content away to large companies. We spend a lot buying our own labor back. Our own digital production can hopefully counter. Minimal computing makes sense in this scenario - for people without big grants to do long length studies in a reasonable way.

Whenever a minimal edition is produced many things are reduced, like server time (ecological), maintenance cost (labor), reduce bandwith (accessible/justice), better preservation. We raise learning curve - it is not a problem in a class. But in the professional world changing staff to work in a different way is a real problem, especially the cost and time involved in retraining staff. Hidden costs like responsibility for internet etc are included.
Ed is a theme for static site generator Jekyll. It converts plain text markup into websites. It takes a series of files written in plain text and calculates how to build web-pages with links etc. It is different than the dynamic web we are familiar with: web 2.0. Dynamic websites produce html on the fly. 90% of documents are dynamically generated - they depend on servers. We will pre-make it and make a static site generator. Ed pre-exists. Shelley-Godwin archive is s static archive for example. It has the Frankenstein model. Studio@Butler is also partially static. Comments have to be dynamically generated however. Netflix is a static site.

Language for Jekyll include YAML, markdown (reduce form of HTML - simplest form of markup - for example, Chicago citation style is an idea of markup. Markdown is a markup which is a series of rules about how to structure data. YAML is used to create the metadata and markdown (text.md) for the content. Jekyll can interprt YAML, Markdown Liquid and pure HTML. Heads have to be used in pure HTML because Jekyll takes HTML.

- Displays formats of the webpage.

www.dhbox.com - digital humanities project of CUNY