 All right ready to go Hello again, welcome welcome everyone today. We're going to do our second session for the year for the working group This is our DLF working group data and digital scholarship kind of a newer We're bringing together two different initiatives Former formerly the e-research network and the digital scholarship working group Merging those around data and digital scholarship. We're excited to see everybody here today Just want to note the two facilitators in the room Sarah Sarah manhunter is here and I'm here as well both work at Montana State We help coordinate and bring the group together. It's just kind of logistical And a number of ways So I'm just reaffirming for the group what I'm going to do is just Kind of outline a few of the things that we we think and work on in here. So it's a Group that's kind of merging that the research data services community and the digital scholarship community There could be lots of ways into this some of these goals Typically what you'll see is something like what we're going to do today, which is introduce a set of tools Maybe a speaker maybe an exercise with that speaker today. It's it's Devin Becker from the University of Idaho We also have a number of Notice that the listserv has been it's a Really great resource. There are lots of us on there more recently. There's been a conversation around best practices or best results around DH workshops or topics for DH workshops so that listserv is Available and You can feel free to post there. I don't have a link to it in here Overall, we're really just trying to build a community of practice for DS And for data services, that's really our goal here Sarah's going to talk a little bit about one of the other components of this is a consultation And she's going to talk a little bit about that right now just to kind of introduce it to the group Yeah, so we have a Consultation option that Jason and I had done when we were the e-research network and it was really fun It's like a matching of people who want to talk about a topic and people who are You have expertise or more knowledge on that topic And so the idea is you come up with like a project or a document that you want to workshop or we have more guidelines Linked from this document here And we're asking you to sign up by February 5th and we have space in this spreadsheet both for consultants and Consultees so people who want to get a consultation and people who want to provide some expertise And I we made a little bit li link there DLF DDS dash consultations To get you there if you can't click on these slides So it's super fun And so if you're interested in signing up, please do and if you have questions about it You can ask me and Jason offline or we can answer questions at the end of the session to Okay, go ahead Jason No, I was gonna say I'll drop the link into the chat as well. Perfect. You can do that in a second All right So today we're really excited to have this session about static web tools and digital humanities practice And then we're also going to have an activity where you sort of add your own meta data And you can see this collection builder tool in action that Devin's going to talk through and we'll have wrap up and questions So that's the basic structure of today's workshop or activities and So our speaker today is Devin C. Becker He's the head of data and digital services at University of Idaho And he's the director of the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning His talk today is called Confessions of a Static Web Convert and he told us that he would provide a lot more information about himself So all we're giving you is his title, but we're excited to have you here Devin and I Think that's it. You can take it away from here I'm gonna stop sharing Well, thank you Jason and Sarah and thank you to the DLF for providing this venue I'm really excited to be here and a little nervous. I didn't expect to be nervous Here I am and But yeah, so I'm gonna talk about the static web and kind of my Journey into kind of conversion basically total conversion to static web practices And kind of go through a few things Here I also wanted to mention though before you go in that you know that you research network that Jason and Sarah ran It was really important for the development of collection builder and for our practices at the University of Idaho library And I'm excited. That's a another reason. I'm so excited to be a part of this So, let me go to present So this is what I'm hoping that you all get from this today I'm an understanding and overview of how static site generators work We'll talk briefly about that on the static templates that we work with at the University of Idaho Which is collection builder in oral history as data in the models we follow which are minimal computing And lip static which we call a methodology I also hope you come away with ideas about the differences between systems and templates I'm gonna kind of detail a models of models for dichotomy And then the role of making and creativity in regards to digital practice and make some arguments about that I also hope I'm not going to talk really specifically about The what it would mean to convert to a static web approach at your own in your own practice But I'm hoping like overall you'll get a sense of what that means And more generally, I hope you have a pleasant experience and some touchstones and resources to take with you There's a bunch of links at the last bit and I've got links and we'll put links into this Presentation and all that and it is a little longer. It's probably gonna take about 45 minutes with the With the activity as well. Um, so I want to introduce me since I'm doing the confession give you kind of the background This is almost like a little resume, but I was born in Indiana. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana I grew up Lutheran and majored in religion at a non-religious college So there's kind of a clash there, but that's the religious language crippling self doubt, etc. I My kind of true passion has always been poetry. I'm a writer. I got to study With the current Nobel laureate Louise Glick, which was which was starts blew my mind when that happened this fall And then I have an MFA in poetry and published a book in 2015. I Went and decided to kind of, you know, it's very difficult to become a poet in the in academia anymore But I really got into the library's kind of the last bit of my teaching career there And I got an MLS at Indiana University And studied rare books and digital libraries Particularly with Cotty Borner and information digitalization Joel Silver at the Lilly library and John Walsh who teaches digital libraries Um before I get totally into this I want to acknowledge that the University of Idaho is on the seeded grounds of the Nez Perce tribe And the traditional homelands of the Palouse band of Indians I acknowledge their presence here and recognize their continuing connection to the land the water and their ancestors and this is a Really important spot for the Nez person Very privileged to be living in this area I also want to acknowledge that I am a white middle-aged heterosexual man Talking about technology using religious terminology, uh, which there are few rhetorical situations that could be more frightening that um I also I want to put it And so I want to kind of acknowledge that right away and know that that I recognize that And also that you know, this is not the presentation in which we're sort of talking about uh, the social justice and uh equity and inclusion sort of Portions of the static web practice, but but they're very much there and I saw the outskills here and he's he's spoken somewhat about that but um It's an important part of this approach. Uh, this isn't the presentation to go deeply into that But I I just want to say that that's that's always on my mind with some of this stuff as well Um professionally, uh, you've got my kind of titles here. I've been at the Idaho University of Idaho Library for a decade I started as the digital initiatives and scholarly communications librarian had another And job and now I have kind of three administrative roles including the interim head of special collections and archives Which is truly too much stuff. Um, but we're in a kind of transitional moment Uh, I've worked with a ton of systems. So just you know, just so you know that I have that experience content DM vivo WordPress or mecca some Drupal OJS And you know, but part of the reason I do so much static stuff is because of the experience with those systems um And then we right now have an incredible faculty here and you know, and I've and it's really grown in the last You know, I'd say five years especially. Um, and I'm I'm just extremely lucky to be working with my colleagues and uh faculty and staff Um, so before we get going Uh, totally into this I I want to start with a little activity. It's going to be about three to five minutes Uh, and so I have a linked uh google forum here. Um, and Let me go back here. Uh, and so I'm going to ask you to kind of give a give a um, and you can use that bitly Uh, I'm going to try to read my chat Let me see if I can I can somebody put that in the chat. I can I can try to get it in there. So it's bitly bitly slash static dlf Um, and there's a linked google forum there Uh, and I'd like you to take the next three to five minutes to fill it out and what I'm asking you to do is sort of Uh, describe an encounter with another thinker's thoughts like I I talk about a poet named freq the dart and the one that I filled out in a couple in a couple others um And uh, talk about the the and just go look them up on google You know for the birth date get an image of the thinker as well Um, and and then talk about the the date of the encounter the location it occurred Um, you'll do that, you know via the forums and then a very brief description Uh, and the medium and book in person, uh, etc. Um And this is this should only take three to five minutes. I'm not you know, you doesn't need to be You know spelling or copyright things don't worry about that We'll put up a digital collection using collection builder using this data and then we'll take it down right after this presentation So it's it's just a kind of demo Don't get too crazy about it. But you know, hopefully we can we can do something cool. Um, I'm also going to ask you to to add a Some uh coordinates. So if you see here, here's mosco If you so to add it live that long to get that long the easiest way I've found right now is to just go to um Go to go to google maps right click on wherever your location is and then click on that and click on the first Option there and that'll copy the latitude and longitude to the clipboard you can drop that in exactly as it is Into the form and then we will be filling out Um a spreadsheet here. So I will uh wait for that and give you guys a few minutes to do that And if there's any questions, you can either speak up or ask them in the chat Sounds good. I'm over there now. So I'm entering some better data Okay about one more minute Getting some in there Devin, is there a size that the image needs to be? No, it's fine. Whatever image you get is fine. You know, we're just gonna kind of click through it. So Teeny tiny will look a little worse, but it'll work All right, um, I'm gonna get back and if you need to finish some of that up I'm talking. I think uh, the next bit will be a kind of overview of static web Um in general, um, so, uh, you know, I I call this a conversions of a static web convert I think I talk about these sort of practices as static web I think there are, you know In the in the dh community, especially he's talked about his minimal computing Um and in another kind of other a little bit other ways too But so when I talk, you know, what people are talking about when they say static web generally is that They're talking about static site generators to create websites of static files mostly html CSS and javascript The the the large difference between the kind of tip of like sort of the most typical practice from the last decade Of the dynamic site versus the static site is that static files are created at build time Rather than in response to a page request So like if you're going to a WordPress site, for instance, you enter in the url And that opens and the site is building on the server and then serve to you Whereas for static sites, you build them at the time of development Cobble those things together that's all built and then you put that and you can serve that from any server Any any basic web server out there or content delivery network I mean and it's a it's an approach that's becoming more and more prevalent In the web development kind of community generally People also may refer to jam stack and jam refers to javascript plus api plus markup There are some really, you know, this is more a lot of the more kind of commercial portions of this are kind of contained in this area and there are some good Websites there, especially like jam stack dot wtf Which is quite the extension So when I'm talking about Static web a lot. I'm usually talking about jackal Jackal is a specific static site generator. There are quite a few static site generators Many of them are in different computing languages javascript go Jackal is written in ruby And so that is the the the software you need to if you're going to develop on your own computer download, etc And jackal's been popular for about a decade now. It was used on the 2012 Obama campaign One of its it's got a couple of kind of features that are particularly attractive to us It uses this liquid language, which is created by by the company Shopify To create the templates and that language is is a fairly easy to learn templating language. It's not Impossible to it's it's pretty kind of like readable and usable And that does the programming portion So the algorithms are the kind of the for loops and the if then sort of statements that create the templates that then build the site And there's also a built-in sort of data and collections function For jackal, and we're going to talk, you know, so it was built initially to be a blog And and so it has a collection of posts built in and that's one of the things that I sort of think is so So powerful about this approach is it has a collection. It has the kind of idea of collection at its center Which I think is incredibly important for, you know, archives libraries generally Something that we do really well. We have been doing really well for a very long time Um, and it also and then this I have this underscore data here It allows for iteration over csv yaml yml and json files. So Uh, the data folder and we can see that here is where those those Those data files are stored And this and the static site generator can iterate over all that data and build the templates and build all the Static websites from that data and the templates that you create. Um, so this is a typical kind of um And so like a for for jackal specifically Usually you would go to one github repo or directory on your local computer that has these directories inside of them So assets, uh, and then anything that has this underscore in front of it jackal uses is kind of the magic part of jackal Those are the places that jackal goes and it looks at and builds all the static sites from so data includes all the data files As I mentioned, uh, the layouts include the layouts for the individual pages that you're creating maybe an about page or a home page, etc Um, the posts is where they have a specific markdown formula for creating a blog post that then can you know, the There's a lot of functionality built in with those sass is for um, your your scss files the kind of the configured css The config file there that is where you fill out kind of the base settings for your site usually so maybe the site title If you're using plugins, this is where you declare them and a few other things and then the index.md And we usually have a pages uh folder where we store all of our a bunch of just Markdown folders for the pages we're going to deliver And those are where those are where those created and this isn't going to get like crazy into jackal I just want to kind of you know, give you the overview but which but so jackal uses all of that stuff there Um, it goes into the gears here, uh, and and jackal iterates over all of that and produces the static site That can be served from github pages, for instance, which is a which is a free service Or from other content delivery networks, which a lot of those are free right now too for static sites Or via any of your own any web directory you may have access to um So at the University of Idaho, uh, we have a sort of specific static stack that we work with to build The tools that we make um oral history of data and collection builder In in all of the the project sites and our library website and everything else And this is this is it. So jackal as I just went over is our static site generator We use github as a way to collaborate and track changes our versioning kind of Basic and then we also use that to publish a lot of websites Our collection builder site for is is published at collection builder dot github.io, which is a github pages site So we don't need any infrastructure besides a github account to to you know edit that site We use bootstrap To as a framework to kind of ease our development process And all that means is that you know, it has kind of uh preconfigured css and javascript Interactions that you can use basically by just adding classes to your html So the templates that we use use a lot of cards Which is or or the type of buttons that they have you could you can implement modals You can have different things like that But it just allows for like a faster kind of development model and it's kind of cleaner css You don't have to hand code all that and then the data files that we use comma separated values files Which is you know, a simple plain text version of a spreadsheet and yaml Which is you know, basically kind of a list with values and elements Defined kind of in basic text files Um, so why do we why do people use this for development? Because of that preconfiguredness because it's built before You know at the time at the build time rather than at delivery time. It's faster It's more secure So a lot of the stacks that people work with like our our lamp stacks that use php for instance And we were not allowed to use php at some at one point because we were getting you know We we had quite a few hacks but we have the what our last php site is a WordPress site Vandal poem of the day And that one is continually getting you know, people are trying to hack it and things like that This you know these sites, you know, not impossible to to get into and break But it would be kind of more of a password break and these are you know You're not going to have those kind of like spam bots that a lot of like older WordPress sites or some Drupal sites end up being Um, there's lower barriers to publishing github pages as I mentioned is a free way to publish on github from a static Site and there's no server required. So you're not having to update The software you're just having to keep track of the content that you're creating And most sites are github get lab repositories So that can you know, there's easy to integrate with other services and their collaborative Version developed kind of places And so why is this kind of important for libraries dh? I think it kind of it bodies a lot of the library archives values and practice It's it's meta data data driven. So that collections is that ideal We I think one of the big parts about this is it allows more people to participate in the kind of creation an envisionment of The the design and delivery of of information. So we work a lot with collaborative google sheets So much of our website is built at that with with that anymore And you know So and people are already ready to get into those and to think about the data in those terms And they don't have to you know start learning, you know thinking about a database or or have to kind of distinguish between the two They can just kind of learn that data is that thing that they entered into the cell It's collection oriented You know, we we try to kind of build under these this sort of like with that collections as data model and in mind But also the collections in context that we need to treat our special collections as such and really Communicate the value of That of a collection, you know that the history of the collection The context of a collection because I do think collections become more than the sum of their items It's preservable Static sites going to probably, you know going to work in 10 years Given the browsers are still, you know functioning in the same way we expect them to But it's not you're not going to have to maintain PHP or a Drupal or something like that that might You know that I think a lot of the dh projects from the early 2010s Some of them are no longer because they're no longer working because you know, it's very hard to keep that maintenance up There's also kind of a wide open development We use issues a lot in github for our website and maybe you would be Sort of annoyed trying to get a presentation ready and you messed up the spreadsheet and you're getting pinged And maybe you have a little passive aggressive Confrontation there, but then it's it's all open. It's all out there Maybe, you know, you can learn to kind of take yourself a little less seriously that way too So that collaborative iterative part of that too is there And then the sort of modular aspect of it as well all of these pieces You know, especially with the jekyll way Everything is kind of like a nested doll effect. You have an includes and you have a layout And you're always kind of building in this fashion. So it's it's very modular It's truly reusable and reproducible Which I was actually kind of impressed by in creating this I'm going to look back at some older kind of the initial Experiments with jekyll and I was able to recreate the pages that I was working with at that time. So Getting to my own kind of conversion narrative I only took, you know, I my writing kind of passion is poetry and I took one fiction class And was able to take it for like a few days. It's like I can't do this But I still remember one of the, you know, one of the instructors kind of made your points about fiction or narrative Is that you need two things, right? You need characters you care about and trouble and you know, if you're going to lose one It's the characters. Um, so, you know, what is the trouble? They were sort of hinted at this already, but uh, you know And then I'm also going to um, talk about a frank bidard poem later and one of the lines there is uh, says like What you initially apprehended passion becomes opinion. Um, he does it better than that but you know, I think there's a In kind of thinking about what's driving a lot of what we do is I was looking back at my career here and thinking about like The kind of first initial impressions I had starting my job. So, you know, 2010 Uh, it was a digital library and didn't have a whole lot of, you know, we didn't know a lot Um, but I was pretty, you know, it was it was thrust into kind of maintaining the content dm right away. Um And what I realized though was that, you know, I was really disappointed with the way the special collections were treated Um, and especially digital libraries, uh, you know, I I came from, you know, working at the lily library and seeing what You know, these amazing collections and kind of getting to experience them in the back rooms and having and just Having such a powerful experience there and then you see them online and they're like little big thumbnails and they're treated as a kind of item in a catalog rather than as a collection that has meaning in itself and uh, I You know, I was like that doesn't seem right and it still doesn't seem right to me I still think a lot of the systems that we work with don't do a very good job of that Um, and then you know that the why are these systems so difficult to customize? I mean like I knew how to work with spreadsheets. I knew how to work with data in that way I knew files and folders when I first started. Um, but you know, I you know in order to get anything online, especially at that point You know, I needed a my sql database Uh for a hundred images and a hundred rows of data and that you know, initially I was like, uh Just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm like, I'm wondering if you could do that and you know, I was too You know new to think that maybe I was right But I think like as as the static stuff kind of came up. I really realized like whoa That's actually all you should need is a hundred A hundred images in the spreadsheet and create a website from that and that's kind of the goal and of collection voter itself um initial solutions Uh pre Evan Olivia, I'm going to talk about them the characters in a second Uh in our static approach. I used xml and xslt To do a lot of the to create a lot of x of static sites And this and that was sort of pre our use of jackal and we were able to build these templates on top of content dm To add that contextual piece to the collections I also did a lot of find and replace over our live website, which I think is kind of terrifying to me now And I know it's terrifying to my colleague evan who's on this uh presentation. Um, so uh, but the difficulties with with this approach Especially was it was really difficult to update. I have to run through this kind of like, you know intricate workflow every time I needed to update a site Uh, essentially rebuild it fully And that wasn't built in like it is with jackal. Um, it was hard to build out individual pages. Although we finally got there With kind of xsl t 2.0 Uh, it was not collaborative So all the maintenance ended up on me and there was just no there was just very little development Outability wasn't able it was hard to kind of recreate some of the things that we were doing. Um So here are the characters and nay heroes Uh, and and really like I'm gonna I'm talking a lot about kind of my own journey here, but uh The work with olivia and evan olivia weichel and evan moebson who are pictured here In the throne and using three computers with visual studio code code up, which I'm still impressed by Um, or three screens, uh They are my colleagues. They're the ones who've kind of driven. Um, the we we work on the static stuff All together. Uh, we're very collaborative. Uh, they're, you know, work on all the on all the grants with me for collection builder and Oral history's data and everything else that we do with cil and the website that's here and everything else. So, um evan is the one who initially introduced the static web Approach here. He kind of came out of his work with the carpentries And he started With the argon our newspaper digital collection was kind of the first In production static site that we had uh, and olivia came on um in 2018 Right as evan and I had decided we needed to redesign the whole website using static approaches But then we also had to go on vacation in july and so her second month was Basically, um evan and I had gotten things going. We're like, okay. So now you're gonna kind of run the uh, the website revision entirely Um, so she did that right away and I think she's forgiven us for that But it actually college to you know has brought so much of of her kind of recent experience as she came from Indiana University as well um But so I'm going to kind of step through a few of the kind of conversion steps via my own epiphanies with Uh with these productions. Um, we're going to look specifically at control shift And so I was looking back for this at my old at kind of the initial Git commits that I was making when I was working with this and I think you can see here I hate computers being a main main one. Um, but this this first Kind of this this poem generator, uh, you know, there's the famous steven ramsey article about the hermeneutics of screwing around Um and in dh and how important that is and I really do believe that that sort of play aspect of dh is such an important part And so, you know, and at some point that summer I worked with two graduate students. Um, and I'm just going to Click in the control shift here The two grad students, um So quarry old was me and and lauren westerfield were our first graduate fellows with the center for digital inquiry and learning Which is our dh center And we just you know, we adjust. I just started learning this technique and we had some ideas about ways we might want to Look at, uh, you know, I had I had done these series of interviews with poets across the country Um, and we wanted to picture them and I didn't really want to just write an article about them I had audio and video. I had images from their, you know, from visiting them Um, and I had transcripts at this point and I just wanted to find a way to put everything up to open it up as wide as possible Um, and so I got to you know, and we were I was very lucky to work with these two graduate students who are both um excellent writers and and You know crazy intelligent, um, mosco eggs right now too Uh, and so we had these ideas and one of them was this page We thought well, wouldn't it be cool to kind of visualize the writing process in like a table and if you hovered over it You would get uh, you know the idea of what of what they said and then you could click it and read about it and so we were able to kind of and and you know that uh That for summer we were able to build this um in a very early stage, but it was able it was working Uh, and then we were and then we were looking at some of the you know, some of the things we Uh, we put everything up on youtube and youtube has the automatic transcription uh thing and had it back then It's a little different now But the way that it transcribed it kind of flattened the language and it had it in these what looked like to me like lines And so I was talking to quarry, uh And lord about that and we're like well wouldn't it be cool to do like a foam generator And then we were able to to create that in that first year and using very much the jackal techniques Uh, we turned this it was like an sbv File um downloaded from youtube turned it into a csv and used it uh here And it just essentially kind of a simple, uh formula like, you know Create this do a little, you know shuffle it with our you know our JavaScript shuffle and put it back up Um, so then you can you know every time you do this, it's a new poem I mean this has led to some other kind of work that I've I've done through the years Um, and then finally, you know, I'm going to talk about this in just a second But this is the visualization we came up with uh, well, I'll just talk about this now This is my third epiphany, but I'll I'll skip over it But um, and then so like, you know, it built this the first year and it kind of sat around for a couple years We had a couple more oral history, uh Projects come into the cvil and we really and I realized, you know, like this data was all starting to kind of work the same way Um, and we had had, you know, we had so if you click in you can see that here But we had created this sort of you know, um and using you know, using actually the the the system owns This sort of a model like, you know, we wanted to search for You know, wanted to be able to search and see and filter by the topics that we had coded and things like that Um, but uh, I also was you know, started to think I you know having worked in this for a while Uh, you know, it's starting to think with the data starting to think about it in a very specific way and starting to kind of You know think not only with the data, but also the templates and the visualizations and the ways you can use Rectangles and things like that and that really led to this I mean, I still remember the kind of morning I was thinking about it thinking like well if we if we color code if we had some sort of color coding We're able to create rectangles Uh for each little section of of the thing of uh of this of the transcript Which you had already put into a csp at this point like maybe we could do something where You know, we could see what everybody's talking about when they're talking about their career And kind of compare that and and go down and then if we wanted to filter that we could filter that down And things like that and so uh, and then you know, I'm gonna go back here But that sort of and here's my thing here where all of a sudden that visualization was working You know, I could I pictured it in my mind and was able to get to that point And I think you know, I'm gonna call that the kind of I was I was pretty well into it by then It's pretty well gone But that was the kind of moments like oh, wow, this is not only like An approach that makes it easier to publish. It's better for more collaborative More interesting to me, but it's also, you know, I think it felt to me like a creative process A kind of craft craft process that I was familiar with from my own background And and that you know, I think that's the power, you know Something that I think is just incredibly powerful Um, there was one other kind of early version of collection builder here where we were working with our own content dm data and then we had this Symposium every summer with wsu is which is eight miles away And I was able to get some content dm data from them They sent that over and and I got that I got their data to work And I that was another moment where it's like, oh, wow So, you know, not only we can do this for ourselves But other people's data if it's structured in the same way it also will work And so I think that was like when we're like, oh, okay. There's a there's a whole lot now And so there's no turning back, right? Uh, the website need reading revision. Why not static? We were problems with the mecha for teaching. Why not static? We moved to a hosted content dm lost a lot of our functionality Uh, customization. So why not put a static skin on top? And so, you know, at this point we've we've we've we're totally gone And but we're enjoying it. We think it's a really powerful and an excellent way to do this So our library website is statically built. It's collaboratively developed We have, you know, most of our, you know, reference and instructions spec staff other staff working In github to help us build content and to think up new things Argonaut, that's one of our first collections Letters of marina marcini of marina mancini is a translation project that olivia runs Voices of gay rodeo is another project that came out of our work Kind of with control shifts and that Um, and then we have this new blog that we built using collection builder Kind of doubly to also create a digital collection and a blog that's kind of connected And uh, and then and then the other thing, you know, I said here the static projects And one of the other powers about this is that they can turn into these templates So for instance, you know, some of our early work building for our for content dm and Turned into collections collection builder, right? And um, and that's the little logo for collection builder here And I'll have links to this presentation later and a pdf link as well And everything here is linked and described So if you want to get in and kind of click on things you're welcome to and then oral history Is data became the tool that we took from the kind of visualization that we built first with control shift And now it's kind of gone back and forth, but that visualizations also use the voices of gay rodeo So it's it's kind of awesome to see this all work together And go from there and so now i'm going to kind of give you a demo of collection builder And then we'll return to a few to kind of a sort of more a little more theoretical discussion But so this is the collection builder website. There's a lot of data here There's a lot of doc. We've done a ton of documentation and we have a workshop tutorial here as well There are three kind of basic types of Collection builder we have a github pages version, which is the simplest one, which we're going to use today We have a standalone version which we're which we're actually just about to release a new version of That'll be really heavily kind of metadata dependent. You know a lot of customization and control that way But right now still, you know, you can use it to and have some built in but that's for developing on your own computer And kind of building out bigger collections and then we have the skin version for content dm right now That builds on using Metadata from content dm. You can just drop it in it'll build a site for you using their api um, but we're going to look I want to look specifically at The github for here And so i'm going to start this Collect the dude. This is going to be a demo using the data that we have so You see the data here. Everyone put in some really cool Epiphanies. Oh, I'm really excited to see this Uh, and so you can see I you know I should change the titles of the different things to fit with the metadata that we use for a collection builder In order to make it work. We need a few more Kind of things here. So I'm going to scroll over here. Oh, let's scroll here Drag down I practiced this so I hope this will work We have a couple issues here, but that shouldn't break anything Just won't be on the map. Um, and then we are going to download this As a csv And I will open this in my folder And I'm gonna I don't think you can see this but I'm renaming it just epiphanies. So it's a little easier to see um, and then at the same time I'm going to go and I think I actually have it up here. I'm going to go to the collection builder gh template Uh, and this is a really powerful button here. Let's use this template. I'll talk about that a little later I'm going to click this it's going to build it's going to take copy all of that take copy that entire repository I'm going to call this dlf dds Uh and make it public and I'm going to create the repository So it's good. So it's copying all that material in there It gets rid of when you use the template it gets rid of the the get history So you've got a kind of clean state to develop on but everything that we have built in Is built in um, and once that happens Should only take a few seconds Then we're going to do a few things and to get this set up. Um, we're going to load our data here and So I copied this epiphanies.csv here I'm just going to use the basic commit here make a commit there and you can make a message into yourself If you're going to do a little bit further Made that change And then I'm going to change this config yaml We're going to do two things here And you actually don't need to do this. You can just delete the url and base url now. They just change this But tip but before we had to change these urls so that the the website and the links gets get built correctly Um, this is the config yaml. So this is the main We'll call it epiphanies Counters with thinkers. I don't I know thinkers is such a sort of terrible name, but uh, And then we're going to call this epiphanies. And so this metadata value here And we do you know, I think to tutorials and things so I'm not going to go too too indefinitely But this is where this this is is saying go to the csv in the data folder And that's going to be used throughout this collection to build the site. And so we're going to create this Do that here And then our next step is just to turn it on Um, and so as I mentioned a number of times, this is we're going to use github pages to freely publish this Uh, all we need to do is change the branch to the master and that'll be changing to main soon And uh, we saved it so I've made two commits so far. I want to add the the csv and one to Um to to change the kind of basic configs Um, and so let's see what we got here. It might take a second to build so now we're going to wait and and let the Let it build in the meantime. This is something we typically do is copy the lake address And just add it to the about to the kind of about section here. So you have it all the time Let's save the changes. Um, and you can do this as well If I mean if you want to kind of follow along the If you wanted to kind of go through this on your own I'm going to just drop the the spreadsheet link here And I think it's just few only but you should be able to download that If you wanted to go through this the process that I just did you could you could see that So let's see Of course anything anything you do live is going to do that. So there's a couple other things I'm going to do here So, uh, you know, we have these kind of object IDs which are really important for collection builder They're kind of the the key to so much I'm going to use this picture of frank bidard that I have in as our homepage picture And so this we have this theme yaml in our data folder That kind of defines a lot of the little features for different pages So that's going to be the featured image is going to be that that one We could add a different one to here. I'm just going to make one pick one at random Say 10 We have we want a subject page. We're going to this is going to be like a word cloud And we're going to use medium here Locations good and we're probably going to be all over the map. So I'm going to move this zoom level and maybe even International up. So we're going to make a few changes to the theme and build those in Um, so we've got some So we're going to probably have some issues Um, but we do have we've got one picture of wv do do blah here. So that's pretty awesome. Um, and a few A few others. Uh, and now we have a collection of 26 items Each described and uh pictured. Oh, Amanda Gorman from yesterday Tracy Smith Uh, another great poet thumps coon. Oh, wow, this is great. Um, so a few of these are mine Um, we're going here That's cool And then so so basically we've taken the data popped it in and then this a lot of things are being automatically generated We've got a page for everything. These are the different, uh, kind of the mediums through which The things were experienced The timeline is going to uh is is the timelines based on the date of the encounter You could change that to the date of the uh individual if you want Some of the images didn't come through as you can see, but you know, that's just the way it is You would go back and fix the data rather than going back and fix the code Um, and so I think that's another kind of powerful piece. Uh, and here's and here's sort of, uh, That timeline and then we can see a map Um, which okay, so, you know, I bet what broke here is uh with the So probably If I went through and kind of deleted some of this. Oh, and we have some different coordinates here um Well, it does work. Uh, the map does work here. I'll show you This is just a test I did yesterday to kind of, you know, I just grabbed a few here But the map looks like this Uh, one thing I wanted to show and the timeline and the features here too is, you know, you can create different kind of integrations, uh, different layouts and so for the timeline, you know, if you wanted we've got that kind of base kind of table-based timeline um But if you wanted to create, uh Say a slightly different that kind of a timeline js look here I'm just going into the our pages and going into the markdown and changing the layout Uh, this is called front matter and the markdown for here, uh to timeline js And to do that Then we'll change basically Now now, uh, github pages is rebuilding the whole site and rebuilding using uh different kind of data setup and things for that page Specifically and we'll load the timeline js setup that we have uh base there and hopefully That one will work in a few seconds So yeah, and the other thing while we're waiting for that to build The other thing I wanted to point out about collect about collection builder is we've got, you know We've really kind of forefront the collections is data model and have all these different kind of models about Um of the of of the different, you know, here's a metadata json file of the entire thing You have a subjects json geodata json the timeline json, which this is the um, this is the json that runs that Runs the timeline js So you can use that in another situation We also have this facets json file, which I think is really great You can define the facets that you want to use Uh, there you go Oh, we don't have we didn't define it well on the theme But you can you can use this to look at your data for an entire collection Especially a larger collection and kind of start to learn things about that and then use that to make some of the visualizations that you'd like um, so Okay, so now I refreshed it Uh, and now we just changed that one thing and we have this timeline of people's experience with prints Playing basketball listen to your boom blast with purple ring. Oh, that's a nice toy um And so winning the so yeah from 1980s all the way through and so this is I think this is probably the right timeline for this collection And you can kind of make that decision there Um, so wow that that was uh, thank you guys for participating there. That was that was fun um And I hope it kind of demonstrated some of the the ease and some of the power too That's there with this with this version and so I'm just you know the forms of collection builder here We've used it for a lot of different things to work with graduate students community groups Faculty teaching archival research. That was kind of one of our initial kind of ploys here We're moving out. This is collection builder too. We were we're doing this digital library vital project right now A kind of collections of collections and then eventually a collection of all the items But you know to start we're just describing collections in a spreadsheet and doing things like that Oh, we're gonna talk about wax in a second. I just saw that They they released a kind of collection of collections more recently About I think Caribbean dh Projects not too long ago And then this is this is a thing we're working on with our with our cd il grad fellows And I'm going to just click into here Sort of demo of this But this is bill and they have they've been really fun to work with they they're talking about the loss of the north Out of those mountain caravans. It's sort of a collection of absences They they've sort of disappeared from from the lower 48 And so they they wanted this, you know fake 404 page And we've been we've been using this kind of this new kind of css This is tough tc dot css Which kind of presents it in a way like Edward Tufty presented some of his textual Documents, and I'm getting the students to kind of write into this as well Using markdown as well, but the one thing I wanted to show here was the Steviak Lee So they did all these oral histories of people's encounters with that And so we we took basically collection builder and just put it on top of our map And then we used a little bit of and we used leaflet for the maps And then you know as this is kind of like a nightlife story map kind of thing But you know, we wanted people to kind of have a deep map that map experience of this Of this collection so you can view the map and get into that a little more or you can go back to view the item And so you move back and forth to all these different items and at the same time you're moving kind of across geographical space Uh, so we thought that was pretty interesting as well. Um, so there's a lot of applications There's a lot of extensions and and ways of doing this based out of this sort of static way of doing it. So What I really wanted Sort of more of the theoretical part of this, you know, more recently, uh, there's a great, uh, thread from Alex Gill and Uh, and Quinn Dombrovsky and a few others. Uh, marine iraq who's works with Alex on wax and Ed and mini comp And and then we're talking about the difference initially about wax and omeka and then, uh, I have a link here to tomorrow's take on difference in wax and the collection motor and omeka But Alex makes a really important kind of distinctions about, uh, the difference between the two and I These are linked here if you want to go in and and check this out. Um, we're going to Alex's, uh, Twitter feed, um, but he's talking about the the way that sort of maintenance here and the design aspects of of wax versus omeka Uh, and how how much easier it is to to kind of mess with the design of of a wax Which is which is the jackal project with jackal template as well And also the the way that it's just, you know, you're maintaining. I think his last point here this, uh, This means we maintain software not documents that for omeka and some of those other systems And I think that's a you know, that's a real, uh problem when you're thinking about kind of archival collections and things like that And then tomorrow's take about, uh, you know, moving into this static approach more or You know that for them, it's you know, they call it very much minimal computing. Um, you know You get more control, but you also have to think a lot more about the workflows and how it will include your collaborators and things like that Um, but and as I was sort of thinking about that And I'm not going to get into Geert's too much. Uh, I just wanted to put up where where my ideas were kind of coming from I'm sticking back to my own kind of, uh, education and thinking about the difference between a model of and a model for And the way I'm sort of thinking of a model of model for that and sort of Sort of, uh, binary here is, um, model for is kind of prescriptive systems for replicating information And a model of is an idealized expression of information meant to be mimic So, uh, you know They're not kind of it's more of a spectrum than it is like two sides of a coin Um, so I think of it kind of that way But if you think of legos and I just did this this weekend So I this was on my mind, but a model for and this is where I would say, you know Omeca is more towards this spectrum a kind of system that's that's very prescriptive that That makes you kind of go through these very steps every time and does it for a reason because it's easy You know, it's it it takes away a lot of breakage It takes a little way a lot of issues with the initial kind of setup, uh, in some other parts But you but you're kind of stuck in that model, right? You fill out the forms you push the buttons You create the you create the experience and that and that especially goes for the educational point of that And then whereas a model of you're kind of working like you The model for being you work just with the instructions all the time and a model of you're looking at What you can build or the picture on the front of the box and you're going towards that So it's more creative. It's it's more and then you can go say. Oh, actually, I want to do this to that I want to take a couple steps back and redo this part of of this weird boat that I built um So right now, I think, you know, we're calling our collection builder on our website a tool Uh, but I just you know, and I just kind of messed with the site and went through here But I wanted to say that, you know We described it in a grant more recently as a flexible open source template For creating visual collection in zibber websites, and I think that's more of what it is It's more of that model of uh for you to start with this model It's got a demo site right away and then you can start and then, you know You can go from there and edit every single piece of it that you want um The other part about being a model of I think uh It gets makes this distinction a model of is often like an idealized kind of worldview, right? And so it's also interesting to me that, you know wax is a static project and collection builder Both come from, you know, both have very specific sort of World views attached to them and you know, Alex and Mari kind of call wax a provocation And it's very nimble of my weight. You know, they've used it to to document Kind of ice detention centers and things like that And so it has a lot of environmental and social justice origins and aims that I think are incredibly important To the community and to to kind of demonstrating the power But it then, you know, it definitely has this kind of worldview that that it's idealizing and it's in its expression Um and collection builder comes out of something we call them static and that's a we think of it as a methodology And it comes, you know, it comes much more from our working space where uh, you know Kind of libraries collections data centric Where we have this collections is data and collections in context kind of idea behind it But they both have this kind of worldview that they're that are driving a lot of the distinction And so this is lip static and and you go to the site and read this more in depth, but The methodology is that we're, you know, we're building things that are open simple library optimized and user focused And we're also working towards building lip static into a site And this is on me that it's not up yet that collects some of the tools and well templates and Like kind of one-offs and things like that that are built in static So that it become a resource that people can go and find the individual code pieces So they can really use the modular power of this and build things in And that we're open to have that up in the near future So I kind of want to end on this idea that you know, uh Is there such a thing as creative librarianship? Can we get to a point where we see What we're doing more as craft or creative activity than maybe scholarship or kind of business run things I mean, so I'm going to end with a couple of different Frank the dart poems This is called advice to the players and both of these will be from his book stardust There's something missing in our definition vision of a human being the need to make We are creatures who need to make because existence is willy-nilly thrust into our hands Our fate is to make something if nothing else the shape cut by the arc of our lives My parents saw corrosively the arc of their lives Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves But being is making not only large things a family a book a business But the shape we give this afternoon a conversation between two friends a meal Or misshapen without clarity about what we make and the choices that underlie it The need to make is a curse a misfortune And I think that last line and this this poem goes on for a number of a couple pages more It's very powerful. It's the first poem in the book It is kind of defines that I mean we need to know You know the choice kind of understand the clarity about why we make and the choices that we're making And I think this approach to to to building these sites to building these digital scholarship projects to building exhibits building digital collections Is better in that in that capacity So this is the question right is there such a thing? What changes What changes when we treat digital scholarship digital librarianship as a crap And do we want and so I mean kind of the corollary of this is the you know, I feel like we might You know some of the work we sort of adopted the wrong metaphors and I see this a lot in kind of library work Generally where we're going towards these sort of business models or kind of startup models or tech models Or we're trying to be completely on the scholarly track and measure our impacts and things like that And I just you know something about those I mean, I think there's areas where that's very important to measure our work in those matters, but For some of what we do in dh and digital scholarship I feel like you know Is there a way to better encourage or improve our work by taking on some of those artistic educational traditions like The crit that's used in a fine arts mfa Or workshops, which you know, I did tons of as a as an mfa student apprenticeships reviews and I mean, you know There's some of that starting to kind of pop up around the dh community. I think that's really important I mean, I think, you know, perhaps I think static web is an excellent starting point for for thinking about that kind of practice in that terms Um, and what it is essentially is this, you know, it's memetic training, right? You have these places to start you can avoid the tear of the front page that use this template button is so powerful And you can go from there. Um, and I just wanted to show One thing this is kind of my latest uh project called form and I'm very literal minded So I mean this is basically like memetic training for poets And I've always been interested in kind of the shape of poems and how Uh, thinking, you know, either mimicking or writing into poems might be a really valuable things for a poet And so this is something that I did over my sabbatical. It's still very early and it has some copyright issues So I will take it down after today Um, but so I often write into the snowman, which you know, there's a there's a number of interesting poems here. Um If you wanted to look maybe at uh, you know, and so it basically what it does is it it takes a poem Fairly simple, you know, erases it and creates a form in its spot so that you can write a poem within it So there's the original and there's the form and so that's that's kind of a way that I've been kind of driving my own writing practice I'm in something I'm hoping to kind of make more public so that other people can do that too And another part of this is is uh, you know What I found is that I you know, I learned a lot about the poem by writing into the poem Uh, and I also, you know, I I've I had this huge trove of data and this is the copyright issue That I that's from kind of poetry foundation in some other places online Um, and uh, I've learned a lot by kind of like, you know, putting using that sort of generative Uh poem idea that we did with control shift and using that with the thing. So here, uh, these are language Yeah, this is language poems. So kind of language poems are kind of like 1970s to to now Um, and you can kind of like create your own poems this way Uh, you can edit the lines here if you wanted to get rid of something you can say, oh, that's a good one Got a way you can make a black line you link out to the poems and they're listed here When you're done, you approve all the poems and then you save it as a pdf um So that's that's kind of the literal expression of this idea Uh And I wanted to kind of uh end at that point and sort of talk a little bit about a few caveats You know, I I've always, you know, a doubter. So I'm like, well, is this just all vs, right? Is it just another fad? Are we just the developers driving the practice we want, you know, me and Olivia and Evan like this We do this you should do this, you know, I I worry about that thing and they're kind of fine line between success and failure And I think there's a lot of challenges to this model. I mean, and I totally understand that Um libraries and you know in presenting collection builder over this last year while we're on this iMLS grant A lot of times I get on these presentations and realize that thanks, you know I'm basically like a vendor to the people I'm presenting to I'm pitching and and I get I need to do that But I also like that's not the relationship I want to be in with with this uh development of way Um, and it's you know, it's not as easy. This takes some kind of conceptual leaps for people It takes in more work on the maintenance side Um, but if there's more rewards rewards here too, and I also, you know, I think like these these, uh, projects Like collection builder like wax Uh and like mucutu. So right down the road, uh, kim christen works at washington state and runs, uh, The cdsc there and the mucutu project Um, and you know, I've talked to her about like well, how do you maintain? How do you just keep, you know, they have all these grants and all these systems going to kind of keep building this community? And if that's such an amazing job, I'm like, how do you keep it up? And you know, uh, and she's like, yeah It's just you know, you just kind of have to keep believing and so that's a hard That's a challenge for this too, right? I mean having those sort of designated believers for these projects Um, but I also think these are all opportunities, right that 2.5 percent, uh kind of provocation from david lewis Like what if we invested that in people, right? What if we invested that in kind of getting everybody up to speed here? Um, I think there's more rewards here, and I think there's more kind of vitality and joy Here as well. So I'm gonna end one more poem And I'm not going to interpret this. I'm just going to end it with it hammer The stone arm raising a stone hammer dreams it can descend upon itself When the quest is indecidable what is left is a career What once was apprehended in passion survives as opinion To be both author of this statue in the statue itself Thank you very much And I've got uh, I'm going to put the the link to this presentation here too But I've got a lot of learn static links some tutorials from my colleague evan Went on wax stuff on jackal collection go to oral histories data And then links to some of the things we said here. Um, and I'm going to put the link to the google presentation The chat now so, uh Thank you very much and I think we're open for discussion Got a few you know 20 minutes or so for discussion Yeah, we usually go around 90 minutes. Um, and anybody else who's still in the room we can we continue to talk about any questions you have for devin, um, and we can also talk more broadly about dh practice and teaching and implications of these tools. Um Just open it up to to anybody who's here and feel free to um, I don't think you have access to the microphone Is that right gale? So, um, oh people should be able to mute. Oh, cool. Perfect. Um, so just unmute yourself if you have a question and we can Go from there. I I knew like I was trying to get done before you and because I knew there'd probably so many people have to go Um, but I appreciate you all staying around. I know it's a lot. It's a little long But I I just had a lot to say, you know, I just you know, I kind of Didn't want to leave off so much of that Can you hear me? Yeah Okay, great. Um devin of I you know, I'm I'm actually like sort of multitasking and working on Some preparation for an o mecca project for o mecca s for some students A class that's coming up next week And this of course is getting me really excited because um, like, oh, yeah, o mecca. I'm just doing all these steps And why are we why do I have to keep doing these steps? And so I'm just wondering if you or other people who've had, um, Who've used collection builder with uh, um with students Um, I did have to miss a little bit. I had to pick up my daughter at the bus stop, but so I'm sorry if you did mention that Um, uh, can you just give some examples of like, um, what are ways that you've involved students in the process of building these exhibits? Um, I guess the thing that you know, I'm finding frustrating about o mecca is that You know, it is really nice to have this kind of ongoing collection of like items used in student exhibits that they that we can keep Sort of generating on the other hand, um, you know, so much of it is sort of front loaded on me um, and you know, the view call the colleagues who are um supporting it and so What I'd like to see is something where students get involved more involved um In building the collection in a sort of a little bit more lightweight um manner so Yeah, I mean so So we really we really forefront the data, right? So we get a collaborative google sheet and have them work on that, uh, you know When we do it we usually do some scanning and that's sort of the process But if they're not doing that if they're just creating an exhibit, uh, you know Either pulling in the metadata from somewhere else and kind of getting that sheet, right? Um, and then, you know in collection builder gh would be the one to use for that Uh, you know, they can they'd have to sign up for github, but then they there's just This is all documented But you know, they would have to go fill out they can kind of choose what shows up on the cards and choose What shows up on the pages and choose, uh, which which fields create the word clouds for the site Um, and so they just start to edit little pieces. They're not having to do like real code editing But they're editing these config files essentially that that do all that for you Um, and then you can store the objects in an objects folder in collection builder gh rather than link out to them So you can have it kind of as its own thing and then make that public using collection using github pages so that You can just leave it there. Um, I mean I can link out to the The history one That we did I mean this really drove our great using omeka s really drove the creation of collection builder because of that You know, I had to go and set up it took me a day to set up the server to figure out all that The difficulty with the csv kind of loading plug-in Because that you want that to change too and it's one of the most powerful things with the students is They'll mess it up right things will break and there'll be a you know It's supposed to be in north Idaho and it ends up being in australia The the map location right and so you can show them. Oh, well, that's your dad That's a data issue and you can change that and learn that you know The data is really powerful to drive this stuff. But also that precision with detail and things too Makes a ton of sense for building any site. So so that's I mean, I think it's easier. I think it's it's definitely easier to maintain You can link out to the free. You don't have to have it involved at all. You just need github. You just need a github account But yeah, I would just I'd say go to the collection builder site and check out some of the documentation and use that I think we also have an article About static web in the classroom and sort of the benefits there that was on the dh plus live special thing and all I'll link that here But if I could ask a follow-up question, which is like um, like you're From the instructor perspective. Yeah, that seems great I'm just wondering what kind of feedback have you gotten from students as far as their experience And I'm just also thinking about like, you know, a lot of our students. They have experience, you know Um, in social media, they have experience maybe building their own site in wordpress But just, you know, if you're working with students who really have no coding background, um, how how what what kind Are there what barriers do you see in the sort of their experience? so if I mean there's a there's They're typically able pretty easily to work in a collaborative spreadsheet And we we usually broke them into groups and they need to create their own site And then maybe they build it as a full Like their own kind of polish site for the full class at the end But they but that way they learned, you know, that sort of collaborative work within the spreadsheet. They were all pretty able to do Setting up the kind of like going through the steps of, you know, I have a get I have a A github account and now I need to press this button and do that, you know Putting that on them is they actually have not had too many issues with that Um, and then just kind of showing we usually just use the web interface So they don't have to pull anything down and then they're just editing essentially just showing them It's really you're teaching them github and the github web interface specifically So there's not a ton of coding but and they're typically pretty used to kind of, you know editing something in text files We haven't seen too many issues there. I mean things break sometimes. I mean that's and there'll be a frustration there Um, you know, there's not exactly what they want If you want to add a kind of interpretive piece and have them write like the about page and write it in markdown That's something you would need to teach and markdown is is an easier way for them to learn kind of html things But and you know, all the typical things that you would run into Teaching any sort of technology frustration Some some take to it easier than others Uh, the group work was great because you know, sometimes those who could kind of write would write and those who could Who really like to tinker would tinker uh and then bring it forward like that. Um, but but there's not I wouldn't I wouldn't talk about it as coding so much and try to you know, I think it's like kind of It's the feeling it's it's it's writing a text file. It's it's you know A csv is you know using that google sheet is pretty you know, fairly easy Just making sure they understand the transformation of the file from the google sheet to the csv And how important that is to build the site and all that I hope that answers some of the question Hey devin, thank you so much. This is super interesting and i'm really excited to Experiment with it and i've been meaning to learn wax for ages, but The whole digital exhibition Using static site generators is new to me. So this is great Um, but I was kind of one I had a question though sort of similar to laura's question about um And it like specifically for students who are very kind of like Designers and visual thinkers, but maybe don't have a ton of coding skills. Um, and i'm just Like and I don't think there's an easy answer to this, but like if you're using this in a classroom Or could you potentially be? You know losing those opportunities for students to engage with something like that I mean we use omeka. Sometimes I think we use scalar and wordpress more um, so those are both more kind of like there's like the There's a strong focus on design and layout obviously in scalar. Um, sure Um, so I think you know, I think this is a great So I think one of the pieces about this this these approaches is that Everything's sort of modular here and you can gear it towards the pieces that you're wanting to teach So if you want to teach github and the collaborative aspects and the track changes in the versioning great If you want to go directly into the css You can do that and show them kind of you know Take them to bootstrap and show them some of the css things that are working there And you can find the little individual modular pieces that you might want to do We also have an option in our um, in our I think it's in the theme file The data it's like theme.yaml file where you can use because it's bootstrap There's these boot swatches that you that are kind of like templates that you can change All like the whole look right it can be a different color Different kind of adjustments because you know, they've just essentially they're just overloading the the bootstrap with different, you know paddings and border radius and all that And it changes the look entirely but I also think if you know depending on your own kind of Capacity for design and things like that if you can show them like oh if you actually, you know, you change this The browse page has like, you know, it's on the 12 step grid So each one's a call for right if you want to change that to Column to column six and make it two on a page. Like what does that do to the design? We'll change some of the font things and things like that. I mean Or you can move the other part of the layouts pages You can just move a few pieces around and the entire A look will change. I mean that digital library of Idaho is essentially collection builder with The nav on top. So, you know a lot changes with just a few things But it's all in there. It's in there. They have to actually, you know, go in and see the code And move it which is I think we're powerful overall for a learning experience rather than Just, you know, the kind of thematic Ways that you can adjust a WordPress site for instance, which is also often done through CSS But it's you're pretty stuck to the theme once you get into a thing in WordPress Yeah, I think I mean and this seems perfect for something like I do a summer fellowship program and this seems like it would be so great to have students working on that But I just worry I guess about like the amount of time that I'm likely to get to work with a class during the semester And like what you know, what is possible to teach them in that framework, but I definitely think this is Super Yeah, no, and I think you know, you do a little and then you know, I think At least they at least they have that now they've got a github account And if they want to start messing a little bit more, maybe they can come back later. I mean, I think, you know There's there's only so much you can get done in those one-offs anyway But I think you can show them, you know, I feel like the data portion that like that the data driven website part of it And that you're driving it with your own data is a really powerful thing So doing an exercise like we did today and just seeing that all of a sudden be a live website with, you know Cool, you know interactive maps and everything else Um, uh, that that could I think that just emphasizes how important the you know the data part is and and that's kind of You know where the where the thrust lies for us, I think This is Evan, um, also just I think uh for a lot of uh, it really depends on what kind of experience You're trying to have in the classroom with the students Um, we've done it with some history students and you know, a lot of the emphasis is really on kind of traditional archival research But then being able to reset that in a slightly different way or lens And so to them they haven't worked with spreadsheets a lot, but working with spreadsheets is a pretty good skill to have You know working with wordpress is a good skill because it runs like the majority of the web So I've done teaching with wordpress, but you know, and we're teaching about kind of archival research and for historians You know that that little experience of re-seeing their archives Data as data for the first time and then working with it in a spreadsheet builds up a lot of kind of skills that they didn't necessarily have but then also puts that lens of kind of rethinking, you know, some of that archival research in terms of A spreadsheet, um, which really makes a difference to their kind of perspective. Um, And so even though, you know, we're not getting to Redoing the whole website and doing a lot of design with it. Um, you know, that little part of it And then seeing that being represented on the web, uh, is really kind of a pretty big Kind of revelation moment for some of that work. Um Yeah, so there's lots of different ways that you can parts of the experience that you can get I think there's opportunities to do some more. I mean, you know, we our tutorials right now are just kind of like Let's get it working and go but I think that that's the thing I'm hoping with the community is like You know, let's is there a tutorial or something you can go to and really have a focus on the design aspect here Or or another aspect and and you know, that's that's where I hope it gets like that's where I hope the kind of creativity leads us Um to to create some of those resources and you know, right now we're all just kind of learning how to Step on to this and and turn it on. Um, but I think there's kind of, you know, as you get more More kind of uh functionality and more work with all of this. I hope we can we can create those resources as well Alex's ditto to your echo Alex's content here in the chat It's nervous when I saw Alex pop on here. I was going to talk about him Evan, I wonder if you could pull on the thread of the creative librarianship and how this intersects or Just want to hear a bit more about that. I that was a really um rich Yeah, I mean it I think it's You know, I I just I feel like, um Um Encouraging each other in that in that mode too. I mean like looking like having like real like I feel like We just so struggle to get the projects put up and we put them up and if they work we're done and um That sort of you know, I like the crits I like the ideas of workshops where you take things and let other people kind of talk about you know And I think that also kind of starts moving the conversation towards like, oh, that's kind of a cliche way of doing that Like is there like, you know, I mean like where you know, like in poetry, you know, like You start to you know, if you're if you're in a workshop people might be like, ah, that's I don't like You know, I don't like how that's expressed or things like that if we're talking about kind of information design interaction things like that in a in a more communal fashion and Are able to kind of advance that Conversation, then we also get probably some newer versions of what we've seen so far. I mean, I think, you know There could be better information visualizations period for what, you know, we have the content Like we have all the content that's that's what I think is so like amazing about our jobs is, you know, I mean, you know, I have You know, I've been here a decade. I could do another two decades with the content we have down in spec um so You know, but but thinking about the means of expression and developing the kind of Steps for that and you know, I think we use that scholarly model so much for what we do in dh and ds that You know, you publish the paper on it and you read the paper and you move from that but You know, there's also means of kind of doing that in a in a more like You know gathering up a lot of this stuff that that's really great like great I mean, part of it is like the reviews and giving examples of people can learn from that You know, so people, you know, you know, like, oh, this site came out today I can really want to check that out because that comes from this person And that kind of happens already obviously, but you know, like If it's if it's in this kind of milieu, then we also can look to the code and think like see a little bit more how it's done I mean, I think with with us, I mean with olivia and evan and I were lucky to have each other Right, so we can kind of create that little environment that little learning Uh, we push each other and make things better that way. Um, I think the hardest part is is and you know It's just keeping up that documentation and uh making sure that when people jump into this They don't hit a snag and then have to back out I mean, I think that's what's so hard when you do these tools and you're sort of putting these things out there for other people to use Um, but if that's also, you know, a benefit of community if you have more people kind of Going through and checking that and making sure that it works so that you know, when you are starting in You're not running into these things that you know, we don't have that much time So the minute something breaks most people are are gone. So that's a big challenge as well I think there's um, you know, these chances for uh, sort of pragmatic and creative remixing of things and working within your limitations and your skill sets And so every time that we have a new kind of grad student or faculty member come in and we start working with them it brings these new ideas and We come up with new ways to change what we're doing to, you know Like try to build something out of those ideas and then each one of those cascades back into our kind of templates and Recycles around and so I think part of that creativity is yeah, just being able to work with people and then reuse those templates in different ways to um, you know, come up with solutions that are interesting and Communicate the kind of things that you want to talk about and and do with the collections Rather than just saying while we have uh content. Yeah, I make a collection in it kind of thing. It's pretty limiting whereas Being like, oh, you have this idea. Let's just try to figure out some way that we can do it within the kind of set of skills and infrastructure that we have You know, there's all kinds of opportunities for creativity and within that If you're willing to, you know, do some learning and figuring things out So I for me this the whole like static web has been a very deeply interconnection between learning and you know, and then publishing that stuff out and I think that's part of the process is is more like focus on learning and teaching Versus focusing on maintaining infrastructure or creating a very like installing infrastructure essentially So there's a lot of opportunity in that space I think it's a great point about opportunity. I feel like a lot of uh Some of our local initiatives have been more focused on infrastructure production, how many how many items have you produced? Right like the idea of how do how do you shift that conversation if you're having it with administration to this creative moment or teaching and learning with digital objects rather than production of digital objects I don't necessarily have an answer for that. It's just attention And traditionally we're creating a kind of a discovery experiences right as librarians I mean, they call they talk about serendipity and the stacks But I mean the thing I was thinking about is like serendipity is you know, it comes from a lot of work Right. I mean like you find something close to another thing because of a lot of catalogues But I mean, we've been we've been kind of you know, curating those things for so long But yeah, and yeah, I mean like so I I think there is that you know creating this experience creating interactions It's just it's a lot. It's sort of hard to see You know, we can start to see that we can look at, you know, analytics and things like that and start to see some of that but I think that so they're so Having people kind of have the expertise and use that expertise and be like kind of, you know craft Experts with apprentices and things like that can really benefit overall experience of our users Alex go ahead I just don't want to keep us longer I've bugged myself until full but Like one of the things that I have here is multiple workflows depending on the people because I actually don't In one sense like I it's easier for me sometimes with some faculty to Um, to just say, you know what just here's the spreadsheet. Just give me the spreadsheet and like And like give me the spreadsheet and like for the like About page or like any kind of narrative or multi-million narrative. I'm like and give me a microsoft word document And I swear to god It actually decreases the amount of time that I have spent on doing these websites with these kinds of projects with faculty I'm happy to share examples with with any of you of those kinds of projects that got done that way That's a kind of service tech support site or I just like no just give it to me I'm just gonna do it and I spent like 10 hours doing them And I was there was no teaching and there's no teaching no transfer of knowledge nothing And actually the faculty walked away happy with the site And I ended up working less and of course the library spending the library of my library already understands that the cost of sys admin and DevOps It goes way down when we do it this way and we have like now a whole even system set up With like travis before it goes to github. So it's everything is running automatically I like two pennies a year for a project on amazon cloud or something something ridiculous like that but anyways So then other projects are like, yes, let's learn uh, and like Like where i'm going to teach you like how to like get this stuff installed Which is the biggest pain point installing any one of these things Is like going to take hours And then i'm going to use the opportunity to also teach you basics of coding, you know and data And metadata and we're going to go deep into it in two months three months of time invested in some people the students mostly students less faculty And then there's somewhere in between where i'm just like well I'll teach you some things like metadata like let's play like two courses We'll play around with metadata a little bit. You fill out a spreadsheet. We'll still do them Maybe we'll do markdown on github And so I have a continuum and I was wondering if you guys Also had a continuum of services that range from like, you know, what don't worry about it Just send me this You're not gonna learn anything but you already know how to do a spreadsheet I hope you send me that and a folder of events to the like no i'm going to teach you how to be me Uh Yeah, how do you handle that? Absolutely. I mean, I think like the ccc and Idaho project is is that the first thing you described is it's a um these A couple who have run this who are older and older couple She is a professor in communications And you know, she's really interested in all this and she you know, she's come to workshops and things like that But what but they don't have time a lot of it is and and really what they want is they know what they want to see And so they can describe that to me and they can send me them the markershoff word And they can do the spreadsheet and you know, we've done a lot of spreadsheet for them even But they can fill out you can they can go back and edit some of that and then we can create the project Whereas like right now that story and extinction site With with the map, you know, I'm working with the grad students And I think this is really a great opportunity for them to learn how to kind of write with the collection And so we've you know, we've built in a lot of pieces into like our about pages and Into projects like that where they can kind of you know, write and mark down and use some learn how to use an include command To like include an image here or include a map here Based on and they can filter it and so they can even start to learn a little programming that way um And and that's written really That's what I see as like a real possibility So that they don't have to like do this project and then there I think it's going to be their thesis project And then step out of it and write a 40 page document about this Like that just you know, that's totally that'll never that will not be seen as much as the actual website That is out there too. So they're writing for different audiences that way too I mean, I just think there's a lot to be learned by thinking and writing with these collections too But um, but yeah, so that's I mean, that's that's a lot of work on my part Right. I mean because then I I'm also I'm in that pitch mode too I'm like I'm going to convince them that it's worth their time to to get through this Which I don't think it's going to take too much more time But yeah, and then you know students the same way, you know in a class where You know, if they're writing a An essay about their experience in the project Can we get them to a point where they don't where they feel comfortable enough to write and mark down? Um, we don't know that's something we're hoping to kind of more explore next year With it. We've got a couple kind of projects going forward. So Definitely though, I definitely hear what you're saying about the continuum and we approach kind of that's one of the first things We established kind of with the fellows that we have In the in the projects that come in through our through our shop Thanks, Devin for a great talk I'm going to note. It's um 133 and thank everyone for participating Being here even at the end of Of the 90 minutes Sarah and I will be uh, we'll be distributing the slides in the videos We'll also be watch the list there because we'll put out a reminder about consultations and then Eyeing a session probably later spring um Not quite sure on the topic Possibly around research or DH centers Uh administration and and just management and that kind of idea. So um, stay tuned and we'll um, we'll stay in touch Thank you all. Thanks Jason. Thanks here. Thanks everyone for coming. Thanks. That was so fun