Comments on: Calling All Librarians, Info Scientists, Digital Humanists

By: Gabor Por

Gabor Por — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 17:46:17 +0000

I am an enthusiast Drupal user, but would like to point out another disadvantage. You want a “lifelong” solution and most versions of Drupal has a shelf life of 4-6 years. E.g. version 6 came out early 2008 and will be supported only till version 8 comes out next summer. Version 7 came out last January will be supported till version 9 comes out (probably 2015). Updating from one major version of Drupal to another no is a major project. WordPress, on the other hand, doesn’t suffer from this issue.

By: Bryan Alexander

Bryan Alexander — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 22:13:15 +0000

The comments so far are excellent, and I don’t have much to add.
Drupal is both good and too much. If Eric and his crew are making something for multiple Swarthmore faculty and staff, then it could be worth it. Such an app might have broader use and/or collaborative development possibilities.
Have you talked with Dan and the GMU crew? They might have something in the pipeline.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:14:11 +0000

Yes, I’m aware that there’s that literature and I’ve read quite a bit of it. In fact, I’m persuaded by some authors writing within that tradition that this project is worth undertaking. But now my questions are rather more technical and specific and less about the broad philosophical point–and as I think you’re seeing in this thread and elsewhere, those questions are harder to get past the starting line so I can begin doing what I want to do. (As some digital humanists say, “less yacking, more hacking”.)

By: Maureen

Maureen — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 16:05:58 +0000

Hmmm, I’m not sure what archivists are doing at Swarthmore, but I’m perplexed by your understanding of “archival practices”. The best thinking about collecting the history of educational institutions accommodates exactly the kind of data you’re talking about.
Archives collect unpublished records of enduring value, regardless of format. Born-digital should not be a big deal to a good archivist. I’m not suggesting that you hand over the custody or platform of this data to an archives — after all, archives are records of enduring value (usually unpublished) that are no longer used in the course of daily business.
But, if you’re looking for advice about information systems and long-term digital preservation, I would recommend talking with someone who’s trained in these issues. Many archives are actively aware (and our literature has been for decades) that the record will be impoverished if we only take what happens to end up in a repository — a move toward “documentation strategy” embraces exactly the kind of recordkeeping that you describe. And archives are taking in raw datasets all the time. There’s an extensive body of professional literature that could help address your questions.

By: Evan Goer

Evan Goer — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:52:17 +0000

Given your goals, I’d strongly advise against using one of today’s popular web frameworks as your source of truth. They are relatively complicated beasts, and they will either die or evolve into something completely unrecognizable long before your career is over.

Your best shot at simplicity and longevity is to avoid DBs and stick with flat files in directories. It might be that decades from now, the files-in-directories metaphor will be super-arcane, or even completely break down altogether — but I’d say that’s still your best shot.

For a base note-taking format, consider one of the “lightweight markup languages”, Markdown or reStructuredText. A big advantage here is that even if the entire ecosystem of tools and libraries written around these formats *completely disappears* overnight, you’re not screwed. As long as you can still open the file in 2050, it will still be plainly readable. Markdown is looser and simpler, reStructuredText has extra features that might be useful to you. In a pinch, you could also author in a simple subset of HTML, sticking to very basic elements like paragraphs, lists, and links. HTML is changing a lot at the margins, but the core elements should remain the same for a long time.

By: Jay Scott

Jay Scott — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:11:08 +0000

What I'm hearing is mostly that you want a repository of more-or-less raw documents with some tagging for organization and findability. My take is that Drupal is overkill for that. Drupal is from a web app tradition, and it will work but will take more learning up front and more maintenance over time than necessary. On the other hand, Drupal makes sense if your requirement 1 for pushing the live data to whatever format is keyâ€”thatâ€s a quite difficult spec to meet with generality and may well take custom coding, which is natural in the web app tradition. For a repository I would look first to the business â€œcontent managementâ€ tradition or to digital library document repository software. The basic description of a document repository is my first sentence, and allowing many ways to access the data is also considered important so thereâ€s always a way to add on different means of access. A good first try might be DSpace: http://www.dspace.org/My take is that Drupal is overkill for that. http://www.dspace.org/

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:07:51 +0000

Rachel:

I think actually that this project almost works in tension with some archival practices. First, because I want it to be “born digital” and only incidentally ‘deposited’ or ‘curated’ in some sense. The curation would largely be limited to my entry and tagging of notes, which I expect to be as whimsical and mutable as my habits of mind and labor. The key things for me are to document my workflow, to demonstrate how scholarly knowledge accrues incrementally (this is the problem with our overemphasis on publication: we look only at the end product as proof of scholarly knowledgeability), and to provide that workflow to any other curatorial or informational project that wants to pull in that data and repurpose it. A lot of archives by either habit or conscious design still seem to me to be depositories: documents and data go in, and don’t circulate freely for reuse and reconfiguration.

By: tony grafton

tony grafton — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:58:27 +0000

Tim, this is a great plan. You might find inspiration in a series of pieces by French writers and scholars, notanly Maurice Olender about their working worlds: enter “Le lieu de l’archive” in Worldcat and you’ll find them.

By: Rachel Hardiman

Rachel Hardiman — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 07:41:20 +0000

Probably an obvious question and something you’ve already done, but have you asked your college archivist about this? Many university archives are interested in preserving and enabling access to this kind of work, either within the archives themselves or by advising and assisting personal and local initiatives like yours. They will have expertise in all or most of the aspects of classification, preservation, and publication that you describe.

By: Allison Shutt

Allison Shutt — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:30:46 +0000

Tim, You may have seen the recent Chronicle blog about a group of biologists who collected their handwritten field notes into a published book? Perhaps there is also small window in academic publishing for exactly what you’re describing here?