Introduction

This course will give you the foundations of what you will need to develop a digital edition. However, actually launching a digital edition of a text with the kind of features expected in a modern website is slightly beyond what we can manage in one semester. But we could not bring ourselves to end this class without student having the ability to create their own website.

The goal of this assignment is to teach you how to launch a simple website that will give you and your work a public face. The software skills you will learn are the same ones I have used to develop this syllabus, create an online CV, and create pedagogical resources: DH resources and Writing History.

For this assignment you will create a similar website using GitHub Pages and Jekyll. Jekyll is software that integrates with GitHub to allow you to produce static HTML pages out of simple Markdown files. The site is freely hosted on GitHub and easily maintained.

Think of the website you will produce as a robust “About Page” for your digital edition. It should be the kind of thing that you will find as part of a well-documented online project. We will discuss project documentation and “About” pages during class. In that context we will discuss the specific content you will want to include on your “About” page.

GitHub Pages and Jekyll Resources

To Submit for Evaluation

  • A public GitHub repo containing the Markdown files for your site.
  • A link to a website containing the “About Page” for your digital project.
  • Site Content
    • A landing page that introduces your digital edition.
    • A page that discusses the contribution of the project to the humanities in relation to other similar projects (sometime referred to as an “environmental scan”).
    • A page that documents the technical decisions you have made in designing and implementing the project.
  • Markdown
    • One or more links to external websites or anchors in your own website (i.e., section headings designated in markdown with one or more “#” characters)
    • One or more embedded code blocks in your technical documentation page
    • One or more photos

Nota Bene

You will find that coding often entails looking at other people’s code and using it to do what you want. Now that you are proficient in using GitHub, you should be able to find the sites I link to above on my GitHub page and see how I’ve done things.