As a developer, I routinely work on multiple machines during the course of a project. One of the biggest pains is working on a database-driven project is that I often need to move the data on machine X to machine Y, make changes, then move the updated data from machine Y back to machine X.…. More.
Omeka, Solr, and TEI
One of the most vital tools that computers bestow upon the humanities scholar is the ability to rapidly sort and group data that are relevant to the scholar’s own research needs. A digital collection of several thousand artifacts is useful, but it is even more useful if, for example, the user can filter the results…. More.
Code Reviews and the Digital Humanities
The following was a response I made in an email exchange with Tom Elliot of the Pleiades Project and Bethany Nowviskie. Our conversation was prompted by Tom’s inquiry on planning, budgeting for, and conducting a code review as part of a grant-funded project. What follows is a slightly modified (and expanded) version of that email conversation.
Testing and code review is something that has been on my mind a lot lately as our shop has been shifting its focus from boutique, one-off projects, to building upon frameworks maintained by other organizations. As these code bases continue to grow, we need to ensure that subtle changes to the core functionality of the underlying systems do not propagate into bugs in our code. We also need a way to handle this situation quickly and efficiently when this does arise. This was especially reinforced by two recent projects our group undertook to migrate nearly decade-old software on to new servers.
Expanding the Capabilities of Omeka
Because I have a keen interest in the description of cultural heritage artifacts and in doing interesting things with metadata, in recent months I have developed a handful of Omeka plugins to meet these interests. My first foray into plugin development for the application was with the EAD Importer. The EAD Importer, as the name…. More.
Why Ruby?
Stemming from a Twitter conversation last month, I thought it would be a good idea to describe — in more than the 140 character bursts that Twitter allows — why we at the Scholars’ Lab often promote Ruby, opposed to one of the other 4 or 5 languages we develop with. This isn’t an attempt…. More.
Automating Omeka Deployment with Capistrano
If you’ve done much web development, you’ll know that deploying applications can be a real pain. Typically you get some code (like Omeka), FTP it to your server, run the install, then go grab some plugins and themes and FTP them to your server. If you’re a bit more sophisticated, you may have put this…. More.
Omeka Timeline Plugin
As part of our ongoing efforts on our Neatline grant, we needed to include a way of displaying temporal information and interacting with other data stored in Omeka. Just about the time we were starting to write this code, CHNM announced their Plugin Rush which pays an honorarium to give folks some incentive to pitch in and develop a plugin or two. Since we were going to develop the plugin anyway, we’re donating this back to the Omeka project, but we thought this might be a good opportunity to talk a little more about the development cycle for Omeka plugins, and hopefully inspire others to get involved.
Large Files and Omeka
This issue came up for a friend of the Scholars’ Lab today on Twitter, but it’s hard to answer in 140 characters. It’s a question about allowing for larger file sizes in Omeka and there are a few ways to handle this. (Because we want our new blog to be a combination of thoughtful essays…. More.
Library Innovation Grant Yields Dividends for Numismatists
A recent post by Ethan Gruber, a UVA Library staff member who has lately joined the Scholars’ Lab team, detailed his experiments with 3-dimensional modeling to re-contextualize Roman mosaics — right down to the interplay of light and shadow in ancient villas. Now Ethan’s work on creating a scholarly interface for the study of Greek…. More.