TEI 2019

Using Github and its Integrations to Create, Test, and Deploy a Digital Edition

This paper stems from the ongoing work by the Winnifred Eaton Archive (WEA), which seeks to compile, transcribe, and encode the extant archive of Chinese-Canadian author Winnifred Eaton (1875–1954). While there are many frameworks for rendering TEI online (including the TEI Stylesheets, TEI Boilerplate, and CETEIcean), the WEA, like many other projects housed at institutions without a dedicated digital humanities infrastructure, struggled to find a framework for testing, deploying, and publishing the project as a whole; Omeka and Wordpress were offered as solutions, but these frameworks are limited in their capacity to handle TEI-encoded XML. Following the best practices outlined by The Endings Project (Carlin 2018) and inspired by the recent turn to static sites for digital editions (Holmes 2017; Viglianti 2017), minimal editions (Gil 2015; Sayers 2016; Gil 2017), and web publishing at large (Rinaldi 2015), we arrived at the following workflow:

• Store all content on Github
• Integrate Travis-CI with repository to build and validate products
• Use Travis to deploy to a separate Github repository that deploys content using the Github pages environment

This paper thus forwards the above method as a wide-ranging, affordable solution for creating digital projects in TEI (it is entirely free, minus the optional costs of oXygen XML Editor and a domain name) that is sustainable and robust as it leverages existing technologies that are ubiquitous and well-documented. This process is also highly extensible and can be used in concert with existing TEI publishing solutions, like TEI Boilerplate, to create sustainable and archivable static digital projects that are not beholden to the structural limits of pre-existing content management systems. Our paper explains the major benefits of this approach, which include affordability, sustainability, and adaptability, as well as suggests the potentials of this approach across various pedagogical and scholarly publishing workflows.

Bibliography

Carlin, Claire (2018). “Endings: Concluding, Archiving, and Preserving Digital Projects for LongTerm Usability.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, vol. 2, no. 1. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.35.

Gil, Alex (2015). “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make.” Minimal Computing: A Working Group of GO::DH, 21 May 2015. http://godh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/

Gil, Alex (2019). Ed: A Jekyll Theme for Minimal Editions. GitHub, https://github.com/minicomp/ed.

Holmes, Martin (2017). “Selecting Technologies for Long-Term Survival.” SHARP Conference: Technologies of the Book, Victoria, BC, Canada. https://github.com/projectEndings/Endings/raw/master/presentations/SHARP_2017/mdh_sharp_2017.pdf.

Rinaldi, Brian (2015). Static Site Generators. O’Reilly Media Inc. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/static-site-generators/9781492048558/

Sayers, Jentery (2016). “Minimal Definitions.” Minimal Computing: A Working Group of GO::DH, 02 October 2016. http://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2016/10/02/minimaldefinitions/.

Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (2018). CETEIcean: TEI in HTML5 Custom Elements. https://github.com/TEIC/CETEIcean.

Viglianti, Raffaele (2017). “Your Own Shelley-Godwin Archive: An off-line strategy for on-line publication.” TEI 2017 Conference, Victoria, BC, Canada. https://hcmc.uvic.ca/tei2017/abstracts/t_126_viglianti_shelleygodwin.html.

Walsh, John, and Grant Simpson (2012). TEI Boilerplate. http://teiboilerplate.org.