Growing numbers of liberal arts colleges are creating collaborative digital scholarship projects. Defining the roles of faculty, student, and web developer in the semi-hierarchical world of liberal arts colleges—where pedagogical goals must be constantly kept in mind—can be tricky; however, doing so is critical to the long-term success of such projects. Drupal, an open source content management system, enters this space at a crucial moment, allowing a new level of collaboration in the creation and maintenance of sites by web developers, faculty content providers, and all student assistants. Getting the work flow right while keeping the experience rewarding for all concerned is one key to sustainability. In this seminar, members of the team behind the text annotation site Dickinson College Commentaries (faculty director, web developer, and students) discuss the problems, pitfalls, and opportunities of collaborating with Drupal in a liberal arts context.

1. Collaborative Digital Scholarship Projects:
The Liberal Art of Drupal
Chris Francese, Professor of Classical Studies
Ryan Burke, Web Developer, Technology Services
Meredith Wilson, class of 2013
Dickinson College
NITLE Seminar, December 6, 2012

2. questions
• How can web development best enhance
liberal arts models of humanities education?
• How can instructional technology
professionals facilitate faculty/student
research collaboration?
• What are the best DH project types and tools
for the LAC environment?

3. Latin and Greek texts for reading, with
explanatory notes, vocabulary, and graphic, video
and audio elements.
dcc.dickinson.edu

4. editorial board three commentaries so far

5. Homer text and commentary
around AD 950

6. Image, text, and ornament:
commentary on Vergil, around 1475

7. Numbered
lines and
notes:
commentary
on Vergil,
1865

8. text to the left 3 tabs notes to the right

9. awesome scholarly front matter

10. running vocabulary includes all non-common words
and occasional images

11. media tab includes audio, maps, images, video

12. images and annotations pop out in a colorbox

13. Google Earth map with pop-up annotations

14. Our YouTube channel

15. Core
vocabulary
lists of the
most
common
Latin and
Greek words

16. Vocabulary list
Jimmy Derek

17. editing in Drupal

18. html source editor in Drupal

19. questions
• How can web development best enhance
liberal arts models of humanities education?
• How can instructional technology
professionals facilitate faculty/student
research collaboration?
• What are the best DH project types and tools
for the LAC environment?

20. from Mediawiki to Drupal

21. advantages of Drupal
• Fully featured cms
• Organization
• Community
• Performance and scale

24. challenges of Drupal
• Many different ways to accomplish the same
thing
• Core code and module updates
• Need to learn some html

25. collaboration
• Students
• Faculty
• Bringing it all together

26. resources
• Modules
– Display Suite, Fields, Fieldgroup, Node Reference, References, Media,
File Entity, Media:Youtube, Block Class, Colorbox, Entity, Google Fonts,
Libraries, Menu Block, Pathauto, Quicktabs, Soundmanger 2, Token,
Google Analytics, Accordion Menu, Wysiwyg
• Theme
– Zen (http://drupal.org/project/zen)
• Drupal Distribution Project
– Distributions provide site features and functions for a specific type of
site as a single download containing Drupal core, contributed
modules, themes, and pre-defined configuration. They make it
possible to quickly set up a complex, use-specific site in fewer steps
than if installing and configuring elements individually.
– http://drupal.org/project/distributions

27. questions
• How can web development best enhance
liberal arts models of humanities education?
• How can instructional technology
professionals facilitate faculty/student
research collaboration?
• What are the best DH project types and tools
for the LAC environment?