Across four class periods during the Fall 2024 semester, participants in Princeton University Library’s (PUL) inaugural Digital Scholarship Foundations (DSF) Program learned how to build a web-based digital exhibition from scratch.

Collection showcases, primary source organizers, and multimedia presentations were all on the table for students in the class led by Digital Scholarship Specialist Bryan Winston. Students received training in web-platforms like Github, as well as in markup languages and handling metadata, to create a digital collection of their choosing.

“The Digital Scholarship Foundations workshop series emerged out of conversations among the Digital Scholarship Services (DiScho) unit about recognizing a broader need among the Princeton researcher community to learn core skills that are transferable across a range of digital scholarship projects,” said Winston.

Winston worked with Jennifer Grayburn, Assistant Director of Research Data and Open Scholarship, Sarah Reiff Conell, Research Data Management Specialist and Filipa Calado, PUL’s former Digital Scholarship Specialist, to devise the structure of the series, which emphasized building static websites as a way to address projects facing preservation and sustainability challenges.

“I tried, with advice from my DiScho colleagues, to scaffold the series so that both novices and experienced digital scholarship practitioners could be challenged and gain new skills that will benefit their work here,” said Winston.

Reimagining Cultural Objects

DSF drew interest from both Princeton students and staff members alike. Library Digital Imaging Manager Roel Muñoz, took the class to bolster his ability to manage Figgy, PUL’s in-house digital content management system. 

“From a functional standpoint Github is a highly used platform for discussing issues with Figgy, our digital repository,” said Muñoz. “If we discover an issue with Figgy or brainstorm useful functionality, the PUL GitHub environment is where ideas are documented.”

For Kimberly McCauley, a Library Collections Specialist responsible for both Digital PUL projects as well as maintaining physical collections, the program provided her with new tools to facilitate her work.

“The workshop explored VS Code, Markdown, Ruby, Jekyll, and CollectionBuilder,” McCauley said. “All of these were digital tools that I had no experience with. So, there was a lot to learn!”

For her class project, she workshopped a digital exhibit with her PUL colleague and classmate Gabrielle Winkler and the Library’s Latin American Ephemera Collection. They plan to create a digital collection of urban protest videos from Brazil and Latin America, complemented by geographical data and interactive maps. 

Andrew Nguy, a first year Ph.D. student in Princeton’s Religion Department, also had a practical application for taking the class. He created his site as a way to consolidate his research sources, which span recordings of religious rituals and scans of liturgies. 

“A lot of the sources I use are floating around in places like YouTube, or they're found piecemeal in different places online, in the Special Collections of various libraries, and it's simply difficult to keep them organized,” said Nguy. “I didn't initially plan for this to be a public project, but I realized that this would be a great place to share these resources with a broader audience.”

Learning from his students

Winston brought years of experience in developing digital humanities projects to the DSF workshop. As a graduate student at St. Louis University and later as an employee at Dartmouth College, he visualized Mexican placemaking in the early 20th century U.S. by building a digital map and website.

Since joining PUL, he’s been involved with helping others create their own projects, while also developing a series of example sites, using DPUL, ArcGIS StoryMaps, and CollectionBuilder to showcase different exhibition tools for Princeton researchers. 

In teaching this class, however, he learned how useful CollectionBuilder is beyond its intended use as a tool for creating exhibit websites. 

“I hope to include more about ‘hacking’ the framework —using the provided template to create something other than a digital exhibit—when I run the Digital Scholarship Foundations series again during the spring 2025 semester,” Winston said.  

The spring 2025 Digital Scholarship Foundations program will begin February 5. Please complete an application by January 21 if you would like to participate.