Overview
Though humanists don’t often think of their work as data-driven, their source material — archival records, photographs, maps, oral histories, newspapers and books, and so forth — are data. As this source material becomes more readily available due to digitization, tools will be needed to help manage and process the expanding collection of humanities-based data.
DH Press, a digital humanities toolkit developed by RENCI in collaboration with the UNC-Chapel Hill Digital Innovation Lab, is an easy-to-use tool to assist scholars in handling and sharing their data. The DH Press toolkit is designed for non-technical users and enables them to build web-based community projects that merge a variety of geo-referenced content, including historical maps, tags, categories, metadata, and multimedia objects (such as videos, audio, web pages, images, placemarkers, and virtual walking tours). The toolkit is ideal for presenting and telling stories about data, and facilitates user exploration and discovery.
DH Press is built on the open-source WordPress platform, which since its launch as a blogging tool, has evolved into a useful and powerful content management system for diverse types of web-based data. DH Press allows content to be organized and managed, and makes migration in and out of the system easy. This content can then be exported to other DH Press projects or to other databases, allowing for the expansion of public data sets for the humanities. DH Press will be released to the WordPress Plugin Directory after several short development cycles.
RENCI’s Role
RENCI’s Joe Hope is the principal software developer for DH Press and has led a team of developers in creating and refining the toolkit. RENCI also hosts the DH Press Sandbox, a web space where potential users can explore the toolkit and create their own digital humanities projects. The toolkit is available at GitHub, and users are encouraged to customize and extend the plugin for their own specifications.
Funding
UNC-Chapel Hill Digital Innovation Lab
Project Team
Joe Hope (Technical developer)
Resources
To read more about DH Press: http://dhpress.org
To see recent DH Press Beta projects: http://dhpress.org/project-showcase/
