Have you ever been interested in publishing a small archive of manuscripts, art, photographs or other primary sources on the web? Interested in learning about digital humanities? Have you ever wanted to create your own web project from scratch? In this 4 part course, and a bonus round, you will learn how to build a web project that catalogues and presents digitized cultural artifacts using Wax, a set of minimal computing approaches developed at Columbia University. “Minimal computing,” broadly defined, refers to computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors. Following the 4 part course we will have a bonus round to help participants troubleshoot their projects individually.
Wax is a flexible framework and set of tools that allow you to create eminently durable and useful digital archives without a database. To see an example of Wax in action you can visit the Style Revolution (https://stylerevolution.github.io/) built by graduate students in Art History or the Barbara Curtis Adachi Bunraku Collection (https://bunraku.library.columbia.edu/) at Columbia University Libraries.
This workshop is open to Faculty, Students and Library Professional Staff. **All classes will take place at the Butler Studio (208b)**. Each session will include 2-3 hours extra of practice homework—though optional, we recommend the extra effort. We will allow the option to work as individuals or in small teams. To sign up, please RSVP.
Please register for all four workshops (Tuesdays Nov 13, 20, and 27, and Tuesday Dec 4).
Workshop 2: Introduction to Jekyll
In this session you will learn about the engine behind Wax: Jekyll. As part of the lesson you will learn about static site generation, the lightweight markup language Markdown, and how to publish a Jekyll project to the web using GitHub. This lesson is also valuable to those who simply would like to learn a fast way of creating and publishing secure websites that require low maintenance.
