Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main'
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
zipper3030 committed Jan 31, 2024
2 parents 5bf2b6e + 286a374 commit 52f16f8
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Showing 3 changed files with 31 additions and 9 deletions.
3 changes: 3 additions & 0 deletions _sass/components/_logo-banner.scss
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
.banner-container{
filter: brightness(0) invert(1);
}
34 changes: 26 additions & 8 deletions about.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -5,16 +5,34 @@ description: About DHRIFT
bodyClass: page-about
---

Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology (DHRIFT) is a platform and curriculum for teaching the digital humanities at local institutions. DHRIFT enables the ready creation of websites for workshops, institutes, and intensives. DHRIFT curriculum has been extensively tested in the classroom and has been used as the basis for workshops and classes at over 20 colleges and universities across the United States
**DHRIFT** (Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology) is an open educational resource (OER) and publication platform for teaching digital skills. Designed by humanities scholars for humanities scholars, DHRIFT includes a core set of reviewed and tested curricula on common digital humanities (DH) topics, enables the ready creation of websites to support workshops, institutes, and intensives, and provides a minimal computing, accessibility-aware, and interactive functionalities.DHRIFT's core curricula benefits from extensive classroom testing and has been used as the basis for workshops and classes at more than 20 colleges and universities across the United States.

## DHRIFT highlights
If you are new to DH, start learning instantly by using DHRIFT's sample Digital Humanities Research Institute curricula to learn foundational concepts in DH computing. Or, if you are someone who already teaches DH workshops, consider building your own workshop using DHRIFT using our style guide (Forthcoming). Perhaps you are interested in hosting your own institute. Fork our GitHub repository and follow our tutorial to build your own stand-alone, static DHRIFT site using GitHub pages. You can select workshops from our directory to include in your site, design your own, and customize the site with your workshop's details.

- DHRIFT enables teachers to quickly create a maintainable and portable website for a technical course, institute, or workshop at an organization or institution
- Sites created with DHRIFT are your own, and can be hosted on services such as GitHub without cost
- DHRIFT curriculum cover a wide variety of topics in the digital humanities and have been extensively tested in the classroom
- DHRIFT curriculum are Creative Commons licensed, and DHRIFT code is open source
- DHRIFT curriculum are rooted in the values and ethics of the humanities
- In addition to providing DHRIFT infrastructure, the DHRIFT team supports those teaching in the digital humanities through community events and outreach
## DHRIFT's features

The following features make DHRIFT unique:

- Core workshops include interactive code editors in the browser, which avoids complicated installations and allows students access to resources on phones, tablets, and ChromeBooks. It also circumvents security locks on computers that prevent downloading and installing software without IT approval.
- Our workshops meet standards that are based in humanities values. Every workshop includes: prerequisites, preparatory reading suggestions, ethical considerations, sample DH projects that use concepts introduced in the workshop, suggestions for further reading, and a theory-to-practice section to help students figure out their next steps.
- Sites are minimalist and our team is committed to improving download time, reducing dependency on stable access to wireless internet and increasing access for students whose internet is unreliable.
- DHRIFT-generated sites are static pages, which can be hosted for free through GitHub pages, reducing costs and increasing stability.
- A director of existing, tested workshops that cover a wide variety of DH topics in the digital humanities, reducing the time, resources, and redundany of having to build new workshops every time you teach.
- DHRIFT's workshops are Creative Commons licensed, and the code for the site generator is open source. We invite contributions, pull requests, and ideation.
- In addition to providing DHRIFT infrastructure, the DHRIFT team supports those teaching in the digital humanities through community events and outreach.

## History

DHRIFT is a socio-technical intervention for hosting, sharing, and creating DH open educational resources (OER) that builds on curricula created and revised since 2016 and piloted at over 20 colleges and universities across the United States as part of two previously funded NEH grants for the Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) [HT-256968-17](https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=HT-256968-17) & [HT-267293-19](https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=HT-267293-19). The Digital Humanities Research Institutes have individually supported 48 digital humanists who led 30 subsequent local institutes that have reached more than 500 humanities faculty, students, and administrators. Read more about the Digital Humanities Research Institutes on our website: [dhinstitutes.org](https://dhinstitutes.org).

DHRIFT employs community-engaged design and development practices. Our identification of the need for DHRIFT is based on input from our two cohorts of DHRI Community Leaders (CLs) as they have expressed interest in and enthusiasm for a low-barrier tool to start and sustain their local digital humanities institutes. Prior to 2020, DHRI CLS reported challenges they faced in their local settings while planning for and leading local DH institutes: computer labs with restrictions on downloading and installing software, students with limited access to computers capable of installing required software, limited staffing to assist with troubleshooting, and limited internet bandwidth. While these challenges were present prior to 2020, the situation of the global pandemic in 2020

invested into the tools to share and then backfill their technical skill sets once they have a transformed, more confident relationship with the digital tools. We find that participants can direct their mental and intellectual energy and creativity to customize their lessons and content, responsive to their community, rather than mired in troubleshooting.

<!-- At first, DHRI content was written in markdown and formatted to be used directly on the GitHub readme pages (still available e.g. here). Feedback from participants indicated that GitHub was a difficult interface to get used to and created additional overhead for learners trying to grapple with both the material and its format. In response to the global pandemic in 2020, the GC’s institutes team pivoted from preparing a face-to-face learning experience to remote instruction, prompting a 10-week sprint to produce the DHRI Curriculum website to support our 2021 virtual institute. Our objectives were to present the material with greater clarity and less frustration for the user, and secondarily to make it possible for others to repurpose the content for their own institutes. Because of the developer’s experience with Python, we decided to build the project using the Django web framework and Agile methodology, rapidly developing features according to an evolving spec. The current curriculum website which was used in summer 2021 for the NEH DHRI and in January for the GC’s Digital Research institute was well received by students.
The DHRI coordinators, however, have felt that the processes of working with, updating, and teaching from the website were more awkward than necessary, and 2021 Community Leaders have not been able to reproduce their own versions of the site for local institutes. An entire build process is necessary after every change, and the process is both fragile and difficult to fix when broken.

To improve the experience for coordinators and learners, a new version of the website is now in development that will draw from technologies used for flat blogging, integrating interactive site elements through web assembly tools, screenshots with annotations, and new site creation that is largely automated. The intention is to make a more robust build process, multi-modal interaction to facilitate self-guided learning as well as a presentation mode, and interactive code examples that allow users to edit and run their own code. Rather than Python and Django, the version in development is based in JavaScript and Next.js. Being a static generated site, it allows DHRI leaders to very rapidly create their own institution-specific version of our site without any programming knowledge. Rather, using the learning about Git and Github that we provide in our lessons, workshop leaders can clone and deploy with a couple of clicks. -->

## Questions?

Expand Down
3 changes: 2 additions & 1 deletion assets/css/style.scss
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -74,6 +74,7 @@ $sub-footer-text-color: $white;
@import "components/strip";
@import "components/feature";
@import "components/social";
@import "components/logo-banner";
// @import "components/fonts"; // Uncomment this line to self host font

// Pages
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -511,4 +512,4 @@ ul li {
border: none;
background: none;
cursor: pointer;
}
}

0 comments on commit 52f16f8

Please sign in to comment.