Integrating Open Repositories and Digital Humanities Technologies to Foster Civic Engagement
Since 2020, the American Philosophical Society (APS) has been developing an open repository based on the DAMS Islandora to build The Revolutionary City Portal—a multi-institutional collaboration that brings together institutionally siloed collections related to the American Revolution, with an emphasis on historically minoritized or otherwise hidden voices. The project integrates a number of open source technologies to foster user engagement, including D3.js for interactive visualizations, TimelineJS and StorymapJS for narrative content, and the open source python library kraken for handwritten text recognition (HTR). The project has been an exercise in collaboration that has brought together developers, library professionals, scholars, educators, and digital humanists. In this talk, the presenters will discuss the challenges, both technological and social, of integrating these technologies into a coherent and usable platform, including the nuts and bolts of making these technologies work together and the difficulties in onboarding nontechnical staff.