Online exhibits/Digital Humanities

[Alex Kent]

We are going to start investigating how to possibly do online exhibits with Islandora.  Has anyone tried experimenting with creating online exhibits using just Islandora, and not any outside software like Omeka, for example? 

One possible thought I had would be to maybe use the Compound Object SP to pull different objects together under one "Exhibit," and have "Exhibit" be a parent object.

What have people tried so far? 

Thanks in advance!

[Rosemary Le Faive]

The site Bowing Down Home is designed to be an "exhibit" site. We totally scrapped the Collection View form of navigation, and instead went for menus with select objects (people, tunes, etc.) available by dropdown, and each object page (designed with Panels) shows a variety of datastreams and views of related objects. There are also "story" pages (which are editable HTML islandora objects; see Styles/Traditions/Events) and which can contain references to other objects (which sometimes render as playable, e.g. the videos and audio files). The Collection View is still available ("View Repository"), and contains way more than is displayed in the "exhibit", but it's the "museum basement" for those who are interested.

It took a lot of Views and Panels wizardry, but it's possible.

[Luke Bainbridge]

Hi Alex,

We are allowing users to pick "featured" objects using the Islandora Object Field (https://github.com/midnightLuke/islandora_object_field).  The rendering options are limited currently (you just inspired a new issue actually), but you can extend it a little using template overrides.  It stores the "exhibit" information on the Drupal end (not in the repository), I'm not sure how important that is to you, but given that it occurs on the Drupal end you have access to a lot of tools to layout and change the exhibit without having to do a lot of programming.

Cheers,

Luke

[Alex Kent]

Sounds interesting, I really like the idea of users picking "featured" objects, creating their own collections...there's something there, for sure.  Interactive/engaging is always good.  We are on version 1.4, would this work with that? 

[Ernie Gillis]

I created a custom module for our archivist to choose 3 objects to display on our front page[1]. It requires archivis, or some other content admin to know the PID, and they can enter custom display text that links to the various referenced parts (the ojbect, and its parent). Nothing terribly exciting, or advanced, but a stepping stone at least (can release code, but haven't had chance).

[1] https://archives.berklee.edu/

[Luke Bainbridge]

I wrote the object field module on version 1.6 I believe, but I don't think there is anything that would be version specific in there (it doesn't even use the SOLR module if I remember correctly).  As I say in the readme the module is still experimental and it works for our use case, but I don't guarantee it is bug free.  If you do try it out and run into any blockers I'd definitely appreciate issues in the github repo though, always looking to improve on things if I can,

Cheers,

Luke

[Alex Kent]

Luke and Ernie, 

There's a good chance we'll try out both options, and will of course let you know what we find out.  Thanks!

Alex 

[Martha Tenney]

Chiming in late to say that, similar to Luke, at Barnard we created have created a very simple exhibit platform using Drupal content types--basically we have an "exhibit" content type node that contains "exhibit object" content type nodes in a given order. The exhibit content type has fields for a title, thumbnail, and brief description, while the exhibit objects have fields for a title, description, and theme (which are optional but are used to create structured sections within the exhibit). Then you can drop in unlimited images (at this point you just upload a small-ish jpg) which themselves have fields for captions and PIDs, to auto-generate a link to whatever object you want in the collection. If you have any questions, feel free to email me and I'll put you in touch with the developer who created this. 

Here's an example of an exhibit we made with this [1], and here's some relevant code on our github [2]. I'll note that it needs some work and it doesn't interact very much with the actual objects in the Islandora repository, beyond that auto-generated link from the PID. Also, for more complex DH projects we'd likely use a different tool or platform and embed it in our site.

[1] http://digitalcollections.barnard.edu/exhibits/student-publishing-barnard

[2] https://github.com/BarnardArchives/bc_islandora#exhibits

[Alex Kent]

Does anyone else have more examples? We are looking into this more seriously this Fall/Winter.  Thanks in advance.  

[Mark Jordan]

Hi Alex,

I understand that you are asking about curated exhibits and not general DH content, but I thought I'd reply with a link to something that we're doing that may evolve into a more exhibit-like form over the next little while. We have developed a solution pack that manages arbitrary XML files as its OBJ datastreams, and relies on Islandora viewer modules to do the interesting stuff with the XML. Our only public example so far is a set of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads marked up in TEI XML, with a custom viewer module to render the transformed text and corresponding page images side by side. I've also documented how to render a single-XML-file book marked up in XML (in this case DocBook) using the module.

While very few people would consider creating an exhibit in XML to be practical, we're plan on exploring how to leverage this solution pack to render various kinds of XML for public consumption, perhaps even XHTML or XML generated by other applications. We have no specific plans yet but we'll probably spend some time over the next year testing whether this this approach has any merit.

Mark

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