Digital Humanities Development without Developers
Quinn Dombrowski, Ronelle Alexander · 2014
In this paper, we use Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition as a case study in a low-cost approach to digital humanities project development that can provide a highly customized data model and fairly flexible, intuitive user interface, without any custom programming. The infrastructure for this project consists exclusively of general-purpose, open source code (modules) written by an international community of developers for the Drupal content management system. Using this approach, individuals with domain knowledge can develop the data models that underpin the project and configure the system themselves, exclusively by means of Drupal's administrative graphical user interface. This approach is applicable to projects that focus on the curation and presentation of data (i.e. where the technical needs of the research project have close analogs outside the academy). A major barrier to the adoption of this method of developing projects is the widespread belief that the uniqueness of each scholarly research project extends beyond the subject matter to include the project's technical needs as well. This may be the case for research that relies heavily on algorithm-driven analysis, but data curation and presentation are essential in contexts ranging from businesses, government, non-profits, and cultural institutions. The diverse requirements of Drupal's large user base means that Drupal modules are more likely to have been written with an eye towards accessibility, UI/UX design, and mobile optimization than is code written specifically for a scholarly project, where these factors are often deprioritized due to limited resources. Recognizing the inevitable limitations that reliance on pre-built components places on a project, we discuss a number of challenges we encountered. We then compare the basic Drupal content management system to platforms that are scholar-oriented -- both those based on Drupal and those using a different code base. Finally we delineate the circumstances under which this development approach is most valuable, and some considerations for adopting it.