News and Notes from the Clark Library
A recent project I’ve been working on in the Digital Projects Studio has been moving a website built in PHP to Django. To understand why we’d go through the headache of moving the site into Django it’d be good to first understand some of the scope of the project.
This post is a follow-up to the introduction to the Field Notebook and the demo notebook, ‘Monumental Gifts’. I will go over how to install the app and start customizing your own web-based Field Notebook. This post will focus on how to start tailoring the models and appearance of your Notebook to suit your needs for your research. If you are interested (or discover later that you are interested) in building your own original application from scratch, I recommend working through the Beginner’s Tutorial on Django’s website. In fact, even if you don’t plan on building your own application, I still recommend the tutorial. You’ll have better understanding of how to modify and use your Field Notebook if you become familiar with how Django works as a framework.
Installing the app
Our team at the Digital Projects Studio is excited to present our web-based ‘field notebook’, designed with humanities and social science researchers in mind. We wanted to offer field researchers a reusable application with enough structure for ease of use but also with options for further customization according to individual needs. The main purpose of the application is to permit researchers to continually add digital objects, then retrieve and automatically group these objects in different ways as their field collections grow larger. Automated grouping is made possible by requiring the user to add some basic metadata to a digital object as soon as they enter it into the application’s database. The kind of metadata used can also be customized according to the user’s needs.
Continue reading “Introducing “Monumental Gifts”: A Web-based Field Notebook powered by Django”
When first learning how to integrate my Bootstrap and Django, I wasn’t able to find a quick cheat sheet to reference without visiting different documentation pages. To help others I’ve put together a list below of the tags I used most often. A full list of Django tags and filters can be found here.
A few weeks ago a researcher came to the Digital Projects Studio for help in getting his research out to a larger audience. His project, on Jewish cafes, had a plethora of information ranging from details on the cafes themselves to the cities and the famous people who had frequented the cafes. Some of the cafes had been destroyed during World War II and others are still in existence today. This is the story of bringing the Jewish Cafes project online.