Welcome to the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers’ template for text-based digital editions. This template supports the creation of digital editions using Markdown and TEI for transcriptions and GitHub Pages for publication on the web.
The Recovery Hub for American Women Writers supports projects recovering the work of women writers by providing digital access to forgotten or neglected texts and/or extending them with network mapping, spatial analysis, multimedia storytelling, innovative contextualization, and the distant reading of massive datasets. The Recovery Hub’s editorial framework—which includes this template—is designed to support scholars who want to encode recovered documents but who have limited experience with the digital humanities. Past projects have included digital editions of letters, books, short fiction, and other texts as well as experimental projects that explore mapping, visualization, and other content-rich methods.
The Recovery Hub fosters collaboration, mentorship, and community-building among women working in the digital humanities while seeking feminist and decolonial approaches to the creation, curation, design, sharing, and archiving of digital content. To learn more, visit the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers website.
- GitHub Pages and its dependencies, including Jekyll
- TEI in HTML5 Custom Elements based on CETEIcean
- Recovery Hub theme based on Minima version 2.5.1
- jQuery 3.7.1 slim build
- Fancybox jQuery lightbox gallery
In-depth tutorials are available on our example site and in the files of this template.
To get started with your own edition, click the "Use this template" button at the top of the repository home page and choose "Create a new repository" to make a copy on your own GitHub account. For detailed instructions, see Creating a repository from a template in GitHub's official documentation.
Our recommendations for options on the "Create a new repository" page:
- Leave Include all branches unchecked. You won't need all the edition_base branches, just the default one.
- For Owner, it's okay to leave your personal account selected unless this edition should belong to a GitHub organization; if the latter, change Owner to your organization (e.g. the Recovery Hub)..
- Your Repository name should be short but memorable. The name cannot contain spaces, so we recommend using underscores (for example,
baker_digital_edition). - The Description is optional. You can always add or change it later.
- Whether your repository starts out as Public or Private is up to you. Either way, people will not be able to make changes without your approval. If the repository is Private, only people you add as members will be able to see that it exists (to learn how to add members, see Inviting Collaborators to a personal repository in GitHub's documentation). Many people prefer to make their repository Private initially; just be aware that you will have to go into your settings later and change your repository to Public before you can publish your edition with GitHub pages.
For detailed documentation on transcribing sources, organizing files, and readying your edition for publishing online, see our Transcription Tutorial.
All markdown files must have either a Heading 1 at the top of the document, or must declare a title: in the frontmatter. This is because of the jekyll-optional-front-matter dependency for GitHub Pages.
Files that don't do one of these things will be not be processed - that is, they won't be transformed into HTML or included in any of the listings, but they will be passed through as-is. For more information see metadata, below.
This template facilitates customizations through the site's _config.yml file.
The _config.yml file contains settings that affect your whole site.
Most are settings you are expected to set up once and rarely edit after that.
A detailed guide to the settings and options in this file can be found in our
Configuring your site
tutorial.
To publish, enable GitHub Pages by going to your repository's settings, clicking "Pages" in the left sidebar, choosing your branch as the source, and clicking save. Step-by-step instructions are available in GitHub's official documentation, Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site. Once your site is published, the URL will be visible under "About" when you view your repository on GitHub.
Your repository must be public before it can be published with GitHub Pages. If your repository is currently private, change your repository's visibility to public.
In order for links to work, you will then need to change your _config.yml file
with the values of this new URL.
Example: if your URL is, for instance,
https://recoveryhub.github.io/your_edition/,
then these will be your values (note the slash placement):
baseurl: "/your_edition"
url: "https://recoveryhub.github.io/"
Once GitHub regenerates your pages (it can take up to a couple of minutes but is usually pretty quick), you can see your site.