Helmed by lead programmer at ECDS, Jay Varner, and ECDS Specialist Dr. Joanna Mundy, OpenTour Builder is an open-source software platform for building geospatial tours that are optimized for mobile devices. With this tool, tour builders can easily create interactive, attractive tours that guide users from stop to stop using their smartphone’s GPS and OpenTour Builder’s native Google Maps instructions. In 2023 ECDS continued to develop and support the OpenTour Builder Tour open-source software platform. Through a partnership with ECDS, Georgia Humanities gave out two new grants to two organizations for the creation of OpenTour Tours.
New sites approved and released in 2023 include the following:
Additionally, many new tours were launched on existing sites, such as the following:
A partnership between Emory’s University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, Department of History, and Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship, The Georgia Coast Atlas project attempts to redefine the concept of a traditional atlas, instead using digital scholarship to explore the ecological and geographic dimensions of the Georgia coast. Through this atlas, we plan to combine various forms of digital media with scholarly content to produce a website that we anticipate will be of great value to educators, conservationists, students, and the public.
The project will provide a publicly available digital atlas to educate on the Georgia coast through the following methods: (1) annotated panoramas of coastal environments taken by aerial drones, using 360° virtual reality; (2) historical and contemporary aerial and terrestrial photography; (3) historical and contemporary dynamic map content; (4) time-lapse videos of coastal processes (such as tidal movements); (5) on-site informational videos; and (6) online scholarly articles on the natural and human history of the Georgia coast. The overarching goal of this public scholarship project is to create a comprehensive online venue for the entire hundred-mile Georgia coastline.
The initial Georgia Coast Atlas site was set up in 2016 and changed very little in the years after that. In 2023, specialists from ECDS including Jay Varner, Steve Bransford, and Michael Page partnered with external developers to begin the process of completely overhauling the infrastructure of the Atlas site, utilizing the open-source Core Data platform as an intermediary between our data sources and a whole new frontend. This new site will open up new ways to explore the geography of the Georgia coast.
In 2023, the Sounding Spirit Collaborative completed the digitization of over 1,000 sacred vernacular songbooks that will be included in its expanded digital library, scheduled to launch in late 2024. With major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sounding Spirit worked with partners at seven institutions with leading collections of gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, shape-note tunebooks, and hymnals. Sounding Spirit also continued work on its scholarly editions series showcasing annotated facsimiles of influential books of sacred southern vernacular music co-published by the University of North Carolina Press and ECDS, and began planning for a new initiative indexing the tunes, texts, people, and sources connected with southern hymnody.
In order to best support faculty in creating public-facing displays of scholarship, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship is excited to announce the first completed wave of our inaugural Kickstart Your Website Initiative!
In April, ECDS solicited applications for the Kickstart Initiative to create free faculty website builds for simple, professional academic websites. This opportunity was ideal for faculty and staff members with upcoming publications, research interventions, or pedagogical findings who wanted to strengthen their digital footprint and online presence.
In addition, the Initiative created training opportunities in web design for graduate students’ professional development. Supervised by ECDS Digital Publication Specialist Dr. Bailey Betik, graduate student trainees Noah Gounoue, Jessica Locklear, and Surbhi Shrivastava, assisted in the design, build, revision, and content migration for these three builds.
The first completed sites were:
ECDS specialist Bailey Betik worked with history scholars Jessie Ramey of Chatham University and Amelia Golcheski of Emory University to create an interactive digital repository about the work of Kipp Dawson, a nationally significant yet little-recognized trailblazer who built coalitions for over 60 years on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam anti-war movement, women’s movement, gay liberation movement, labor movement, and education justice movement.
As an ECDS partner, Betik supported the design, build, and content migration of Ramey and Golcheski’s research into a sleek, accessible, responsive WordPress site. The site uses images and materials from Kipp Dawson’s personal archive as well as external scholarship about Dawson and video interviews with Dawson herself. The site also embeds six interactive StoryMaps that illustrate Dawson’s impact throughout social movements in the United States and abroad.
The Becket Letters project is 30-plus-year research endeavor to locate all extant letters written by Irish writer Samuel Beckett. ECDS is facilitating the build of an Interactive Index website that will present curated data about the letters as well as the people, places and works referenced in the letters.
Lead Software Engineer Jay Varner and Digital Text Specialist Sara Palmer at ECDS assisted the Beckett Letters team with site improvements, including
The Emory Climate Research Initiative (ECRI) was established by Provost Ravi Bellamkonda in October of 2022 with the goal of fostering an interdisciplinary academic community at Emory University to research and educate on climate change. The core faculty leadership team is comprised of representatives from each school within Emory (Public Health, Theology, Law, Medicine, College of Arts and Sciences, Oxford College, Nursing, and Business). In the coming years, the initiative will seek to expand faculty involvement in climate-related research, teaching and action, while collaborating with other Emory teams working on sustainability and climate issues.
Dr. Bailey Betik worked with ECRI faculty and staff members to design and build the Climate @ Emory site, where the Initiative’s key goals and metrics on their research can be communicated to a public audience.