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Technical Documentation


Project Code

Fundamental scholarly resources, such as editions and translations of primary texts, often continue to be cited by scholars many decades after their publication. The lifespan of digital projects is typically much shorter than that of traditional print publications. To allow this project both to reach the widest possible audience now and also to have the best chance at longevity, we have designed our digital infrastructure using standards and processes that should be usable for the longest time span we can envision and to be recoverable even after technological evolution leaves the current web infrastructure behind and our webpage ceases to function. To this end, we have made the following technical choices:

For those unfamiliar with XSLT, an example should help to explain it.

This may seem an unnecessarily complicated way of generating a webpage. There are two reasons we chose to use it. First, it enables us to keep all of our data in XML format for long-term accessibility. Second, while the stylesheet written to generate the Negrete 1803 page may be complex, we intend to translate at least four additional Parlamentos documents as the project continues. While each one will get its own stylesheet, each stylesheet will be a variation on the one we have already written. The initial outlay of effort has created an efficient pipeline for creating pages for these additional documents.


Extensions

To make the project more engaging and informative, we anticipate moving beyond texts and commentary to include more extensive media. This is likely to require us to use "external dependencies", digital resources that are not run from our own server. Because we do not own the tools or the servers that host them, it will not be possible to guarantee their long-term maintenance. However, we regard the translation and commentary as the core of the project.


Development and Storage

This project is a work in progress. We are using GitHub for collaborative development of our code and also to make it publicly accessible. Further, we are using GitHub Pages to host our development site. During the project development phase, webpages will first be created on the development site before being moved to their permanent hosting site, soon to be launched, to be hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. New features and pages will be added first to the GitHub Pages development site, and in that sense it may be more advanced than the University of Pittsburgh site; but users should be aware that anything on the development site may be incomplete, experimental, or glitchy. It should be treated as a rough draft, not a finished product. If you want to cite or link to any content that appears only on the development site, please consult us first.

When the project is complete, the GitHub Pages site will remain up as a mirror site in case the University of Pittsburgh site goes down. At that time all pages and features should be the same between the two sites. The code we have created will also continue to be available in the GitHub repository for as long as GitHub maintains it, but we also intend to save a copy of the code package to our institutional repository, D-Scholarship at Pitt.