We introduced a new web site for the project where you can find background information about the project, and details about our ongoing work. Main sections of the site include:

• full information about the openly available data sets we are reusing or developing ourselves
• replicable applications using the data sets

The bulk of the replicable applications are the Pluto notebooks we use to explore the digital Complutensian interactively, but they also include examples of static documents that we format for publication with Quarto – including the project website itself.

@online{smith2024,
  author = {Smith, Neel},
  title = {New Project Web Site: A Digital {Complutensian} {Bible}},
  date = {2024-11-26},
  url = {https://neelsmith.quarto.pub/posts/2024-11-26-complutensian-site/},
  langid = {en}
}

But it’s also easy to interact with the HTML, CSS and javascript in a notebook’s web page using the Julia HypertextLiteral package. (For full details see this guide.) This post will show you how to add an interactive display of the images in a IIIF manifest to your Pluto notebook in just three steps.

using HypertextLiteral

manifesturl = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neelsmith/complutensian-texts/refs/heads/main/iiif/complutensian-bne-v1-manifest.json"

@htl("""
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/tify@0.31.0/dist/tify.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/tify@0.31.0/dist/tify.css"></link>
""")

@htl("""
<script>
new Tify({
  container: '#tify',
  manifestUrl: $manifesturl,
})
</script>
""")

@htl"""
<div id='tify' style='height: 800px'></div>
"""

using PlutoUI

@bind manifesturl TextField(800, default="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neelsmith/complutensian-texts/refs/heads/main/iiif/complutensian-bne-v1-manifest.json")

@online{smith2024,
  author = {Smith, Neel},
  title = {Add a {IIIF} Browser to Your {Pluto} Notebooks},
  date = {2024-11-15},
  url = {https://neelsmith.quarto.pub/posts/2024-11-15-pluto-iiif/},
  langid = {en}
}

Image resources from “big-digital” projects

One project I’m currently working on is a digital multilingual Bible, inspired by the sixteenth-century Complutensian polyglot. The Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) has digitized its copy as part of its Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. You can browse the BNE’s Complutensian Bible interactively here.

Even better, the BNE participated in the World Digital Library project (WDL), an extensive collection of digitized cultural heritage materials assembled under the leadership of the Library of Congress with support from UNESCO. As a result, the high-quality images of the BNE’s Complutensian Bible are available without restrictions, and documented following the standards of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).

These are examples of large DH projects at their best: investing in creating high-quality primary source material, and guaranteeing by their use of open technologies and open legal licensing that the resources will be as widely reusable as possible. My work on the Complutensian polyglot would not have been possible without this digital infrastructure. The well documented JSON format of IIIF manifests makes it straightforward for a “small-digital” project to explore a collection of images hosted on a IIIF server.

For the WDL, the Library of Congress has organized the publication of the Complutensian Bible in five groups, published on this web page.

On the LoC web site, the thumbnails illustrated above correctly lead to browsable images, but all five of the links for IIIF manifests actually point to only one manifest, covering only the first of the five sets of images. It’s not possible to find associated data for the other four sets of images.

This illustrates a problem familiar from other digital infrastructure projects: even large institutions may lack the resources for continued curation of digital material once a large project has reached the end of its term. When I reported the erroneous links to the Library of Congress in 2023, I was told that this was already a known problem. “The Digital Collections team … don’t have an ETA for a fix though, sorry.”

@online{smith2024,
  author = {Smith, Neel},
  title = {The {Complutensian} {Bible} in {IIIF}},
  date = {2024-11-13},
  url = {https://neelsmith.quarto.pub/posts/2024-10-24-complutensian-iiif/},
  langid = {en}
}

Scholarly work and “small-digital” projects

In academia, “digital humanities” has become almost synonymous with big, grant-funded, multi-year projects. Some of these projects have succeeded in creating foundational resources for digital scholarship. (For one example, I’ll be posting here in the near future about some of my current work relying on one of those resources, the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF.) But what I’ll call “small digital” work is essential if we hope to realize the potential of digital scholarship.

By “small digital,” I mean work with minimal technical prerequisites carried out by a small team or even an individual scholar that can be easily shared and replicated. “Small digital” is a natural fit for exploratory or experimental work, in contrast to the prior enumeration of “deliverables” that grant funding often requires. Large projects can be an effective way to deliver established material or services, but “small digital” mirrors the normal scholarly process, from forming hypotheses, through discovery, evaluation and correction.

Small digital also offers a comfortable home for scholars whose research includes writing code. While such scholars are not in principle excluded from large digital humanities projects, in practice multi-year grants often divide participants between technology specialists (programmers) and content specialists (“scholars”). And since university departments already have tenure-line positions for “scholars,” the technology specialists are frequently supported by fixed-term positions funded by soft money: far easier for a university to stretch its budget with the overhead charges of a grant than to create new tenure lines, and easier for many academic departments to hire in traditional roles than to evaluate candidates working with code in new ways. Talented scholars who write code can thus find themselves stuck on a treadmill of temporary positions that ultimately define their career arc more as “tech support” than “academic,” further institutionalizing the false dichotomy of coding and research.

The blogger Matthijs Cox discusses what he calls “the two-culture problem” in the natural sciences. Cox wants to support “scientific coders,” who work in between traditional categories of “scientists” and “developers”. The idea of a “two-culture problem” certainly applies equally well (and perhaps even better) to the humanities, where the division is often between scholars who write no code, and developers who implement only what the scholars direct. We could generalize Cox’s phrase to “scholarly coders,” whether in the natural sciences or the humanities. I would reverse adjective and noun, however: I think the broader category is more like “coding scholars” (that is, scholars who write code as part of their research: “scholars who code” might be an easier expression in English).

Most of the work I discuss on this site fits my definition of “small digital.” The purely technical barriers for coding scholars have never been lower, and thoughtful use of AI to write code may already be lowering the level of coding skills needed to work as a scholar writing code. Posts will include working examples of code as well as links to full sources. Like Matthijs Cox, I have found the Julia language to be especially apt for my scholarly work, and it would be wonderulf if, like Cox’s site, the examples I’m collecting here are useful to any other scholars who code. I hope that they will in any case illustrate how readily within reach “small digital” scholarship can be.

@online{smith2024,
  author = {Smith, Neel},
  title = {“{Small} Digital”},
  date = {2024-10-28},
  url = {https://neelsmith.quarto.pub/posts/2024-10-28-small-digital/},
  langid = {en}
}

In 2024, I’m coding in Julia

All the code presented in the “digital infrastructure” section of this site is written in Julia.

I first saw Julia when I was desperately looking for better ways to teach remotely during the pandemic. In December of 2019, I discovered the famous MIT course “Introduction to Computational Thinking”, and wanted to imitate how its instructors taught with Pluto notebooks, written in Julia.

By January of 2021, Julia had become my language of choice. Here are a few reasons:

• I don’t spend time trying to manage versions and environments. I’ll never get back the hours I’ve given to that with Python, Java, C, Perl, …, but I won’t lose more time installing and setting up Julia. Package management is well thought through and integral to the language.
• Julia runs everywhere, easily. Use the juliaup script, or download and install a single binary for Mac OS, Windows, Linux or Free BSD. Combine this with easy installation, and you can be confident that when you share your work in Julia, it will be easy to replicate reliably.
• Twenty-first century features are part of the language, not add-ons: Julia has mature handling of Unicode, built-in support for unit testing, and many other features I routinely rely on.
• Great tooling makes for a productive working environment. The Julia REPL, Pluto notebooks, and Visual Studio Code (with plugin options including executing and debugging Julia, and generating publications with Quarto) all keep me focused on the problem I want to solve, not how to use the tools.
• Julia’s multiple dispatch model was a head-scratcher at first, but I really appreciate its “unreasonable effectiveness” (in Stefan Karpinski’s phrase). The composability and code reuse it encourages is an especially good match for exploratory scholarly work.
• Pluto notebooks are awesome: reactive, like Observable notebooks, but not tied in to a commercial delivery system, and written in a language that’s a pleasure to work in.
• Julia is fast.

@online{smith2024,
  author = {Smith, Neel},
  title = {Why {Julia?}},
  date = {2024-10-22},
  url = {https://neelsmith.quarto.pub/posts/2024-10-22-why-julia/},
  langid = {en}
}