Transition Away from Box for Digital MItford Workspace

[ebeshero]

Related Ticket: #11
Universities might be are definitely phasing out Box support, so we may urgently need to relocate our workspace for Digital Mitford. (I know University of Pittsburgh, where we started, just now is phasing out Box, and I don't know whether my new university could decide to do the same Penn State is doing the same by the end of the school year. Universities are generally finding the expense of Box unnecessary in the presence of MIcrosoft products for managing shared document directories or Google Drive, neither of which would be optimal for our project.)

I think we can create an "in-house" Mitford project solution based on available interface tools, with a little research and adaptation. Here's an outline of an idea that I think we could pull off with our own web resources.

What our team needs for a project workspace is:

1. A web view of manuscript / document images, with capacity to download the images locally. We can't make this a public view for all images (though we can for those from Reading Central Library).
2. A capacity to upload XML files in a way that tracks versions. This needs to be easy for an extended project team that can't all easily learn the details of git and GitHub (those that bring students here from lit classes rather than coding classes, etc).
3. A capacity to "ping" each other with comments on particular images and files. This is something we can do with line-comments in GitHub, but this needs to be easy for people to write to each other on the same page where they view an "uploaded" file and its associated ms images. Or it might be something we build into the private-facing HTML page that hosts images and a view of the XML--something that permits a sidebar of chat. I think Hypothes.is web annotation could be one way to implement this, but a GitHub-based solution might be better.

For the first requirement we can serve images over the web, privately. For this we need file storage that permits private view to the Mitford Editing Team Only: that would just be something password-controlled for our team. We can try storing them on my web server. Each webpage would provide a way to associate a set of image files with corresponding XML files. (If we want to preserve things exactly as they are currently, image files and XML files are saved in the same file directories on Box. We may need to separate the images from the XML files in parallel directories and if so, we need to manage that with careful programming: using the same file directory structures for the XML that we do for the image directories for example.)

For the second requirement, we can investigate some web interfaces designed to handle git commits and build something, or check in with the folks at the Canadian Writing and Research Collaboratory (CWRC) b/c their CWRC Writer runs on an interface supporting git. (Note from the CWRC writer description, "This version of CWRC-Writer, Git-Writer, uses the GitHub repository for document storage, versioning, and sharing. You need to be logged into a GitHub account to use it.") We could try CWRC-Writer's approach for our project, or adapt our own git interface tech that fits our project workflow.

Pinging our git-connected team members and advisors, @lmwilson @RJP43 @ghbondar @djbpitt @alnopa9 @ghbondar , so we're all aware. I want to investigate this over the next year and get help from some interface designers who have worked on this territory. Comments welcome here as we come up with ideas / suggestions / directions.

[ebeshero]

I am working on copying our Box files and noting some things that aren't transferring out of Box. Some of these things are predictable: Box links, for example. I'm keeping a list here of anything that I notice isn't transferring and doesn't seem to be working even within Box.

• Mitford_Digital_Archives/Schloss's_English_Bijou_Almanac/Review in Literary Gazette of Almanac (a box link, https://books.google.com/books/content?id=LYBGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA765&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U39x2YiR3JZUbEiMJ3bR-ywXxrtHQ&ci=42%2C226%2C295%2C193&edge=0 , which appears to lead nowhere)

• SI:_Standard_Lists_of_Named_Entities_and_XML:IDs: Direct links to MRMValidate.sch https://ebeshero.github.io/MRMValidate.sch, and Personography Sources directory in MRMS project support.

• (Outdated) links to TEI Roma in SI:_Standard_Lists_of_Named_Entities_and_XML:IDs/XSLT_and_Schematron_Files

[ebeshero]

Closing this as we have now successfully completed the migration from Box to OneDrive, and thence to a Sharepoint server at https://pennstateoffice365.sharepoint.com/sites/DigitalMitfordProject