Our diPH development team spans several different UNC units and crosses many disciplinary boundaries.
Our primary developer team consists of three amazing programmers:
Joe Hope is our lead developer. Officially, he’s a RENCI web developer focusing on WordPress theme design and plugin development, but we like to think of him as our WordPress guru. His previous work on the Soundings Project provided relevant experience with the sort of DH projects and user experiences we’re looking to deliver with diPH. Among his many responsibilities, Joe is tasked with translating our overall vision for the diPH toolkit into achievable technical steps, milestones, and deliverables. Joe has been working on coding the top-level project functionality of the plugin, which incorporates all features an admin user might want to associate with an individual project, including type of visualization, as well as all of the associated content, including maps, markers, data, and so forth (more on the diPH structure coming in a future blog post!).
The diPH development team talks to SOHP’s Seth Kotch about the Long Women’s Movement diPH project.
Bryan Gaston is a second-year MS student in Information Science at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and, among other things, a database guy. He spent this summer working on enhancing diPH’s search capabilities through faceted (or filtered) search. He is now focusing on WP interface issues, so that the administrative interface for diPH blends seamlessly with that of WordPress. He’s also tackling the marker level of diPH — all of the options for creating, populating, and porting custom fields into diPH.
Chien-Yi Hou, a Research Associate and PhD student at SILS, brings his vast experience in web development and text mining to the project. Given his work with creating KML maps for T-RACES, he’s working on the diPH’s map library. This critical component will allow users to pull in and create map layers for their projects. Our goal is to be able to pull in georeferenced maps from a broad range of sources — the Carolina Digital Library and Archives (CDLA) map collection, tile mapping services, and web mapping services. Ultimately, users should be able to paste in a URL for a map and not have to worry about map configuration. We’re also exploring the use of map APIs to help us reach our goal.
Our core development team is augmented by several other important voices. Stephanie Barnwell, a SILS master’s student pursuing a joint master’s in public history at NCSU, will be managing the projects we’re lining up for the spring to test diPH beta. She’s been sitting in our meetings to learn as much as she can about how diPH will work, so that she can help scope test projects. Joe Ryan, Humanities Research Associate for ITS Research Computing, has started joining our development conversations. He works with humanities faculty on campus to connect them with technology, and he will be contributing heavily to the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative. And, members of the OASIS web development team join us as often as they can. Their expertise with the uses of WP on our campus provides a critical perspective on how we can make diPH compatible and compliant with broader UNC web policies.
Seth Kotch, Digital Coordinator at the Southern Oral History Program, is the client for our Long Women’s Movement pilot project. We are developing this project as a way to drive diPH beta development. Look for a future blog post about this project soon.
And, last but not least, there’s me – the project manager for diPH. It’s my job to keep everyone on the same page and on track to finish by December 31. I’m also working with Stephanie to line up testable projects for the spring, so if you have an idea, email me!