Digital Humanities
I use digital humanities methods in both my teaching and my research. This website is built from scratch as a way to practice my coding skills. This page will be developed into a resource for basic website building and digital humanities tools.
Jekyll
This website is created with Jekyll, a blog-aware static site generator. I started working with Jekyll after attending a workshop on Building Websites for Humanists at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at University of Pennsylvania. Before Jekyll, I made websites using Wordpress. I now prefer Jekyll, which has more possibilities for customization, avoids database maintenance, and is designed to work with Github Pages. I also like that Jekyll gets me practicing command line, which makes me feel like a real coder.
Jekyll Install for Windows
I’m a PC. I stubbornly insist on having a PC laptop, because they are more affordable than Macs. I had some initial difficulty installing Jekyll on Windows, but was able to successfully install using this documentation and Chocolatey. Similar instructions can be found on the official Jekyll website, if you scroll to the bottom of the Windows Installation Documentation page.
Pro-Tip: Sometimes Windows will default building your blog in a directory in Program Files which gets very messy. When you are finally ready to build your Jekyll blog, make sure you change to a directory that is easy for you to locate. Use the command “cd” for “change directory” to navigate to where you would like your blog files to live. See an example below:
cd C:\Users\yourname
jekyll new my_blog
Minimal Mistakes Jekyll Theme
This website is based on the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll theme. I’ve used a couple themes, but prefer the extensive documentation for the Minimal Mistakes theme.