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Digital Scholarship Group

The mission of Saint Louis University's Digital Scholarship Group is to provide expertise in project design, software development and technology management in support of digital humanities and culture heritage projects within SLU and at other universities and libraries.

Active Projects

Patrick M. Cuba, IT architect, and Bryan Haberberger, full stack developer, with the Research Computing Group are working on or maintaining the following scholarly research projects:

  • TPEN 2.8 is an online tool for line-by-line transcription used internationally in classrooms.
  • TPEN 3.0 (2026, NEH DHAG Level 3) extends the TPEN platform (2012, Mellon Foundation/NEH) into the Rerum ecosystem, improving its suitability for the research partners at SLU and around the globe as well as across more academic domains.
  • Newberry Paleography Schools (Mellon Foundation), from the Newberry Library in Chicago, builds off a customized TPEN platform to provide paleography students with curated resources and specialized instruction for independent study and virtual instruction. French and Italian Renaissance coursework is currently maintained with more forthcoming. Other smaller projects focused on genealogy, prosopography, enslaved communities, medieval Ireland, music, and poetry have been completed with researchers at the University of Dayton, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the Jesuit Archives, Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Toronto.
  • Gallery of Glosses (2024, NEH DHAG Level 3) provides a virtual archive for encoding and relating manuscript gloss commentary, especially around medieval and scriptural texts. Visit the Gallery of Glosses.
  • Where's Religion (ongoing, Henry Luce Foundation), from the Center on Lived Religion at SLU, captures and encodes experiences of religious significance in local communities, recording interactions, locations, and social structures. 
  • Custom Instance of Mirador 3 with a published RERUM service adapter allows users to quickly annotate images in an IIIF manifest and save persistent web annotations into RERUM.
  • navPlace/Geolocation Annotation Viewer is a standalone serverless HTML + Javascript application hosted through GitHub. It is used to process the ‘navPlace’ descriptors for IIIF resources and render them on a web map. It also supports geolocation web annotations, which can describe any web resource.
  • Dunbar Library and Archives Online is a collection of small web applications, which combine primary resources and metadata from multiple repositories at the Dunbar Library and Archive, Ohio History Connection, OCLC and the University of Dayton. This space serves as a research portal for the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Published Technical Documents and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

  • This IIIF Cookbook recipe explains how a museum or university might identify a set of points or complex regions on an image, especially maps, to geolocate the resources represented within them.
  • This IIIF Cookbook recipe demonstrates how a scholar or content owner should identify the physical location of a resource represented in IIIF, using the navPlace extension. Any IIIF Resource may be described in this way, allowing a compatible viewer to display a collection of resources on a map or similar interface.
  • As a demonstration of the effectiveness of geolocating resources, a guide was developed to illustrate an implementation of the navPlace extension and HTML map viewing tool Leaflet. This guide allows developers to understand how to integrate well-described resources into their projects and to encourage content owners to include these sorts of metadata on their resources.
  • An approved extension to the IIIF Presentation API, navPlace is established as a property on multiple IIIF data types to assign a location to each resource for the purpose of navigating a collection.
  • An approved extension to the IIIF Presentation API, this webpage defines how GeoJSON and Web Annotation interacts with IIIF resources. Annotations embedded within or targeting these resources can call out regions of interest, especially georeferenced entities referenced within them.
  • SLU offers a public repository for Linked Open Data, especially those supporting Web Annotation, GeoJSON, and IIIF documents. This API defines how developers can interact with it to create, modify, and manage public contributions that are attributed and described, made available as Linked Open Data.

Critical Digital Scholarship Infrastructure

Cuba and Haberberger have been instrumental in developing reusable infrastructure code in support of these projects, which lowers the technical and financial barriers for new projects.

  • IIIF Presentation API and Project Mirador (ongoing, IIIF) contributions describe the standards for data interoperability and exhibition as implemented by communities requiring the accurate transmission of high-resolution images and multimedia resources.
  • RERUM API is a RESTful API for transmitting object documents to and from the RERUM database. It is a public API specification implemented as a NodeJS Express app. Though any JSON can be saved, the specification supports and encourages linked open data. The API implements history, release state control, creator and AUTH0 authorization inside an immutable property for all data objects, which makes it much more powerful than a simple CRUDing API and database.
  • The RERUM database is a MongoDB Atlas cloud instance of MongoDB. Security, persistence, and back-ups and updates are managed by RCG using the latest tools and services available through MongoDB Atlas. The database is not available to the public internet. Interfacing with the database can only be achieved through authorized RERUM API and public RERUM service requests.
  • TinyThings is a very small NodeJS Express application to proxy the RERUM API. It exists so it can be deployed as a starting point for communication with RERUM API, from which users can create more complex HTML front ends. The RCG instance is also a separate proxy API module to handle all CRUDing to the RERUM database from any server it is deployed on. This offers other developers quick and easy access to the RERUM Database. In just a few minutes TinyThings + RERUM API + RERUM Database become a deployable dynamic web application with a front end where users can create persistent data. This is a powerful tool for development and “proof of concept” purposes during a project.
  • The DEER Framework is an HTML-templating system akin to Bootstrap. It allows for <form> HTML elements to connect to the RERUM API without custom script, allowing researchers to spin up data collection and display prototypes quickly and without stack developers.