Sustainability

We have built the Viola Muse Digital Edition with the ongoing sustainability of the project in mind.

Our use of TEI-XML is driven, in part, by a belief that texts encoded according to that international standard have greater potential for longevity and interoperability with other systems in the future. 

This website, which gathers the introductory materials, item metadata, and embedded views of the XML files, has been built using Omeka Classic. We consider Omeka to be stable platform for hosting the edition's metadata and front-end content. The Center for Instruction and Research Technology (CIRT) at the University of North Florida provides ongoing support for our Omeka installation as part of its Faculty Domains project.

The XML files themselves are displayed through an an adaptation of the open-source platform TEI-Boilerplate. Our implementation of that tool is a stand-alone entity that is not subject to centralized updates or new versions, and that uses only standard, open web technologies (HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, and Javascript). It resides in server space maintained by CIRT, also as part of Faculty Domains.

We have constructed our map viewer as an extension of the functionality of TEI-Boilerplate, employing the same set of non-proprietery tools. While the edition uses the commercial platform Google Maps, we retain control of the data used to create the maps, which are generated dynamically through the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API). Switching to a different GIS-based system for our default map would entail adapting the Javascript code that invokes the maps but not altering or porting the map data itself.