Critical Editions

The Critial Editions project for the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is a static site generator for publishing scholarly material that makes heavy use of footnotes, particular embedded video footnotes. The initial use case was the archive’s critical editions produced by research fellows that include a scholarly introductory essay, as well as an extensive set of footnotes for a particular testimony. The site builder will also be used in forthcoming projects in which we will publish web editions of printed books that make heavy use of Fortunoff material.

Specially-crafted Markdown files are used to maintain content, and a command-line site builder can be used to make new instances of the Critical Edition app.

I was the lead developer both for the React application and the site builder tool.

Index Page

Video footnotes

Site builder

In order for this project to be reusable in other applications, I made a site builder that’s pretty easy to use. From the docs:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/jakekara/essay-formatter
$ essay-formatter init my-project

Initiating Critical Editions site
=================================
 📂 Created directory my-project
 📄 Copied start content

 ✨ Finished building project in my-project!

To start hacking, type: 
	cd "my-project"

To build with start content, run:
	 essay-formatter build content

To view the site run:
	essay-formatter serve build

Links

• Fortunoff Critical Editions site - https://editions.fortunoff.library.yale.edu/
• Static site builder - https://github.com/jakekara/essay-formatter