What I Build

I build web software for cultural heritage institutions. For the past several years that has meant the Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago, where I'm one of two developers responsible for digital collections interfaces, digital humanities projects, and in-gallery exhibits -- and the servers and deployment pipelines on which they run.

Libraries and archives plan in decades; most software can't think in those time scales. Much of my work is an attempt to handle that struggle. I maintain a fifteen-year-old MediaWiki installation with fifty custom extensions in oe or two days a week. I maintain digital humanities projects from 2005. I build new pathways and access points to digital resources using barebones tools: HATEOAS, HTML/HTMX, Vanilla CSS and JS. (I ride fixed gear bikes and drive manual transmission cars, too.)

I will admit these are often self-imposed contraints, and I don't always abide by them. (Due to MediaWiki's pivots toward Vue, I've been using that a bit here and there, though I still prefer Svelte.) But contraints force you to think creatively, and these specific constraints help you understand what's important, and what tools just add more tools.

Ok, but, like, specifically

Collection interfaces.
IIIF, DAMS integration, deep-zoom viewers, and the unglamorous work of making a catalog legible to someone who didn't build it. Mostly Vue and Python, with a standing preference for fewer dependencies over more.
Systems that have to keep running.
MediaWiki extension development, version upgrades, dependency archaeology, and the Kubernetes cluster underneath it all. Deferred maintenance is a cost to be scheduled, not an absence of one -- a case I've had to make more than once, and I've gotten better at making it.
Tools for volunteers.
I built Newberry Transcribe, a crowdsourcing platform for volunteer transcription of manuscript collections, and I'm one of roughly fifteen co-authors of The Collective Wisdom Handbook, a practitioner's guide to crowdsourcing in cultural heritage -- a book about building tools for volunteers, written collaboratively by people across institutional and international boundaries, across time zones and disciplines. Designing for contributors rather than for the catalog is a distinct discipline, and an under-examined one.
Local AI, tried rather than assumed.
I run models on my own hardware: local LLMs, image generation pipelines, quantization work. Partly curiosity, partly because it's the only honest way to form an opinion about what these tools can actually do for a collection. Cultural heritage institutions are being sold a great deal right now. I'd rather be someone who has run the thing.

Selected work

Newberry Transcribe
A homegrown crowdsourcing platform for volunteer transcription of manuscript and archival collections, built for cultural heritage contexts rather than adapted to them.
Opacity Contrast Checker
An accessibility tool for checking WCAG contrast ratios through translucent overlays, which standard checkers don't handle. Extremely niche, and possibly the least catchy name in the history of software.
Mapping Movement
Digital humanities project on movement and place; also the subject of an article I wrote about it. I took an initial design goal of the project -- to replicate the experience of reading a physical book -- and ran with it.
Newberry Digital Galleries
Vue 3 browsing interface over the Newberry's DAMS and IIIF APIs. Responsive grid, deep-linkable lightbox, OpenSeadragon deep zoom. Builds galleries dynamically for any ID from the Newberry DAMS.
Foreign Language Press Service
A straightforward presentation of a mid-twentieth-century survey of Chicago's foreign language press.
Race Before Race
A site built for an exhibit about how racism predates concepts of race. I used this opportunity to do some super fun (and quite clever, if I do say so myself) math to make the dots move correctly as the page resizes.

Exhibit sites exemplify the "build it very, very fast please, and also it must stay alive with no maintenance for one hundred years" problem. I did build it fast, and it will run for one hundred years.
Chicago Style: Mike Royko and Windy City Journalism
An in-gallery interactive built for exactly one device: a tablet in the exhibit hall. Licensing meant it could never go online, which made it the only project I've built where I knew the viewport, the hardware, and the network in advance. Layout is hardcoded and the images are enormous, because they only ever had to download once.

Exhibit sites exemplify... oh wait, I said that already. This one is super cool, though -- wait for the background to change. Big thematic inspiration here; I wrote a couple articles on it: one on the source material, and the other on the color red.
Collection Stories: Halloween and Winter
Seasonal pathfinder sites, updated each year. Also the origin of Nzo, a small ghost who has become the Newberry's unofficial mascot. He reappears in the winter edition, hidden.
French Pamphlets
IIIF-based reading interface for a digitized pamphlet collection, mostly from the French revolutionary period. OCR'd pamphlets, cleaned up by humans, then translated by students at a variety of institutions.
Vector customizations for MediaWiki
A small extension implementing a skin-adapter pattern: one component owns all coupling to the skin, so the rest of an installation's extensions can stay skin-agnostic.

Writing

  • "Retiring a Custom Skin on a Fifteen-Year-Old MediaWiki" [forthcoming]
  • "Prototyping with AI" ( colloquium talk, 2024 )
  • "Movement and Place in Mapping Movement" (2023)
  • "Z-Index: The Puzzle Stacked On an Enigma Stacked Under a Riddle" (2023)
  • "IIIF and the Problem with CSS Image Cropping" (2019)
    Written before object-fit had reliable support. The cropping issue discussion is obsolete; everything about IIIF is still accurate -- including the argument for why you should be using it!

Teaching

I coach junior developers through code review, on institutional projects and on open source contributions.

Code

I keep personal projects on Codeberg and mirror a few to GitHub. My work at the Newberry lives on the library's GitLab.

Contact

n3w @ fosstodon

I don't use social media much, but when I do, it's Mastodon. And sometimes Lemmy.