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# System prepended metadata

title: Sustainable texts

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# Sustainable texts


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## "I have texts I want to work with but I don't have funding/staff/computing power." The problem of resources

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- Think about the core of your project and your key objective. What is it that you really want to do? Can you think of some good-to-have components that you can start without?

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- What's your audience? What are your target groups? Will they be able to see, read, access, download your resources from their place, with their infrastructure, in their language?

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- What will your project look like five years from now? The latest technology is not always the most sustainable solution (remember Flash-based websites?)

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- break down your project into small tasks and stages to estimate time and labor. Tasks that seem small (e.g. data cleaning, installing software, troubleshooting) tend to be overlooked and they are time consuming.

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- reach out to the DH community. There are many DHers working on similar projects, developing tools, sharing their code, publishing tutorials out there.

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- start with the basics. Many digital projects are developed with minimum resources and don't require high computing power. Old standards, file formats, technologies are quite often the most reliable ones (plain text files, html files). Your text analysis project can start and end with some .txt files.

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The "minimal computing" approach:

> "We use “minimal computing” to refer to computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors. (...) This dichotomy of choice vs. necessity focuses attention on computing that is decidedly not high-performance.

Source:  the GO:DH Minimal Computing group
https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/about/

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### Simple tools and solutions

#### Starting from/with the text: Markdown

**Markdown:**
A simple, easy to read/write markdown syntax for plain text. This document has been edited in Markdown. Writing in Markdown is intuitive and markdown files can be easily converted to other file formats including plain text, html, pdf.

![](https://i.imgur.com/UZabBm0.png)
Left: Markdown        Right: Html preview

#### Pandoc
Pandoc is a universal document converter. The "Swiss army knife" of documents!

You can try Pandoc here:
https://pandoc.org/try/

Panwriter:
A simple GUI writing tool using the great conversion capabilities of Pandoc.
https://panwriter.com/
![](https://i.imgur.com/zMEu0v6.png)



## How can I work with multilingual texts?

### Multilingual DH tools and resources for text analysis

Multilingual NLP Resources by Quinn Dombrowski:
  https://github.com/multilingual-dh/nlp-resources
* NLP Resources for Nigerian Languages
  https://orikiwa.wordpress.com/nlp-resources-for-nigerian-languages/
* A Vietnamese NLP toolkit:
  https://github.com/vncorenlp/VnCoreNLP



## How can I work with other forms of text?


The Transkribus project:
https://transkribus.eu/Transkribus/



## How can I turn my project into a sustainable digital resource or edition?

### Static file websites
"Building a static website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages"
By Amanda Visconti
https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/building-static-sites-with-jekyll-github-pages

### Solutions for digital editions

#### Manifold scholarship
https://manifoldapp.org/


#### Scalar
https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/













