ockham

Ockham is a platform for publishing collaborative research in the humanities built on top of Jekyll.

Beginning with Jekyll, Twitter Bootstrap, and GitHub we are building a static site publishing platform for humanities research. The goal is to keep it simple. No CMS, no elaborate back-end administration, just content managed directly by the scholars who create it.

By design, content and formatting are kept separate, while making the maintaining and updating information easy for individuals without knowledge of (or interest in)HTML. We seek to make this happen by integrating cloud file shares and possily Gists.

Installation

The Gemfile located in the root directory contains the necessary Ruby gems needed for Ockham to run properly. The gems include jekyll, jekyll-scholar, rake, and stringex.

• jekyll: Ockham is built to work with Jekyll, a static site generator that converts Markdown files and template layouts into a website.
• jekyll-scholar: Jekyll-Scholar is a set of extensions for working with bibliographies, reading lists, and citations. You can read more in the documentation.
• rake: The Ruby software task management tool.
• stringex: Extensions for Ruby's String class. Read more in the documentation.

To install the Ruby gems, first install the bundler Ruby gem. From the command line,

gem install bundler

Once bundler is installed, simply run bundle install from the command line in the directory where Ockham will be installed. The Gemfile will fetch the most recent versions of the above gems.

Once the Gems are in place, Ockham can be installed by placing the contents into the root directory. Once the files are in place, run rake preview from the command line to preview the site on a local server.

More rake tasks are available to users to make editing, updating, uploading, and adding content easier. Run rake from the command line to see what tasks are available to you.

Layouts

Ockham includes layouts for the type of research project content we have identified as essential:

• People
• Projects
• Laboratory Notebook
• Partners
• Funding
• Publications

Plugins

Ockham does not use plugins. It can be run as gh-pages.

Deploying

Ockham can be deployed in one of two ways:

• rsync: Using rsync allows you to use plugins that are included with Ockham. The site is generated locally, then using rake deploy you can send the files to your server using rsync.
• Github pages: If you are using Github pages to host Ockham, you will be unable to use the included plugins. Github Pages only allows certain plugins to run within their system, and you will be limited to only those plugins.

Requirements

• Ruby >= 1.9.2
• Gems:
  • jekyll-scholar
  • rake
  • stringex
  • jekyll

About

Ockham is under development by Jason A. Heppler and Nicole Coleman at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), Stanford University.