This year we invited sponsors at the Sustainer Level and above to introduce themselves through narratives of how users engage with their platforms/products. Participants can connect with sponsors during and after the Forum through onsite tables, online sponsor channels in the Discord, and Chats with a Sponsor—a scheduled time for you to share and get feedback from sponsors about a publishing pain point you think they might be able to solve.
By Erin Dunigan, Quire
Quire is a digital publishing tool developed and used by Getty since 2016. Quire is designed for longevity, discoverability, and scholarship. Using plain text files, Quire creates online and e-books as authoritative and enduring as print and as vibrant and feature-rich as the web—all without paying a fee or maintaining a complicated server. Quire has been open source since 2022, and a community of individuals, institutions, and museums worldwide uses it for free. In this blog post, we showcase a few examples of how digital scholarship/publishing staff and subject matter faculty members work with Quire to produce beautiful publications.
Shortly after starting in 2017 as a software engineer working in the Center for Digital Scholarship at Emory University, Yang Li became known as a digital matchmaker for faculty members working on digital projects. Faculty would come to Yang with an idea, and he would experiment to choose which platform would be the best way to bring their scholarship to life. After several years of research and experimentation, Yang chose three tools/platforms that he felt comfortable recommending: WordPress, Manifold, and Quire.
Yang saw Quire as an elegant way to surface valuable research that might otherwise remain inaccessible. Quire stood out for a few reasons, including the way it
- outputs a static website that doesn’t require the headache of maintaining a server,
- generates PDF and EPUB versions of the website,
- enables deep customization, and
- is actively maintained by Getty, including up-to-date documentation and training.
Yang recommends Quire to faculty whose work is image-heavy and best suited to a catalogue or monograph format, like the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s 2022 publication And I Must Scream. This exhibition catalogue features both an essay and a catalogue section. The object entry pages in this catalogue are automatically formatted by Quire to include a primary image on the left and artist information, essay, and comparative images on the right, much like a traditional print catalogue.
Quire has a notable learning curve, requiring navigation of the command line and writing content in Markdown and YAML, quickguide documentation for which is provided on the Quire website. Emory Art History Professor Amanda H. Hellman, together with Professor Annie McEwen and PhD Candidate Ellen Archie, were up for the challenge. Motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn, they did the bulk of the work utilizing Quire’s documentation and occasionally engaging with the user forum. When they brought the publication to Yang and asked what needed to be fixed, he was thrilled to say, “Nothing!”
More often, Yang is either directly working on a publication or connecting faculty with external help. He is currently assisting with the exhibition catalogue Making an Impression: The Art and Craft of Ancient Engraved Gemstones. Ruth Allen, PhD, Curator of Greek and Roman Art, wanted to include Reflectance Transformance Imaging (RTI). This allows the viewer to adjust the shadows and light as they move their mouse around an image. With some tinkering, Yang customized Ruth’s publication to include this feature, giving readers the opportunity to explore the luminosity of ancient carved gems in an elevated and unprecedented way.
Yang regularly hears from faculty members that they are pleased with the modern look and feel of their Quire publications, the way the tool structures content, and how it enhances the scholarship through its various multimodal features. After nearly a decade of helping faculty, Yang reflected that Quire is unique in that it “enables you to appreciate the beauty of the project itself; the platform doesn’t get in the way.”
