Enhancing the DraCor frontend

[juliajbeine]

During the DraCor Summit, there have been some suggestions and ideas for enhancing the DraCor frontend by reordering certain sections or adding new sections and features. This discussion may serve as a forum to discuss an overarching strategy for doing this, linking to issues for individual aspects. Moreover, I link to older issues related to this discussion.

Sections
Our current sections are:

• About
  • What is DraCor?
  • FAQ
  • Corpus registry
  • Credits
  • Media Kit
  • Imprint
• Corpora
  • […]
• Tools
  • API
  • API v0(legacy)
  • ODD
  • SPARQL
  • ezlinavis
  • pydracor
  • rdracor
  • Shiny DraCor
• How to
  • Tutorials
  • Research
• Merch
• DraCor GitHub (browser: via logo)
• Rahtz Prize (browser: via logo)

Suggestions

• Restructure the information in the “About” section

  • open question: What is the current function of the FAQ site? Which relation does it have to the ODD? Why are the FAQs attributed to the “About” section and not to the “How to” section?
  • Possibly, we should group the “Credits”, “Corpus registry”, and “Imprint” sections together in the drop-down menu as they are related. The “Media Kit” section in between seems a little bit misplaced from my point of view.
  • new section: Add a new section entitled “DraCor Community”. There, we may provide information on the DraCor mailing list and the Mattermost channel as well as on community events such as the DraCor Summit. Currently, the information on the mailing list is getting lost in the “What is DraCor?” section. Moreover, we currently do not have a place to document community events such as the DraCor Summit and link to related materials (see also Add link to DraCor Summit #352).

• Enrich the “How to” section

  • new subsection: Add a new section entitled “How to contribute to DraCor”. The information in that section may draw on wiki entries within the corpora, such as this NeoLatDraCor Wiki entry or on resources such as the slides from the “From Dramatic Text to DraCor TEI” training session. Possibly, the flowchart for choosing your encoding workflow (see slide 54) would be suitable here.
  • Possibly move the FAQs to this section (see above).
  • Shall we keep the Research bibliography here or move it somewehere else?

• Restructure the information in the “Tools” section

  • open question: How are the subsections ordered in the drop-down menu? Does the current order make sense?

• Add information on science communication

  • Where could we provide information on DraCor and Science Communication (see Add section on DraCor and Science Communication #348)? Would it make sense to connect such a section with the Merch section as it is also a kind of science communication?

• Add a How to cite button to each corpus

  • We may add a How to cite button on the corpora individually, providing a citation file which may be loaded into Zotero or similar. The information may come from the new corpus.xml (see Revise and properly document corpus.xml dracor-schema#108).

• Revise How to cite information on the homepage

  • drawing on the recommendations in the deliverable by Ingo Börner et al. (citation via git commit ids).

What do you think, @lehkost, @peertrilcke, @markschwindt, @DanilSko, @cmil, @ingoboerner?

[cmil]

I would suggest to rename the How to menu to Documentation and move API, API v0, ODD and FAQ there. Documentation is a more common category on websites and the API specification and Encoding guidelines would be much better situated there.

[juliajbeine]

@lehkost and I would suggest the following new structure regarding the frontend:

Sections

1. About

• What is DraCor?
  • To do: Shorten text for better focus (e.g., communication channels may be moved to other sections, see below).
• Corpus registry
• Credits
  • To do: Move corpora information to the registry.
• Imprint

2. Corpora

• […]
• To do: Add abbreviations on the individual corpora sites.

3. Documentation

• API
• API v0(legacy)
• ODD

4. Programming

• pydracor
• rdracor
• SPARQL
• Other apps
  • ezlinavis
  • Shiny DraCor
  • Einakter

5. How to

• FAQs
  • To do: Restructure / rephrase FAQs.
• Tutorials
• DraCor Textbook

6. Research

• Research bibliography
  • To do: Add bibliographical information on posters.
• Posters
  • To do: Add posters (gallery walk).

7. Community

• Get in touch
  • To do: Add the following information (on one site):
    • Mail: info@dracor.org (Note: state who reads the mails.)
    • Mailinglist
    • Mattermost (Note: People who would like to join should write to info@dracor.org.)
    • GitHub (Note: List dracor-frontend, dracor-api Discussion boards.)
    • Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/dracor.org)
    • Hashtags (Note: Add the sentence about the hashtags from the "What is DraCor?" section here.)
• DraCor Moments
  • To do: Collect photos for gallery.
• DraCor Summit 2025

8. ScienceComm

• MediaKit
• Card games
• DraCor in ScienceComm
  • To do: Start a bibliography of DraCor-related content in science communication, press (science journalism), etc.
• Merch
  • To do: Move posters to new section (see above), only keep shirts, possibly cup.

[juliajbeine]

Related issues are:
#340
#352
#348

[ingoboerner]

Thanks for putting that together. As we talked about it already, just a few remarks.

• I would still call it "Tools" instead of "Programming", not on only because it is shorter, but I think, it better captures what we want to highlight: Which options does a user have to work with DraCor Data; or rephrased: Which tools are available. I think, calling that tools is quite standard, see for example the SSH Open Marketplace "Tools & Services": https://marketplace.sshopencloud.eu/ Here Easy Linaviz is a tool: https://marketplace.sshopencloud.eu/tool-or-service/f9JraR ... CLS INFRA D3.1 Baseline Methodological User Needs Analysis calls it "CLS Tools" (Chapter 4): https://zenodo.org/records/6389333#.YkGDwi8w0go, "Tools" also here: https://clscor.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/resource/?uri=app%3ATools The things mentioned in the menu these are not always tied to programming (SPARQL, Easy Linaviz, ...).
• • I am not sure if we have to really list all the Tools, even a selection of them in the menu. I think it would be more helpful to have a page that listed the tools as cards or whatever is a good design choice, similar to what Poetree is doing here: https://versologie.cz/poetree/tools and maybe link to documentation, GithubRepo, Tutorials how to work with them, ...
• I would move lot's of things into "About", e.g. the "Community"
• someone suggested merging "How To" and "Documentation" – makes sense to me
• instead of extending the Top menu I would think it would be a better idea to extend the landing page with some kind of Quick-Links to important pages/information. I could imagine that we would have some sort of additional navigation on the landing page that would address different user groups and offering quick access to certain parts of the website and beyond: I want to use DraCor --> Link to whatever documentation, I want to contribute --> Community sub-page or whatever. I didn't know how to call such a navigation structure; Claude calls is "Feature blocks - Larger sections with icons, images, and descriptions that serve as entry points to different parts of your site"; what's also interesting: "
  Mega footer - A comprehensive footer with organized links to various sections (good for secondary pathways)"

[juliajbeine]

Based on discussions elsewhere and on GitHub, this is the new suggestion by @lehkost and me:

Sections

1. About

• What Is DraCor?
• Corpus Registry
• Credits
• Get in Touch
• DraCor Moments
• DraCor Summit 2025
• Merch
• MediaKit
• Imprint

2. Corpora

• […]

3. Documentation

• API
• API v0(legacy)
• ODD
• FAQs
• Tutorials
• DraCor Textbook

4. Tools

• pydracor
• rdracor
• SPARQL
• ezlinavis

5. Research

• Research Bibliography
• Posters
• Card Games
• DraCor in Science Communication

[lehkost]

We haven't decided yet how to disentangle the website texts and photos from dracor-frontend. But the restructuring of the menus can already be done, since we have most of the files already (I also added placeholder files, see 3016ec1):

1. About

• What Is DraCor?
• Corpus Registry
• Credits
• Get in Touch (placeholder added: "get-in-touch.md")
• DraCor Moments (placeholder added: "dracor-moments.md")
• DraCor Summit 2025 (link to https://summit.dracor.org/)
• Merch
• MediaKit
• Imprint

2. Corpora

• […]

3. Documentation

• API
• API v0(legacy)
• ODD
• FAQs
• Tutorials
• DraCor Textbook (link to https://dracor-org.github.io/dracor-textbook/)

4. Tools

• pydracor
• rdracor
• SPARQL
• ezlinavis

5. Research

• Research Bibliography
• Posters (new file: "posters.md")
• Card Games (new file: "card-games.md")
• DraCor in Science Communication (placeholder added: "science-comm.md")

[juliajbeine]

@lehkost, regarding the science-comm.md, I listed some DraCor-related publications in science communication I was involved in on my website.

[juliajbeine]

See #369.

[juliajbeine]

Overview of related issues:
#340 (closed)
#352 (closed)
#348 (closed)
#368 (closed)
#378 (closed)
#382 (closed)
#383 (closed)
dracor-org/dracor-docs#4
dracor-org/dracor-docs#5