In this section, I will document the use of a toolset for creating a digital humanities publication. This is a generic project that allows for complex digital humanities implementations.
This project uses the free, open-source version of WordPress hosted on our own project domain; and it relies on three plugins that each have a yearly subscription fee. Including hosting, the total yearly cost for this project is about $525. That said, it can expand to a fairly large, robust publication that can be contributed to by a large community of academics and researchers.
Therefore, this approach might be the basis of a grant for a Digital Humanities project.
My goal here is to provide a viable methodology for executing a Digital Humanities project, with the assumption that some funding could be found to complete the project itself.
Of course, funding for personnel is not included here, and should be the primary cost for any project.
Digital Toolset
- WordPress CMS
- Advanced Custom Fields Plugin
- Elementor Pro Plugin
- Dynamic Content for Elementor Plugin
WordPress
To use this toolset, you’ll need to purchase a domain name and domain hosting. Both require yearly fees to stay active.
Once you have set up your domain name and host server, you can install the community version of WordPress, which is a free, open-source, modern Content Management System for blogs.
We will use this blog Content Management System (CMS) along with some extra plugins, to create a much larger CMS specifically tailored to our Digital Humanities project.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
In order to create our own metadata fields and customized database fields for our project, we will use the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin for WordPress. To make full use of its functionality, we will pay the annual fee for the pro version.
Advanced Custom Fields is what we use to design our database structure and to create input forms.
Elementor Pro
This project uses the Elementor Pro as a template builder, which is used to create the visual display of the content in our database. The free version of Elementor can be used to build single pages, but we’ll need the advanced features of the Elementor Pro template builder for our large project.
Dynamic Content for Elementor
This additional plugin allows Elementor to take full advantage of Advanced Custom Fields. This plugin adds additional features so that Elementor can display any type of custom content and metadata.
Costs
When planning your Digital Humanities project, you can consider these tools to be part of the cost. The fees are charged yearly, so you should project the cost of the project to a 5-year or 10-year period, with a plan for what happens to the project after that period.
- Register a domain name – $10/year
- Host Site – $360/year
- WordPress – free
- Advanced Custom Fields Pro Plugin – $49/year
- Elementor Pro Plugin – $49/year
- Dynamic Content for Elementor Plugin – $58/year
Yearly cost of technology stack: $526.00
Lifetime costs: Consider pre-paying for 5 years as part of your grant/project funding, so that you can ensure that the site is stable and will incur no charges for that first 5 year period. Thereafter, a secondary grant could be procured to cover the costs for another 5-10 year period.