Digital History at University of Toronto

This repository collects most of my course materials for Digital History a semester-long 3rd-year seminar I teach in the History Department at University of Toronto. The repository contains most of my notes and assignments, as well as the syllabus and some auxiliary materials.

Most, but not all, of the materials in this repository are reproduced on the course website:

http://digitalhistory.github.io/

My materials are written in Org-Mode, a syntax similar to Markdown but not as widely used. If you use Pandoc, it can translate pretty well between org and various markdown flavours. The website is generated by the Hugo static site generator, after the long files in this repository are parsed and chunked out by ox-hugo, the org-mode hugo exporter. The deployment process is a little bit involved, but once it’s been set up it’s a breeze. I use git hooks to automake the fussy bits.

My lecture notes can also be accessed here, in their natural environment, as reveal.js web presentations, created from the org-mode source by the awesome org-reveal translator.

Some features don’t work perfectly in the current environment. Most notably citations, which I generate using Zotero, will not always look or act the way they should. Also, a whole lot of images are missing, since I steal a lot of my images & don’t have permission to republish them.

This repo is neither complete nor fully organized, but I intend to keep improving it so let me know if you can’t find something.

I hope this is useful to someone!

Website organization

The Website is organized as follows:

• Syllabus
  • Logistics
  • Introduction
  • Objectives
  • Method
  • Tools
  • Course Requirements and Grading
  • Texts
  • Course Outline
• Tools and Tricks
  • Environment Setup
  • Git and Github
  • ??
• Lectures
  • 01 to 12
• Assignments
  • 00 to 06

Deployment

Deployment requires the following steps

• [x] create website folder, exclude from top-level git repo
  • [x] add gh-pages branch to public dir
• create org-mode project with subprojects:
  • export all full pages
  • export all subpages
• commit to master
  • push to origin
  • copy git commit message
    • initiate export
    • cd to website folder
    • this part has now been done in ~dh-website/.git/hooks/post-commit~!
    • commit with a copy of message
    • push to origin
    • generate gh-pages commit message
    • commit to gh-pages
    • push to origin