CB-Essay

CB-Essay is a framework for writing and publishing multimodal essays using CollectionBuilder. Write in Markdown, keep your collection items in a CSV, and weave them together — embedding images, documents, audio, and video directly into your narrative.

Best for:

• Multimodal essays and monographs
• Writing with integrated collection items
• Sequential section and chapter navigation
• Print-ready PDF output via Paged.js

Origin

CB-Essay grew out of work with graduate students at the University of Idaho Library’s Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) who were building multimodal essays for their theses. The students needed a way to combine long-form writing with collection items on the web. The existing tools weren’t cutting it, so we built CB-Essay.

Example Projects

• CB-Essay Demo — self-documenting demo that teaches you the features as you read
• Tender Spaces — multimodal essay on Gaëtane Buttigieg (Alicia Gladman)
• Sedimentation — an archive of Glen Canyon (Hannah Green)
• Fire Lines — an archive-driven exploration of the Legacy of 1910’s Great Fire in the Northwest (Isabel Marlens)