Welcome to CB-Essay

Let’s all stop writing digital scholarship pieces in Microsoft Word. And let’s start encouraging students writing for digital projects to do the same.

So many times, during the 15 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve given up at the end of a project and allowed this to happen, capitulating to the dominant, bloated, ugly and overwrought writing technology of the time in order to make it easy for faculty or students who are ostensibly producing writing for projects that are meant for the web and meant to improve the digital literacy of those completing them.

I think it’s time we stopped doing that, and in order to make that easier, we made a tool that helps one to truly write with, on, and for the web.

What Is It?

CB-Essay is a Jekyll-based framework that combines long-form essay writing with digital collection features. Built on CollectionBuilder, it enables you to create multimodal scholarly narratives, written in Markdown, that integrate primary sources, archival materials, and multimedia items directly into your texts.

What Makes CB-Essay Different?

Traditional digital publishing tools treat essays and collections as separate entities. CB-Essay unifies them, allowing you to:

  • Write in simple Markdown with specialized features for scholarly work
  • Reference collection items using simple includes
  • Create asides and margin notes that link to primary sources Like this!
  • Build interactive visualizations from your metadata
  • Publish your work for free on GitHub
  • Fashion the readers’ experience through scroll-based interactions and custom typography/fonts Keep scrolling to see the next section magically appear!”

How It Works

CB-Essay operates on a dual-collection model:

  1. Essay Collection - Your narrative content lives in _essay/ as Markdown files
  2. Object Collection - Primary sources and items defined in a CSV metadata file

CB-Essay allows you to write with this collection of sources, allowing you to integrate your references, images, documents, recordings, and videos seamlessly into your writing and into the web. Just follow the plan as in the below image.

Below image credits: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. ‘Group farm plan writing meeting. Weld County, Colorado’ The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/1b0a3fc0-1d42-0139-bac7-0242ac110003

Group working on a farm plan writing project with man pointing at a complex plan written on a large sheet of paper at the front
The tool is no more complicated than following this gentleman's instructions!

Key Features at a Glance

  • Sequential prev/next navigation
  • Flexible essay or monograph themes
  • Built-in footnotes and citations support
  • Margin notes with collection item integration
  • Blockquotes with full attribution
  • Image galleries and mini-maps
  • Integration with timelines and subject clouds
  • You can also build your own features! –> CB-Essay is all yours and totally customizable.

CollectionBuilder Features

  • All CollectionBuilder pages: Browse, Map, Timeline, Subjects
  • Compound objects support
  • Metadata-driven, SEO-enhanced item pages
  • Search and filtering

Who Should Use CB-Essay?

CB-Essay is ideal for anyone who wants to write write with, on, and for the web, including:

  • Digital humanists creating annotated editions or critical apparatus
  • Historians presenting narrative alongside primary sources
  • Educators building interactive course readers
  • Archivists creating context around collections
  • Writers publishing long-form digital scholarship

Bonus: Project Gutenberg Extractor

Want to publish a public domain book? Use our GitHub Action to extract any of 60,000+ books from Project Gutenberg directly into your _essay/ folder - pre-formatted and ready to publish.

Next Steps

Check out some examples sites, then get started. The remaining essays show off CB-Essay in the wild, and then walk you through setting up your first site and understanding the features.

Or jump straight to the documentation for reference guides.

Next »