CB-Essay in the Wild

Digital Humanites Projects

CB-Essay powers a variety of digital humanities projects:

Fire Lines: The First CB-Essay Project

The first CB-Essay, this essay uses archival items from the University of Idaho’s Special Collections and Archives to interrogate the massive wildfire that occurred in 1910, known as the Big Burn.

View: cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/fire-lines

Tender Spaces: Multimodal, Multilingual 5-Part Essay

This extensively customized multimodal and multilinqual essay explores artist Gaëtane Buttigieg’s life, art, and forced institutionalization in the 1970s through personal narratives and video interviews. This project demonstrates CB-Essay’s flexibility for highly designed, custom presentations.

View: cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/tender-spaces

Sedimentation: An Archive of Glen Canyon

Archival photograph from Glen Canyon, from the Sedimentation project

A multimedia exploration of Glen Canyon’s entangled human and natural histories, traced through the sedimentary archive. Created by Hannah Green as her English M.A. thesis at the University of Idaho, Sedimentation interweaves five thematic essay “tributaries” — Atmosphere, Water, Biota, Humans, and Land — with archival photographs of the canyon before it was drowned beneath Lake Powell in 1963. The project also features Eddies, a choose-your-own-adventure mode that lets readers navigate through interlinked story fragments in any order, building their own nonlinear path through the canyon’s histories.

View: cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/sedimentation

Demonstration Sites

We set these sites up as demonstrations of the various themes and effects of the platform.

Frankenstein: Extracted Book from Project Gutenberg

A still from the film Frankenstein (1910), showing Charles Stanton Ogle as the monster.

A digital edition of Mary Shelley’s classic novel demonstrating the monograph theme. Features chapter-by-chapter navigation, integrated scholarly apparatus, and historical context from Project Gutenberg.

You can watch me build the Frankenstein site in the video below! (Make sure to turn on GitHub Pages first before you do this!)

I go through a few simple steps to build out this site, after having made a copy of the repository

View: dcnb.github.io/frankenstein

The Wreck of the Deutschland: Single-page, sectioned poem with scroll interactions

Wreck of the Deutschland poem edition preview

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem presented in the essay theme with scrolling transitions and visual breaks. Shows how CB-Essay handles poetry and single-page essays with dramatic effect.

View: dcnb.github.io/wreck-of-the-deutschland

Next Steps

Ready to get started? The remaining essays walk you through everything:

Get Started - Set up your first essay in 10 minutes
Essay Features - Learn and copy all available features
Collection Integration - Blend essays with collection items

Or jump straight to the documentation for reference guides.