How to document a summer academy
Choosing the right technical workflow for your hybrid publication
Content creation
Before planning on how to gather the documentation we had to ask ourselves: what is to be documented?
There are three different moment where content can be created and has to be documented:
Before the summer academy
Although the academy wasn’t started yet, there was already a lot of content that was generated by the organising staff. They did research, choose a subject, plan schedules and dates, get the word out by printed and online media and process motivations of applicants. It can be good to already document this process. By documenting the organisation flow you can create a base or structure for the upcoming summer school program and it is useful for sharing information about the future academy with applicants.
During the summer academy
During the summer academy different formats of content were provided to the students. Analyse and estimate this before your academy starts. This way you can start looking for a suitable platform where everything can be documented. It wil save you a lot of time after the summer school is finished. Organising this summer academy was our first time and we had to learn the hard way. It took us quiet some time to set up a good platform after the summer academy was over.
For collaborative note taking we experimented with Pirate Pad and Ether Pad. Both are online text editors where different users can take and edit notes in the same document. We really liked these editors.
Pictures were taken both by the organisation as participants. After the academy we had to email every participant several times to ask them to send their pictures. Using a platform that can be used during the academy can make it easier to upload the photo’s or other content at once.
After the summer academy
After the academy is finished, you can ask participants and teachers to write a review. This can be helpful feedback if you want to organise an other one the year after.
Choosing the right back-end to collect the documentation
To compile all the content we wanted to bundle co-writing, co-editing and content management all on the same platform. We looked for a back-end where we could do some real time documenting on, that was easy accessible, had a good way of ordering information, had a short learning curve for participants and supported several kinds of mediafiles. The lectures, workshops, screenings, excursions, party and exhibition provided a big variety of media such as videos, sound files, notes, images, and code as well as objects and long texts that wouldn’t be suitable for only an online publication.
We chose to use WikiMedia, which supports the several file formats and is easy editable by different users. It’s easy understandable structure and user guide is beneficial for changing collaborations and teams. This academy we didn’t have the opportunity to test WikiMedia as a back-end and content collector for students to upload their content as a WikiMedia page because we still had to built it. We used it after the academy to gather the information collected by writing emails and uploading code and pictures to a dropbox repository. During this filling of our WikiMedia back-end we encountered several hierarchy and workflow problems.
Categorisation of the content
We wanted to sort the documentation to be able to publish a well structured and logic documentation. We sorted the content by categorising the WikiMedia pages. Andre Castro recommended us to use a categorisation system sorted by state, media and topic.
Because not all media such as videos, sound files and links aren’t suitable for print publication we added a media category so we could divide articles in a suitable print version and not suitable print version.
It is important to consider that making a structure can inherit the danger of guiding the contributed content too much. Leave space for adding things that weren’t thought of before.
H&D Wiki categories structure:
State
- EditMe
- WriteMe
- Published
- Ready to be published
Media
- Web
Topic / Tags
- eg Arduino
- eg HTML 2 Print
Co-editing
After receiving the contributions, the organisation and participants must then select the most viable and implementable ones. The challenge of the selection process is that most submissions are not always useful, have an other hierarchy or are difficult to implement in the publication. Organisations have to deal with the submitted ideas in a very subtle way as throughout the process they don’t want to reject submissions and risk of alienating them which may eventually lead to disengagement. It’s advised to give the participants a short introduction in how to collect and document the content. This way the organisers can prevent an extensive editing process afterwards.
Wikimedia let’s users adjust articles and write comments on the changes that were made in an article. Participants have the possibility to go back in time and compare older versions of the same article. This way content will not get lost after over-editing an article.
Making the documentation public: publishing
After building and filling our back-end documentation platform we had to translate the content to a website and print publication format. For print we looked into two options: creating a publication from the website and creating a publication directly from the WikiMedia page. The process will be discussed here.
Currently used set-up
Hackers & Designers documentation platform.
| Back-End | WikiMedia Page |
| Front-End | Website of Hackers & Designers |
| Print publication | Generated from the wiki |
Workflow
organisation > preparation > communication > collaborative note taking and input assembly > editing > publication > printing > distribution
Translation Wiki to website
| Pandoc | translates wiki-markup to the HTML markup language |
| Python Scripts | Initiates several actions |
| Lay-out website | CSS |
Translation Wiki to print
| Pandoc | translates wiki markup to LaTeX mark-up |
| Python Scripts | Initiates several actions |
| LaTeX | Lay-outing of content from WikiMedia page and generating PDF |
Publishing web
The Hackers & Designers website is published always in real-time. Meaning every time the website is loaded or pages are requested the web browser queries the MediaWiki back-end using the MediaWiki provided API, along with installed wiki semantic extensions and their APIs, through a Javascript client-side web application (AngularJS).
Example API Requests
Request a page:
curl 'http://wiki.hackersanddesigners.nl/mediawiki/api.php?action=parse&page=How_to_document_a_summer_academy&format=json&disableeditsection=true&prop=wikitext%7Cimages%7Clinks'
Request an image:
curl 'http://wiki.hackersanddesigners.nl/mediawiki/api.php?action=query&titles=File:Chicken-and-Potato-Soup.png&prop=imageinfo&&iiprop=url&format=json'
Code is available on Github.
Publishing print
1a. Web to print: HTML to Print with CSS and print preview
One way to publish a print publication from an online environment is printing a webpage by using CSS. A user can just click ‘Print Page’, a pop-up print preview will appear and the custom CSS will translate the webpage and media to a printable, in pages divided print publication. The design is also made with code/text, which means that you can use text editors such as Etherpad to collaborate on content with several people at the same time. The negative side on using this set-up is that you if you decide to not use a single page website you’ll have to print each article separate and later bind it into a book. This way no table of contents will be created or there will be no option to apply different lay outing for indexes, special chapters, or glossaries.
Differences Between CSS For The Web And CSS For Print
You also have to consider the differences between a webpage and a printed publication. What will happen with image galleries, sliders, menu’s and the like? If your webpage has a slideshow with ten images at the top, that’s not going to translate well to paper. The most basic level of interaction on the web is a link. This too becomes problematic. On your computer, you can simply click a link to see where it goes, on paper this functionality is lost so you need a good way to take all those inline links and show the reader where they lead.
The biggest difference, and conceptual shift, is that printed documents refer to a page model that is of a fixed size. Whereas on the web we are constantly reminded that we have no idea of the size of the viewport, in print the fixed size of each page has a bearing on everything that we do. Due to this fixed page size, we have to consider our document as a collection of pages, paged media, rather than the continuous media that is a web page. Paged media introduces concepts that make no sense on the web. For example, you need to be able to generate page numbers, put chapter titles in margins, break content appropriately in order that figures don’t become disassociated from their captions. You might need to create cross-references and footnotes, indexes and tables of content from your document. You could import the document into a desktop publishing package and create all of this by hand, however, the work would