•Digital Mappa (DM) is a platform for curating, linking and annotating small scale (< 5,000 items, more depending on local install and memory) digital collections of images and texts. Its premise is simple: with DM you can easily mark specific moments (called “highlights”) on images, texts and their annotations, and then do two things to these highlights: link them to other text or image highlights, and create annotations related to them. Links are bi-directional, and you can attach as many links and annotations to a highlight as you wish. In the project display, you can open or navigate to multiple instances of the same text or image. Once a DM server is set up for projects, no technical expertise is required to begin making sophisticated projects of linked and annotated content. On a DM server, users also create accounts to work individually or collaboratively on one or more projects, and elect to have their private, or publish them for the public to view.
With DM v3.0 (2024), projects can now export sustainable material and data archives of their materials to ensure its content will remain accessible even if the DM platform becomes obsolete or inaccessible.Exporting a project creates two backups: an HTML and JPEG based archive that can be open in any basic web browser, and an SQL archive of the raw database.
Also with DM v3.0, all users can now create customized links for a set of images and/or texts to enable others to be able to automatically open up the same set of materials.
•In DM, text and image highlights are usually colored, but on texts highlights can also be transparent. Rolling over a highlight displays its customizable title, and if links or annotations exist for it, a highlight window containing them. To open a link or annotation in a highlight window, click on the highlight to make the rollover window stay open, then click on the desired link or annotation.
•Importantly, while OEPF showcases many of DM’s features, it is not the only model for how the platform can be structured and used to organize and present digital images and texts. Digital Mappa provides a basic set of features that are also flexible enough to accommodate numerous kinds of image and textual content, and methodological, scholarly and pedagogical approaches.
Learning more about Digital Mappa
•For more information about Digital Mappa, visit digitalmappa.org
•To explore other projects using DM, go to digitalmappa.org/showcase-projects
•To learn more about installing Digital Mappa for your own projects, go to: digitalmappa.org/installinfo
•Or to drink straight from the tech spout, go to the platform's GitHub page