How do DH institutions use GitHub? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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How do DH institutions use GitHub?

(5 posts) (4 voices)

Asked 5 years ago by Ben Brumfield
Latest answer from jamesc

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Ben Brumfield
Member
I'm working with a tech-savvy cultural institution to customize and deploy an open-source application currently hosted on GitHub. I'd like to use GitHub's reputedly-amazing branching powers to manage their customizations while still picking up upstream bug fixes and enhancements. However, the institution is only familiar with SVN for version control, so I want to educate myself a bit to make sure I'm setting them on a sustainable path:

What are the best GitHub practices for institutions with multiple contributors? I see that both ScholarsLab and CHNM have accounts under those names but also know that a number of people doing development in each organization have personal accounts. Do the organizations have organization accounts with the personal accounts set up underneath them?

How much does an institution generally pay to host 5-20 public/OSS repositories?

How common is repository forking in the use case I've described? In this scenario, the institution-specific work would be configuration files, stylesheets, and possibly some layout editing to bring the app's look-and-feel in line with other web properties. Is there a better--or inferior but common-enough to address--way to handle this kind of customization of an upstream application?

I'm also interested in any examples of large-to-medium-sized cultural institutions or DH organizations who have embraced GitHub.
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Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Jeremy Boggs
Admin

Hi Ben,

I set up the GitHub account for CHNM. When I first created it, GitHub didn't have the 'organizations' feature, but I recently switched that account to be an organization. Then I set myself and a few other folks at CHNM as administrators of that account. It was pretty straightforward, and much easier to start project under the CHNM account and contribute to them with my own user.

So far we've only used it for modest projects—some themes and plugins. Anthologize is probably the most active, and probably the most forked among individual developers on the project. We've talked about moving the Omeka project to GitHub instead of our own SVN repository, but there's no formal plan to do that yet. We don't have a paying account, since all our repos are public

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
jamesc
Member

Hiya,

In addition to various SVN repositories we use github as well at https://github.com/oucs in the Oxford Univesity Computing Services, but so far only have a couple projects there.

In our case we have personal accounts and projects but also have ones which belong more to the institution ... it is entirely up to the users how they view the project.

Not very helpful I know,
-james

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Wayne Graham
Member

I think one of the problems we run in to with digital humanities projects is that we read the final reports, the blog posts, and other medium, but we rarely read each others code. Most of our code (and we have a lot) is hidden behind a password-protected svn repo, which I think is a huge problem (not to mention IP issues surrounding the release of software). For me, I was attempting to at least have a few projects where someone could at least see the engine powering whatever content was being supplied.

We've started working with faculty members to start projects on these more open venues (see http://code.google.com/p/faulkneratvirginia/ for example). As a thought experiment, Joe Gilbert and I reimplemented that particular site (written in Cocoon) as a Rails app (https://github.com/scholarslab/Faulkner-Audio-Collection). What I loved about this is that interested individuals could actually see some of the thought process that goes in to different approaches to the implementing a similar project.

There are some IP issues that hang around this; the agreement for Google code makes some people nervous (they reserve the right to pull a repo down at any time for any reason). Github has been great, though there's a bit more of a learning curve. Plus, with the 'private' accounts, you can choose what is public. I've heard good things about BitBucket (thought I've not used them), and one site I've started to dig is ProjectKenai as it gives you a few options for how, and what you want to host (plus it comes with Jira).

I will say that we deploy directly out of github, and google code on to production servers (with capistrano). It takes a little thought in how you set things up (you don't want your mysql passwords anywhere in there), but is relatively straight forward after you do it once or twice.

When it comes down to it, I'm not religious on any type of scm; I like git because the merges are a little less of a pain. However, our projects usually have a very small team of developers, and generally we're working on different parts of a projects so that's really not a huge issue. I'd love to see more forking (or at least reading of the source code) for projects, and I think GitHub provides the best implementation of that aspect of any of the hosting sites out there (plus they have svn access).

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
jamesc
Member

Certainly no disagreement with that. We tend to also use Sourceforge or Google Code but that is mostly historical, before github was so popular, we'd probably use that now. However, I do tend to think of them as different in motivation: A lot of the things I'd put on SF/GC tend to be stuff that is only minimally changed. The TEI repository is of course an exception to that, it is frequently updated and has 6-monthly releases. Doing the majority of your work 'in the light' in front of everyone has many beneficial side-effects.

-james

Posted 5 years ago Permalink

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