Digital Systems: Trans/Scribes

Overview

Using exhibit.so, I have created a digital display of Trans/Scribes, a collection of writings by and for transgender and intersex people published in 2000 by the Fireweed Collective, a Canadian feminist organization. Here is a link to the exhibit. You can also find the full publication here as part of the LGBTQIA+ Periodical and Ephemera Collection at Princeton University. Please note that the volume contains dated and/or derogatory terms for transgender and intersex individuals; in my exhibit, these only appear on the cover, but they are found throughout many of the stories inside.

Using IIIF and exhibit.so

Though I likely would have chosen to anyway, I felt compelled to use exhibit.so because Quire, the primary alternative, would have asked me run commands using Windows PowerShell, something I’ve never done before. (It’s definitely something I’d like to learn in the future, even if not for Quire, but I digress.) While exhibit.so was as easy to use as I had expected it to be, implementing a resource using the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) proved to be more challenging. I found this list of collections that each had instructions for finding IIIF manifests and initially chose Wikipedia because a) I was familiar with the website and b) it provided the broadest selection of content. Once I had settled on a subject, however, I realized that URL provided by the IIIF always returned a 404 error. I tried different images, subjects, and browsers, but nothing changed. (Recent changes in Wikimedia’s protocol might have broken their compatibility with IIIF, but I can’t say for sure.) Other collections, such as the British Library, refused to load from the IIIF-provided hyperlinks. Thankfully, once I had found a usable resource,adding the IIIF manifest was as simple as clicking a button and copy-pasting.

I appreciated how streamlined the creation process was with exhibit.so; selecting different pages and zoom points to correspond with each paragraph was intuitive, and once I figured out what I wanted to say everything else was a breeze. The ability to preview my work at any time was quite helpful, as I was worried (and, frankly, still am) that I had too many words on each slide. Not needing to log in to use the software was also welcome. I had only two complaints. First, I wanted to change the color of the text background, but choosing colors only seemed possible by dragging my mouse around the provided palette. I would have liked an option to input hex codes so that I could keep a consistent color across each slide. Second, I was confused on how to save my work should I need to put it down and come back later. The only way to do that is to copy the URL, either from the address bar or the Share button at the bottom the page–both of these felt awkward to me.

Applying exhibit.so

By far the biggest strength of exhibit.so is that it is a straightforward tool for both the creation and viewing of digital displays. All of the heavy lifting is done by the IIIF–curators need only add the manifest for anything they wish to showcase. Such a low barrier to entry makes this tool especially useful for smaller institutions, who may not have the expertise or time necessary to construct more elaborate solutions. For patrons, the exhibit.so displays are clean and easy to read, and from my perspective there didn’t seem to be excessive loading times for the images either. I should note that overall I didn’t experience any of the issues many of my classmates seemed to have with the software–slow load times, crashes, etc. On the other hand, I didn’t attempt anything too complex.

I do think that the simplicity of exhibit.so can also limit its effectiveness. A thought I kept coming back to was whether the software would support screen readers and other accessibility features; there certainly wasn’t any way to add audio transcriptions on my end. (Other materials, such as music scores, might also benefit from the addition of sound.) I was also frustrated by the lack of interactivity on the user’s side. My subject was fully digitized, all 100 pages included in the IIIF manifest in very high resolution. I would have loved to have an option at the end of the exhibit to let users flip through the volume like I did on the Princeton website. Even if only limited to the pages I had selected, users could still be allowed to zoom independently of the limits I had imposed. On my (horizontal) computer screen, the (vertical) object isn’t all that big, and the amount of empty space is frustrating. The benefits of using a standardized display like exhibit.so shouldn’t have to come at the cost of depth.

On the topic of standardization, exhibit.so is also dependent on widespread adoption of IIIF. I suppose that’s obvious–the former was created as a way to display media through the latter. But it’s a little disappointing that a tool that (to me) seems to have a lot of upside is essentially useless for any institution whose materials don’t conform to IIIF standards, many of which I would imagine are the smaller ones that would most appreciate the ease of use that exhibit.so provides. While the IIIF website touts their integration with plenty of large cultural institutions, the number of broken or otherwise unhelpful links didn’t always support their claims.