The Project
The Stanford Humanities Center (SHC) fosters research in the humanities and through its newly launched comprehensive platform, SHC Today, unites the Center's initiatives. SHC Today features curated materials from the Center and Arcade, an extensive collection of engaging publications that span various languages, historical periods, and generations. The website we launched includes a diverse range of blogs and journals that push the boundaries of their genres, along with videos, podcasts, and other resources for scholars, students, and the public. This partnership needed an interactive digital hub to engage audiences with their research in real-time while bringing together three subsites with their own goals, vision, and unique cast of stakeholders.
Kalamuna engaged in a highly collaborative effort to bring their visions together and to life through research-driven discovery. This resulted in an accessible and highly functional website with a holistic brand strategy. As a result, we created a dynamic and engaging new Digital Humanities Hub on the latest version of Drupal to support future initiatives.
The Big Goal
The Stanford Humanities Center had a vision for an interactive platform that would allow a wide range of users (from senior scholars to students to the general public) to participate in ground-breaking humanities research in real-time, creating new opportunities for collaboration at Stanford and beyond. Our greatest goal was to set SHC apart as a leading humanities center and a hub for advanced collaborative humanities research.
Kalamuna has a comprehensive, industry-leading Discovery practice that is user-centered, during which we often uncover opportunities for even greater improvement. As part of our user experience research exploration, we conducted stakeholder interviews and surveys of staff members. The results of our comparative analysis better informed and refined their organizational goals. A comprehensive content audit identified tens of thousands of accessibility issues, much of which was missing alt text, and opportunities to improve usability through better calls to action. For SHC, making humanities research easily accessible is the top priority, and with our redesign process, we were able to provide intuitive website navigation.
We created Drupal subsites, which provide an innovative, context-based solution that allows for a custom look and feel for each brand space. Sharing code and a database allowed us to more easily and economically ensure that content can be searched for and featured across all subsites. Further, users for all three sites can be managed centrally but with different permissions for each subsite. Reusable component architectures are shared across the sites, reinforcing brand coherence and improving the long-term maintainability of the platform, made even more robust on Acquia’s hosting infrastructure. The open source nature of Drupal aligns philosophically with Arcade’s strong support for and participation in the Open Access Movement in publishing.
In order to coalesce SHC and Arcade and support future initiatives, we created unifying, yet distinct, branded subsites on the latest version of Drupal. To provide users a comprehensive view of what was happening at Stanford Humanities Center and showcase the latest in humanities research, we imagined a new third space where visitors could access editorial features, news, projects, and articles from both primary subsites. Thanks to the shared site architecture, the Today Hub easily pulls in and categorizes research publications from SHC and Arcade, as well as events, projects, and news.
Final Thoughts
Together, we set SHC apart as a leading humanities center and as the home for a new hub for advanced collaborative humanities research worldwide. As the team continues their work to publish and share the latest humanities research and information, we continue to actively support the site, develop new features and are in the process of bringing comprehensive design finesse to the platform.
The team is extremely communicative and professional. They have come up with some very creative solutions. The discovery findings have been particularly valuable.
Robert Cable
Communications Manager, Stanford Humanities Center