This is a repository for the data structure and website code of the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) project at Northeastern University.

Check out the project wiki for further information about the project, how it's built, and how to contribute.

This project is a prototype intended to gather stakeholder feedback on the utility and usability of our interface for exploring Cherokee texts. We are building out this web interface to drive our decisions on data structures that may outlast the current website. This prototype is likely to change quickly in significant ways, especially as we pursue technical integration with Digital Scholarship Group infrastructure.

Feel free to submit an issue if you have feedback, suggestions, questions, or problems!

The back-end is implemented in Rust and the front-end is written in TypeScript. Each layer of the architecture is split into its own directory, starting with the back-end.

• types/ defines all the types that our data adheres to in the database, GraphQL, and front-end.
• migration/ pulls data from several Google Drive spreadsheets, conforms it to consistent types, then writes it all to a database.
• graphql/ exposes a public GraphQL endpoint (deployed on AWS Lambda) that allows one to query DAILP data from the database. Play with the data here.
• website/ renders a static site using our GraphQL endpoint at build time and at runtime (to handle user queries).

Read more on the wiki.

We use the Nix package manager for managing dependencies, development environments, and predictable infrastructure. Before contributing, ask a maintainer for a .env file which will hold secrets required to run the code. This file must never be committed on Git.

To get started with a development environment, you only need to install Nix by following these instructions. After that, the nix command will be available in a terminal. We use an unstable feature of nix called "flakes," so you also need to enable this feature.

Then, you can start a shell which has all the tools needed to work on this project:

$ nix develop

Once you are in the development shell, you can manage the back-end with Cargo and the front-end with Yarn. For example, this command runs all back-end unit tests:

$ cargo test

Inside the nix develop shell, the following commands launch various pieces of our infrastructure locally.

$ dev-database
$ dev-graphql
$ dev-website

If you run each of these commands in a separate shell, then you'll have a fully operational local test environment. If it's your first time running the project locally, your database is probably empty. With dev-database running, run the dev-migrate-schema and dev-migrate-data commands to structure your database and populate it with data from the DAILP spreadsheets.

nix caches build results to make future builds quicker. However, this can take up a lot of disk space if you're making lots of code changes. To clean up the nix cache, simply run:

$ nix-collect-garbage