About this Documentation

Wax is a minimal computing project for producing digital exhibitions focused on longevity, low costs, and flexibility created by Minicomp. [The] underlying technology is made to learn and to teach, and can produce beautifully rendered, high-quality image collections and scholarly exhibits. It’s comprised of: a few Ruby gems for processing image data and associated metadata (wax_tasks, wax_iiif) and a Jekyll theme (wax_theme).

Wax is, in my opinion, one of the best minimal platforms for creating truly beautiful, robust, and functional exhibits on the Web. However, many digital humanists (especially those with no technical background) find it difficult to get started with the platform. The Wax documentation is currently a work in progress, but is not nearly comprehensive enough for users to navigate without significant background knowledge in Jekyll, web-building, and other technical know-how.

Since Wax was “created for individuals and groups who either don’t have or don’t want to use a lot of resources to create their scholarly exhibitions… [and] best suited for folks who are willing to take on some technical responsibility in exchange for a lot of flexibility”¹, this extended documentation is intended to provide more detailed documentation for how to set up and use Wax. The hope is that with clearer documentation, more people will want to use and be able to use this absolutely amazing tool to create public-facing scholarly exhibits on their own.

This documentation is continually updated by Kiran Mohammadi-Williams, a librarian on the East Coast. If you see an issue, need help, or want to contribute, feel free to fork this repository and make edits or message me.

1. “Who is Wax For”, https://minicomp.github.io/wiki/wax/ ↩