Portic storymaps 2021 : "Commerce multi-échelles autour du port de La Rochelle au XVIIIe siècle"

This repository hosts the source code of PORTIC research program's first case study (see PORTIC homepage for more information). Built by an interdisciplinary team of historians, engineers and designers, it proposes a detailed study of the economic history of the region of La Rochelle (France) circa 1789.

Through a series of three "storymaps" combining text and visualization, this publication tells the story of the decline of La Rochelle region's ports after France's loss of Canada during the seven years war, and the consequences of this event on the region's trade structure at the dawn of french revolution. It also features an atlas allowing to browse and share individually all the visualizations crafted during this research.

This project rests on the shoulders of two existing digital history projects : Toflit18 and navigo.

Installation

Prerequisites:

• install Node.js
• install python
• install yarn
• install git

Then in a shell terminal, copy the following commands and hit enter:

git clone https://github.com/medialab/portic-storymaps-2021
cd portic-storymaps-2021
yarn install
pip install -r requirements.txt
yarn data:update

Development

yarn start

Useful scripts

The project is provided with diverse scripts aiming at updating data and contents.

Data-related scripts

yarn data:load # fetches data from toflit18 and navigo sources and stores them in the `data` folder (ignored from this git repo)
yarn data:build # builds derivated datasets from complete data given by data:load script. It stores them in public/data
yarn data:update # orchestrates data fetching, building, then deleting of the temp `data` folder containing complete datasets

Updating the thumbnails

Thumbnails making for the atlas view is automated. To update thumbnails, in two different terminal tabs, run :

yarn start

Then run:

yarn run thumbnails:make

Warning: thumbnails building can be capricious on some machines. Backup existing screenshots from public/thumbnails before re-running this script.

Contributing

The project is open to contribution through pull requests.

Suggested guidelines for commiting to the repository

• the main branch is the principal branch for the website version under development. Suggested workflow for contributing to the code is : for project members, to develop new features in a separated branch, then to merge it in main branch when it is ready ; for external person, to clone it then to submit a pull request with your modifications.

• it is suggested to use imperative tense verbs and explicit features/bugs mentions in commit messages (see this guide for optimal commit messages)

• it is suggested to reference related issue in commit messages (example of commit message : improve radar viz #8) in order to keep track of commits related to an issue in particular.

Technical architecture of this repo in relation to data sources

Detailed presentation of the organization of the repository

- .github # contains automated deployment workflow
- datascripts # contains python scripts that fetch and build web-oriented datasets and contents, putting them in public/data and src/contents folder
- public # contains website's html, icons, datasets and other static assets
- src # the source code of the website
  - components # reusable components
  - contents # mdx files for website's content in 2 languages
  - helpers # various functions and utils
  - pages # page containers used directly for routes rendering
  - visualizations # components directly used in website's pages and atlas
  - App.js # entrypoint of the react application
  - App.scss # entrypoint of the scss code
  - colorPalettes.js # color palettes to be used accross visulizations
  - ...
  - summary.js # summary of routes and their titles in french and english
  - visualizationsList.json # dynamically generated list of visualizations to be used in atlas and pages to retrieve titles, captions, & co.

Guidelines concerning code development and modification

• reusable components should go into src/components folder. Each component should have its own folder with an index.js file, plus as many files as you want (js subcomponent files, scss files, component-specific assets, ...)

• components aimed at being directly used for specific visualizations should go in the src/visualizations folder. They should use reusable components from src/components as much as possible.

• style is managed through scss files. It is suggested to use existing variables in src/variables.scss as much as possible, and to add a .scss file specific to each new component with its non-reusable styling rules (if any).

Deployment

Deployment used to be automated to happen every day and each time a commit is pushed to the prod branch. The published website was then pushed on the gh-pages branch, which serves the site at https://medialab.github.io/portic-storymaps-2021/. It is now only updated when pushing on the prod branch.

Therefore :

• Contents and data are updated every day
• To deploy a new version of the website code, it has to be pushed to the prod branch.

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.