Portic storymaps 2022 : "Commerce, contrebande et ports francs : le cas de Dunkerque au XVIIIe siècle"

This repository hosts the source code of PORTIC research program's second 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 free port of Dunkerque circa 1789.

Through a series of three "storymaps" combining text and visualization, this publication tells the story of the Dunkerque port trade 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 Pypi
• install Yarn
• install Git

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

yarn
sh install.sh
yarn run thumbnails

Development

Use following command.

yarn dev

Maintenance

In order to collect freshest contents and data source, update the data with the following command :

sh retrieve_data.sh

You can update the thumbnails with the following command :

yarn thumbnails

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 in order to keep track of commits related to an issue in particular.

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).

How to translate the app

How to translate the app

How to update the data

How to update the data

App architecture

Front-end : webpack & react architecture

The application is bundled with Webpack. The root file is /index.js. It is in this file that must be imported all the JavaScript scripts that compose the application.

The React library (v.17+) is configured in the project, as well as other bundling tools. You can integrate React scripts, .scss styles, .yml files from the root /index.js file.

The React router (v6+) development tool allows you to redirect the user to activate certain display scripts based on the page address and the parameters entered. The page address is used as a source of truth, for the active language and the texts, visualizations to be displayed.

Data retrieval and computation

The data is downloaded and processed with Python and NodeJs scripts in the /datascript/ directory.

The shell script /retrieve_data.sh does three things. First it will download the data files from the two databases Toflit18 and Navigo. Then it will activate the script /datascript/_fetch_content.py which allows to find texts and data stored on the Google Drive of SciencesPo, on the Zotero library. Finally, it activates a series of Python and NodeJS scripts to process all the downloaded data.

This data allows to generate the text content of the application, as well as the visualizations. It is useful for both the development and the production of the application.

data type	source	target	integration on app	downloading
navigo database	data.portic.fr/api/	/data/*.csv		/retrieve_data.sh
toflit database	GitHub	/data/*.csv		/retrieve_data.sh
spreadsheets	Google Drive (GSheet)	/public/data/**/*.csv	HTTP GET	/datascript/_fetch_content.py
index of visualisations	Google Drive	/src/data/viz.json	ES6 import	/datascript/_fetch_content.py
bibliography	Zotero	/src/data/bib.json		/datascript/_fetch_content.py
texts	Google Drive (GDoc)	/src/content/**/*.mdx	/src/summary.js	/datascript/_fetch_content.py

Data local storage and visualizations management

The visualizations index /src/data/viz.json contains the names of the .csv data files which are loaded in the front-end for each visualization.

The /src/visualizations/index.js file is the entrypoint for all the visualizations code and components. It also automatically passes each visualization component the data it needs as prescribed in /src/data/viz.json. For this, the columns 'id' and 'n_chapter' must match the caller id of the visualization. Here is an example of how a call to the "history-dunkerque" in chapter 1 looks like:

Part 1
---

Lorem ipsum dolor est.

<Caller id=”histoire-dunkerque” />

Deployment

Deployment is automated to happen every day and each time a commit is pushed to the prod branch. The published website is then pushed on the gh-pages branch, which serves the site at https://medialab.github.io/portic-storymaps-2022/.