Archive Infrastructure: Sandpoints

1. Introduction¶

This project implements Sandpoints, an open source framework for open and collaborative publishing. It is developed by Marcell Mars since 2019, and built as a theme for the static website builder www⁄Hugo. Both Hugo and Sandpoints are free, open source, and cross platform, and are developed in the programming language Go.

The implementation of Sandpoints in academic research publishing was outlined by van Gerven Oei in the editorial of Dotawo Journal issue 7 (2020):

Starting with the present issue, Dotawo will design and publish its content via the www⁄Sandpoints platform. Dotawo contributions are formatted in www⁄Markdown syntax, thus moving away from proprietary software such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. For collaboration and version-control we employ www⁄Git rather than Google Drive or Dropbox. The online issue is created via www⁄Gitea and www⁄Hugo, which take the Markdown files from the Git repository and generate a static website from them. The result is a compact and fast website, which moreover can also be used offline. Also the typography of Dotawo is now based on open fonts. The journal is typeset in www⁄Gentium, which is released under an www⁄SIL Open Font License. The PDF output is generated by www⁄PagedJS […]. In short, all of the software used in the creation of Dotawo is now open source. Although this process demands a certain amount of flexibility of the editors, it also shows that transitioning an open access journal to open infrastructure is not only possible but also feasible.¹

2. Key features of Sandpoints¶

• Sandpoints is a module/theme for www⁄Hugo.
• Hugo is a static website builder.
  • Static websites serve a client a fixed HTML page according to a CSS and/or JavaScript files. Static websites require no dynamic processing or customizations to be performed by a server.
  • Thus, static websites are lightweight, robust, fast, and given that they are simple HTML, they are resilient to technological updates.
  • Static websites are also portable, meaning they can be stored, copied, and also compiled and run on a USB stick.
• Content in Hugo and Sandpoints is managed with Markdown files.
  • Markdown is an open specification for plain-text human readable files.
  • Markdown files can be opened and edited by any text editor.
  • Since they are plain-text, they are extremely lightweight (this file is 6KB).
  • They can easily serve distributed collaboration through version control (i.e. www⁄Git).
• Sandpoints add functionalities to Hugo projects pertaining to open and collaborative publishing.
  • It features a particular ontology that follows a §⁄triadic hierarchy.
  • It features extended hypertext functionalities that allow for non-linear content traversal, such as browsing entries by type, keywords, or §⁄backlinks.
  • All the content is open and listed at the ⁄sitemap (see also §⁄sitemap).
  • It allows for entries or groups of entries to be exported into interactive and printable PDFs (not implemented in this project, since article content is archived in PDF files in the library, not in article entries).
  • It offers integration with a project-specific portable ⁄library. See also article⁄Archive Library.

3. Ontology¶

Sandpoints supports a triadic hierarchy. This follows that content is organized, or parented according to a tree structure with a depth of three (entities). This project follows the scheme archive>issue>article, as in:²

Archive
└── Issue
    └── Article
-Editor 
-Contributor
-Print

This ontology follows that:

• an archive item serves as a parent,
• which can have multiple issues, and
• each issue can have multiple articles.

Furthermore:

• each issue is associated with editors, and
• each article is associated with contributors.

Lastly, print items are used to enable printing of any of the above elements (e.g. article, issue, or the whole archive ).

4. Content organization¶

Content in Sandpoints is formatted in Markdown files, which are organized in subdirectories within the directory /root/content/. Each subdirectory inside content/ is named after and corresponds to a specific content type.

This project features the following content types (and subdirectories):

• archive (the parent object)
• issue (child)
• article (grandchild)
• editor
• contributor
• print

5. Sitemap¶

Sandpoints projects feature a ⁄sitemap, that lists all published content (all content that is not marked as draft). The sitemap is at the root URL of any given project.

6. Backlinks¶

The concept of backlinks was described in early speculations that informed hypertext (i.e. by Vannevar Bush and later Ted Nelson), but were not implemented the WWW. According to these ideas, hyperlinks are bi-directional, which follows that a hyperlink is visible both in the document that features a link and also at the target document where the link is pointing to. The latter is a backlink. By this scheme, any document knows which other documents point to it. The same concept is used by search engine algorithms, such as ‘page rank’ by Google, that function by creating an index of how many webpages link to a specific target website – or how many backlinks a given webpage has.

Sandpoints allows backlinks for selected items.³ Here these are article, contributor, and editor.

![this is a link to an article](article:target-article)

This will create a link to the target-article but it will also create a backlink – a mention of this link inside the target-article.

A link from this article to some other one, at the latter article will generate a backlink that would appear at the top right of the page (mentioned in this-article).

Backlinks (as well as external and internal hyperlinks) are catalogued at ⁄urls.

7. Notes¶

• For an extended description of Sandpoints see www⁄Sandpoints Portfolio (sandpoints.org), which includes descriptions of its implementation in different projects, and related bibliography.
• www⁄Sandoints (Gitea project repository).
• See also Graziano, Valeria, Marcell Mars, and Medak Tomislav. ‘Learning from \Syllabus’. In State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art, edited by Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrrett, and Inte Gloerich. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, 2019. www⁄http://www.statemachines.eu/books/state-machines-reflections-and-actions-at-the-edge-of-digital-citizenship-finance-and-art/.