About CB-Essay

CB-Essay combines long-form essay writing with digital collection features, enabling you to create multimodal scholarly narratives that seamlessly integrate primary sources, archival materials, and multimedia items directly into your writing.

Built on CollectionBuilder, CB-Essay extends the CollectionBuilder-CSV framework to support essay and monograph publishing alongside traditional digital collection capabilities.

What Makes CB-Essay Different?

Traditional digital publishing tools treat essays and collections as separate entities. CB-Essay unifies them, allowing you to:

• Write in simple Markdown with specialized features for scholarly work
• Reference collection items using simple includes
• Create asides and margin notes that link to primary sources
• Build interactive timelines, maps, and visualizations from your metadata
• Publish beautiful, accessible sites with zero JavaScript complexity

Perfect For

• Digital humanities projects and digital editions
• Annotated texts with primary source integration
• Scholarly essays that incorporate archival materials
• Multimodal monographs combining narrative and collection items
• Publishing public domain texts with scholarly apparatus

Key Features

Essay Writing:

• Sequential essay navigation with prev/next buttons
• Flexible themes: traditional essay or book-style monograph
• Support for long-form scholarship with chapter-like organization

CollectionBuilder Integration:

• All standard CB-CSV features: Browse, Map, Timeline, Subjects, Data downloads
• Seamless integration of collection items within essays
• Dual-collection workflow: essays + metadata-driven object pages

Essay-Specific Includes:

• Blockquotes - Styled quotations with attribution
• Asides - Margin notes with optional collection items
• Image galleries - Inline image displays
• Maps - Embedded mini-maps with custom coordinates
• Section transitions - Scrollama-powered visual breaks

Bonus Feature: Project Gutenberg Extractor

Extract 60,000+ public domain books from Project Gutenberg as ready-to-publish essays using our GitHub Action workflow. The script automatically downloads, cleans, and formats books into chapter files - perfect for creating annotated editions or scholarly apparatus.

Learn By Example

This demo site is self-documenting. Each essay teaches you how to use CB-Essay while demonstrating the features:

1. Welcome to CB-Essay - Overview and introduction
2. Getting Started - Your first essay walkthrough
3. Essay Features - All includes with copy-paste examples
4. Collection Integration - Blending essays with collection items

Copy and replace: Every feature you see can be copied directly into your own essays. Just replace the demo content with yours.

Example Projects

• Tender Spaces - Heavily customized multimodal essay exploring queer intimacy in Idaho
• Frankenstein (coming soon) - Demonstrates monograph theme with chapter navigation
• Wreck of the Deutschland (coming soon) - Essay theme featuring poetry with visual transitions

Get Started

Ready to create your essay?

1. Use this template
2. Check out the Getting Started Guide
3. Explore the documentation

Questions? See our documentation or open an issue.

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Credits & License

CB-Essay is developed by the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) at the University of Idaho Library.

Built on CollectionBuilder-CSV.

• Code: MIT License
• Documentation: CC-BY
• Demo content includes items from CDIL collections and essays in the public domain

CollectionBuilder

CollectionBuilder is an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology. Learn more at collectionbuilder.github.io.