Relocating Complexity: The Programming Historian and Multilingual Static Site Generation

In this case study, we show how the challenges of maintaining a sustainable static-site architecture for the Programming Historian are deeply intertwined with the logistical challenges of expanding the original project into a multilingual set of publications. In our desire to democratize access to knowledge, we constantly encounter situations where easing the complexity of one workflow requires increasing the complexity of another, in turn relocating Like any technologists, practitioners embracing minimal computing principles must grapple with the changing purposes, audiences, scales, and functionalities of the project they are supporting. In this case study, we explore the challenges of maintaining a sustainable static-site architecture during the multilingual expansion of The Programming Historian (PH), an open-access publication of peer-reviewed tutorials on digital tools and workflows geared at humanities teachers and researchers. By elucidating the deep intertwining of the technical, logistical, and social challenges of moving from a monolingual to a multilingual publication, we hope to provide other digital project teams with a valuable perspective on the tradeoffs of static sites when the projects they support are rapidly growing in size and complexity. At the time, with only one team of editors managing a single publication workflow, this minimalistic approach seemed an excellent solution for both technical flexibility as well as sustainability. complexity (and the labor it entails) between different members of our project team.