Medieval Scrolls Astro

• The Medieval Scrolls Digital Archive is a comprehensive resource for research on scrolls in the Middle Ages. The website was originally designed as a supplementary resource for Tom Kelly's HarvardX course Scrolls in the Age of the Book, which provided an introduction to the making and use of scrolls in the European Middle Ages. In its first iteration it was a Wordpress + Angular application. This project is a redesign of the website using Astro, a static site generator.
• The data source for the Astro application is stored in Google Sheets and transformed into JSON (data/scrolls_master_list.json) using OpenSheet in scrape_sheets/scrape_sheet.py. A Github Actions workflow (update_scrolls_data) on a cron job is used to update the JSON file in the repository. enhance_sheets/enhance_sheets.py was used to add additional metadata to the Sheet on a one-time basis.

🚀 Project Structure

Inside of your Astro project, you'll see the following folders and files:

/
├── public/
│   └── favicon.svg
├── src/
│   ├── components/
│   │   └── Card.astro
│   ├── layouts/
│   │   └── Layout.astro
│   └── pages/
│       └── index.astro
└── package.json

Astro looks for .astro or .md files in the src/pages/ directory. Each page is exposed as a route based on its file name.

There's nothing special about src/components/, but that's where we like to put any Astro/React/Vue/Svelte/Preact components.

Any static assets, like images, can be placed in the public/ directory.

🧞 Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project, from a terminal:

Command	Action
npm install	Installs dependencies
npm run dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:4321
npm run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
npm run preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
npm run astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check
npm run astro -- --help	Get help using the Astro CLI

👀 Want to learn more?

Feel free to check our documentation or jump into our Discord server.