Quire / Alcohol’s Empire

Project: Alcohol’s Empire, an interactive, multimedia publication using Quire, a new digital publishing tool developed by Getty Publications
Name: Kris Thayer, Engagement Strategist/Designer; Diane Richard, Engagement Strategist/Writer
Division/Department: Design and Editorial, Audience Engagement
Other Mia departments involved: Curatorial, Media and Technology, Marketing, PR
Project date(s): June 2018–February 2019

cover of the digital publication Alcohol's Empire featuring three glass drinking vessels

Audience/user: Academic community (faculty, staff, students); Explorers (Falk); Facilitating Socializers (Falk) who participated in “Alcohol’s Empire” programs; cocktail-history enthusiasts

Project goals

  • Conduct a test case for Quire digital publication platform to determine skillset, resource, and workflow requirements, and, overall, its applicability to future Mia content development and publication projects
  • Document the results and process of a multi-party collaborative project with a suite of outcomes including a gallery installation, research products, video, and public programs.
  • Publish recipes, scholarly essays, and other media with a small team and limited budget using a platform that a) presents as a scholarly publication, b) is stable, and c) is accessible by a worldwide audience.

Project description: As museum publishing models evolve in the face of tightening budgets, greater scrutiny on ROI (return on investment), changing audiences, and perceived opportunities in digital publishing and distribution, museums must make informed decisions regarding which exhibitions and projects require the production of a print publication—with the labor, distribution requirements, and significant costs that go into them—and which might be served best by interactive web-based records.

In “Alcohol’s Empire,” Mia staff sought to design a native digital project specifically to test Quire, a publishing framework created by the Getty Museum, to evaluate its potential for future use at Mia and determine what types of projects are good fits for Quire, and for digital publishing in general. The nature of “Alcohol’s Empire” proved to be a good test of the platform: it was a collaborative project with three distinct partners who each contributed content to and reviewed the publication at various stages of production. The project included two public events that spread awareness of the publication and functioned as points of distribution (signage encouraging guests to download the book). Further, the project received national media coverage, which also augmented distribution.

In summary: Overall, Quire proved to support the aesthetic and functional needs of this collaborative publication, which remains available to cocktail historians around the world.   

Resources used
In-house (publication specific): developer, designer, editor, subject experts (curator), content director, photographer.

External contributors: videographer, authors, cocktail-making experts

Staff time: An estimated 50 editing hours and 100 design and development hours were required to produce this publication (hours spent authoring essays and capturing photo/video were in addition those listed above). Learning to use Quire and all its component parts took place intermittently over many months prior to the start of the Alcohol’s Empire publishing project. The designer fit in self-paced exercises and training videos between regular, scheduled work. Once text and images became available, the project took approximately three months to complete. The editor’s time was consistent with that of a print project, if only slightly longer to proof and make edits once in digital layout.

Design details: The project designer invested numerous hours to learn Quire’s various network of platforms and how to use them; she relied heavily on self-learning. Quire design is templated, causing disconnects between the designer’s vision and what was possible. Trained as a graphic designer, she found her ability to customize limited by having only a basic knowledge of HTML.

Editorial process details: The team used Google docs, instead of Word, to expedite the tight editorial schedule and review cycle of numerous contributors and reviewers. Once final, text content was exported to Word, then processed through Pandoc (a document converter) to create Markdown files. Markdown is a lightweight markup language using plain-text formatting syntax (for example, *italic*   **bold** # Header 1 ## Header 2). Quire readily imported and interpreted the Markdown formatting, including footnotes.

Working in a text editor (Atom) and using a web browser for preview, the designer created the first “draft” of the publication. At this point our team deviated from the recommended Quire workflow. Ideally, all collaborators would have worked on separate “live” branches of the publication in GitHub, allowing for real-time collaboration and absolute version control, a powerful advantage of Quire over a traditional workflow. However, because of the short production schedule and the time needed to get comfortable with Atom and GitHub, we modified the workflow as follows:

Collaborators received a live, web-based preview as a url, and each author reviewed the content separately. Then, editor and designer worked side-by-side to reconcile the changes and fine-tune content, not dissimilar to the workflow of print publications. Proofing the digital content—without the benefits of real-time collaboration and version control within GitHub—proved cumbersome. Without a static hard copy, it was challenging to make notations and pinpoint edits.

The overall project (publication, two events, research and development program, gallery installation, photography and video documentation) drew upon various budgets, including the Department of Decorative Arts, Textiles & Sculpture Affinity Group, “Living Rooms” Project, and Exhibitions. The publication portion did not have a discrete budget beyond dedicated staff time. Quire is free and developed as an open source. We identified it as an inexpensive way to leverage the investment of resources for other project elements into a final documentary product.

Reflection

What worked? Everything worked—though with caveats (read Surprises). One benefit of using Quire was the real-time preview it offers. Multiple reviewers could read the product simultaneously, making it easy to share with the project’s outside collaborators. Edits and design alterations manifested instantaneously.

Other benefits of the publication:

  • Allows for greater preservation and digital distribution of works in a simplified format.
  • Enhances accessibility through open-source framework and responsive design.
  • Is not subject to changes to Mia’s website design because it is hosted on Github.
  • Conforms to publishing best practices regarding editions.
  • The document is infinitely and instantly updatable, and those changes can be documented for the reader/researcher.
  • Meets scholarly criteria and encourages scholarly use.
  • Supports inclusion of additional media (video, audio, zoomable objects), for in-gallery and promotional purposes, including social media sharing.
  • Templates allow for customization

In sum: Using an off-the-shelf product (Quire), we delivered what we promised: a robust, responsive digital publication accessible to a worldwide audience on an unbreakable platform. The resulting product was what we envisioned. It took effort, but the efforts paid off.

What were the challenges? Quire was still in development, not ready for release, and had incomplete documentation. Our project helped expose some areas in need of further refinement (see below). From a user perspective, the inability to cut and paste text, images, or the supplied citation is inconvenient.

What was surprising? We were surprised to learn that Quire is not a single thing; rather, it’s a publishing framework or network of interlaced digital tools. As a result, the designer was forced to learn multiple new technological tools.

With Quire, you use:

  • Pandoc to convert Word files to Markdown language
  • Atom (a text editor) to edit publication files
  • Terminal (command-line shell) to tell Quire what to do (like “quire new” to start a new project and “quire pdf” to build the PDF version)
  • CSS and HTML to customize templates and apply styles beyond those already built in Quire
  • GitHub (a web-based hosting service) for collaboration and version control
  • A web browser to preview your work.

Relevance

At Mia: The “Alcohol’s Empire” cross-divisional team pulled off a successful collaboration with external partners (The Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine at the University of Minnesota and cocktail-making experts at Tattersall Distilling) that offered multiple interlinked components: the digital publication using Quire, an exhibition in the Period Rooms, and a wildly successful tasting program held at Tattersall Distilling. With further refinement, this project could serve as a successful model for creating companion publications for projects that have significant content, programmatic, and digital communications aspects.

In the museum field: Developed by the Getty Museum, Quire is of interest to industry professionals nationwide. As museums’ publication programs evolve, Quire is a potential tool for adoption. Mia’s efforts contribute to its evaluation and possible refinement.

Public: Mia is proud to be on the forefront of industry experimentation, particularly as it relates to supporting greater accessibility of scholarship. Our efforts resulted in a many-faceted project documenting the history of the global trade in alcohol c. 1700s, the rise and evolution of medicinal curatives into consumable cocktails, and the re-creation of those recipes for contemporary cocktail enthusiasts. To that we say, Cheers!

Illustrations & Figures

Quire (ideal) workflow

 

Detail of workflow in GitHub. Multiple readers work on duplicate branches of the same document. Changes can be reviewed, reconciled, and accepted (merged) into the master branch, using Git (GitHub’s version control system).

Screen grab of a typical page in the text editor, Atom (left). On the right is the web browser preview that shows how that page renders. It helps if you can do some light coding, which you can use to customize Quire’s templates.