About

An experimental site by Bethany E. Qualls, PhD, working through how to make early, dare I say proto-memes, accessible to wider audiences. All images are from the Lewis Walpole Library Collection, Yale University, unless otherwise stated. 1.0 version as of 8 March 2026

Colophon

This site was built using Canopy and a lot of swearing. Thanks to Scott for moral support from afar.

Canopy was created by Mat Jordan (Northwestern University) and Mark Baggett (Texas A&M University) as a method to quickly build exhibit style digital humanities projects that extend existing digital collections using IIIF Collections and Manifests. It continues to be an active open-source initiative of Northwestern University Libraries, where it supports digital scholarship in many forms. This example site is built from the Donald K. Adams and Lawrence D. Stewart Collection of Prints and the Indian Paintings on Mica collection hosted by Northwestern University Libraries' Digital Collections.

Canopy uses the IIIF Presentation API to deliver rich media from providing institutions, Markdown as MDX for authoring contextual content and layout, TailwindCSS for the user interface, and a static FlexSearch index for search. Easy aggregation and retrieval of IIIF resources is made possible by the IIIF helpers developed by Stephen Fraser. In addition, Clover IIIF, developed by Northwestern University Libraries with contributions from other institutions, is integral to Canopy and provides the rendering of IIIF resources, annotations, and metadata throughout the interface.