One Template to Rule Them All: Interactive Research Data Documentation with Quarto

This repository contains the presentation materials for "One Template to Rule Them All: Interactive Research Data Documentation with Quarto" presented by Moritz Mähr and Moritz Twente at the Digital Humanities Tech Symposium (DHTech), held during DH2025 at NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal.

The DHTech Symposium, a mini-conference embedded within DH2025 (July 14–18, 2025), provides a venue to foreground technical innovation and infrastructure in digital humanities research. Unlike typical DH conferences that prioritize research outcomes over technical process, the DHTech Symposium emphasizes the tools, platforms, and methodologies that underpin digital scholarship.

Our contribution introduces the Open Research Data Template, a GitHub-based framework designed to streamline the publication and reuse of open research data through executable, interactive documentation using Quarto. The template supports integration of narrative, metadata, and code in Python, R, Julia, and ObservableJS, enabling researchers to publish cohesive, reproducible, and FAIR-compliant websites directly from their project repositories.

We discuss how the template lowers barriers to reuse and sustainable archiving of research workflows by automating documentation pipelines and facilitating seamless publishing. Real-world applications from projects such as DigiHistCH24, Stadt.Geschichte.Basel, DHBern, and Decoding Inequality 2025 are presented to demonstrate its flexibility across domains and use cases.

The presentation covers:

• The motivation and need for executable research data documentation in DH.
• The structure and technical implementation of the template using Quarto and GitHub Actions.
• Automation strategies for multi-language code integration and metadata harmonization.
• Sustainable publishing practices for archiving and interoperability.
• Live demonstrations and case studies.

Links

• Digital Humanities Tech Symposium Agenda
• DH2025, NOVA University Lisbon

This repository includes slides, demo notebooks, and reference materials to support the talk and foster adoption of the Open Research Data Template in DH and adjacent fields.

Repository Structure

The structure of this repository follows the Advanced Structure for Data Analysis of The Turing Way and is organized as follows:

• abstract/: Contains the abstract for the DHTech Symposium, including the extended abstract and any supplementary materials.
• documentation/: Contains the Quarto documentation files for the Open Research Data Template, including the main presentation slides and demo notebooks.
• paper/: Contains the paper files for the DHTech Symposium, including the LaTeX source and any supplementary materials.
• presentation/: Contains the presentation files for the DHTech Symposium, including the Quarto slides and any supplementary materials.

Getting Started

Install uv to install the dependencies and run the presentation locally:

bash uv sync uv run playwright install

Citation

These resources are openly available to everyone and can be used for any research or educational purpose. If you use these resources in your research, please cite as specified in CITATION.cff. The following citation formats are also available through Zenodo:

• BibTeX
• CSL
• DataCite
• Dublin Core
• DCAT
• JSON
• JSON-LD
• GeoJSON
• MARCXML

Zenodo provides an API (REST & OAI-PMH) to access the resources. For example, the following command will return the metadata for the most recent version of the resources

bash curl -i https://zenodo.org/api/records/15920516

Support

This project is maintained by @maehr. Please understand that we can't provide individual support via email. We also believe that help is much more valuable when it's shared publicly, so more people can benefit from it.

| Type | Platforms | | -------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 🚨 Bug Reports | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 📊 Report bad data | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 📚 Docs Issue | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 🎁 Feature Requests | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 🛡 Report a security vulnerability | See SECURITY.md | | 💬 General Questions | GitHub Discussions |

Roadmap

No changes are currently planned.

Contributing

All contributions to this repository are welcome! If you find errors or problems with the resources, or if you want to add new resources or features, please open an issue or pull request. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct and the process for submitting pull requests.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. The available versions are listed in the tags on this repository.

Authors and acknowledgment

• Moritz Mähr - Initial work - maehr
• Moritz Twente - Enhancements and contributions - mtwente

See also the list of contributors who contributed to this project.

License

The data in this repository is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License - see the LICENSE-CCBY file for details. By using this data, you agree to give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and to indicate if any modifications have been made.

The code in this repository is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 - see the LICENSE-AGPL file for details. By using this code, you agree to make any modifications available under the same license.