The Encyclopedia of the Dog

I am the front-end web developer for The Encyclopedia of the Dog, an annotated digital edition of Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf. The project is led by José Vergara, Assistant Professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship in Russian Studies at Bryn Mawr College.

In Spring 2022, I joined the project team as an assistant and proofreader. I was tasked with adding the contents of the book (both the original Russian text and its English translation) to the annotation site and cleaning and proofreading the text on the site.

That summer, I worked as a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow. As a part of that Fellowship, I got involved in the design and development of the site and discovered an interest in UI design and front-end development. I learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and worked with a team to develop a prototype of the Encyclopedia of the Dog website. The prototype featured an elegant bilingual layout for viewing the original Russian text alongside its English translation. It also featured an early version of the site’s robust annotation functionality, which I went on to refine in subsequent years.

I continued to work on the project as a Digital Scholarship Project Assistant and Front-end Developer for the remainder of my time in undergrad. Then, after graduation, I was hired into a full-time position, which allowed me to continue work on the site.

I have given several presentations in which I talked about the process of designing and developing the site. In these presentations, I emphasized the principles and considerations which guided my decisions throughout the process of creating the site. Namely, I was guided by the principles of minimal computing and sustainability, as well as by a commitment to equity and accessibility.