Creativity in the Time of Covid-19
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Agile Humanities Agency is a software, design, and consulting collective. We work with academic researchers and institutions, educational and cultural-heritage organizations, trade publishers and university presses, and other creative companies. We're a network designed for collaboration.
"Agile offered technical expertise we were missing, and helped focus and organize our efforts into producing a high-quality, publishable project on time. And they were friendly and fun to work with, too!"
"They were able to artfully organize all of our digital assets, and meet the research needs of the multiple stakeholders we are working with – and work within our budget constraints."
"The more I’ve worked with the site, the more I have been amazed that its design anticipated things that had not yet even crossed our minds."
The aim of The Deleuze Seminars project is to translate into English the seminar lectures of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze that were given at the the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis between 1971 and 1987, and to make them available online. The project is a continuation of work already undertaken by Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis. Agile designed the project website on the Drupal 8 platform; it was created to host the online publication of the translations, and it is actively under ongoing development.
At a critical moment in our project’s development, we reached out to the Agile Humanities team for help. They listened carefully to our needs and took the time to understand our project’s overarching goals and objectives. Their thoughtful and incisive questions demonstrated a deep familiarity with the digital humanities landscape, and we benefited greatly from their suggestions. Their work proposal was remarkable for its thoroughness and clarity. We came away from our interactions deeply impressed by their knowledge and professionalism. We look forward to other opportunities to work with them in the future!
Engaging Agile Humanities to polish the look and feel of our interactive scholarly works was a great choice. They quickly turned our needs into expert results and along the way helped streamline our products. I highly recommend them for their collaborative work ethic and exceptional design skills.
Agile Humanities Agency offered exactly the kind of professional and helpful development support that we were looking for. They really understood our needs as a small research team both in terms of creating an online presence and allowing us to communicate to our audience. We are thrilled with the website they developed for us. They have offered great support post-launch. I fully recommend their services.
Our unique community on the Northern California coast required an updated website to reflect our distinctive ideals and provide ease of access to our members. Agile was instrumental in working with our staff and committee colleagues in order to help us achieve this goal. Weekly standups via video conferencing between our team and Agile enhanced understanding and continuity during the development process increasing productivity and a timely product.
OutHistory came to Agile with a sense of how we wanted to expand and modernize our site but not a clear vision. We wanted to combine familiar web design techniques and easy-to-use technical infrastructure, while creating an experience that would properly represent and be welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community we represent. No easy task. Agile not only welcomed this challenge, they embraced it whole heartedly! They were soon digging through our archives for inspirational materials and we flipped the entire process from one focused on structure to one focused on a clear aesthetic and functional sense of community. Not many developers would have so willingly changed the way they work, and even fewer would have been able to do so and deliver such an amazing end result. Agile delivered a product that exceeded our expectations and we hope to work with them again as we move from a prototype to a fully developed site.
Working with Agile Humanities Agency has been a resoundingly positive experience. We had a very specific need for project collaboration and guidance that ultimately resulted in a major commercial release into the academic library market. Agile’s team was able to supplement the beta feedback we received as well as drive some direct guidance on implementation, structure, and future thinking for our product as well as our roadmap. Having an external eye on internal development opened us up to new ideas, helped us anticipate roadblocks, and provided great insight.
We collaborated with Agile Humanities on two very different projects: one an innovative interface to reading across editions of a text, and the other an educational resource intended to function long-term with minimal maintenance. In both cases, Agile offered technical expertise we were missing, and helped focus and organize our efforts into producing high-quality, publishable projects on time. And they were friendly and fun to work with, too!
The people at Agile Humanities combine the very best of technical expertise and a deep and abiding knowledge of the humanities. Consulting with Agile allowed me to see what my digital humanities project already did well and to think strategically about how it might reach its full potential. This entailed thinking carefully about the user experience and how the collection could be made more accessible. Agile proved to be a crucially important resource for me as I applied, successfully, for a major grant to support further work on the site, answering questions, big and small, and helping me to imagine new directions we could take the project. I have had the pleasure of working with Agile to solve problems on the site that I didn’t even know we had, imagining where the project will go next, and anticipating how to get things ready for those next as-yet-unrealized possibilities. I am thrilled with the design and very excited to continue working with the agency.
The work that Agile Humanities conducted proved to be a transformative experience for a long-standing digital project in need of a complete overhaul in design and development. Agile challenged the Perseus Catalog team not just to reevaluate its descriptive metadata practices but also to reexamine the utility of its legacy software and data infrastructure. Through an intensive process of collaborative feedback, animated discussions, and an overview of potential metadata conversions and technical options, the Agile team helped to both guide a massive transformation of the Perseus Catalog legacy metadata and to develop new metadata creation processes. Agile’s work with the Perseus Catalog team has helped to lay the groundwork for future technical developments. Even more importantly, it has helped move the project much closer to meeting its long desired goal of making all of the catalog’s metadata available as linked open data.
Our experience working with Agile Humanities was an exceptional one. When the Environmental Design Archives at University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives partnered on a grant project to create an Omeka site geared towards our researchers, we knew we would need a skilled company to help design our site and build new tools to aid user experience. Agile went above and beyond to create a platform to highlight our collection materials and allow users to explore digitized archival materials that don’t translate easily to the constraints of a computer screen. Their patience, attention to detail, and warm demeanor lent to a wonderful working relationship and resulted in an end product that exceeded our expectations.
Qualitative Data Repository wanted an easy-to-manage, yet powerful and well-designed website for a self-paced online course we were designing. Agile worked with us to come up with a concept that fit our vision as well as our budget and they were incredibly responsive to all our feedback. We couldn’t be happier with how the site turned out.
Working with Agile has been an extremely positive experience. The team is very communicative and responsive. They were particularly attentive to what started out as a mental image on my part and then transforming that into a digital reality. I’m very much looking forward to working with them on the next iteration of my project.
In their work with us, Agile Humanities have been much more than software consultants; they have been partners, collaborators, and teammates. The challenge of the digital humanities is to connect the critical sensibility of the humanist to the imagination of the programmer. Agile helps us do this.
We asked Agile Humanities to work on our interdisciplinary project, Archive/Counter-Archive, which involves over fifty researchers, artists, archivists and dozens of community organizations. Agile Humanities did a wonderful job designing our visual brand and the digital interface for the project. They not only created a forward facing site that highlights the diversity of the AV archives that make up our research, but they also created unique work spaces and dossiers for our researchers. The Agile team is made up of humanities trained programmers and designers as well as stellar project planners. They were able to artfully organize all of our digital assets, and meet the research needs of the multiple stakeholders we are working with – and work within our budget constraints. They have been a pleasure to collaborate with; they are highly responsive and have offered expert advice throughout the different phases of our project. They have also been extremely helpful at implementing changes to our project site, making suggestions on how to improve it, such as creating an editorial workflow for news and events. We highly recommend working with Agile Humanities!
I highly recommend partnering with Agile Humanities for your digital humanities project, whether you're just starting it, or whether it's already at an advanced stage. We recently contracted with them to refine and polish prototype work we had done at the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities on a suite of visualizations around historical figures in the Black Atlantic—the In The Same Boats project. At first we were a bit hesitant to pass on a project that had taken shape elsewhere, but we took the leap. We're very glad we did! The Agile team did an amazing job listening to, refining, and implementing our ideas. In the end, the project had as much scholarly heft because of their contributions, and not despite them, as is often the case with other contractors outside the humanities. We are now in discussions on how to grow our professional relationship. I'm so confident in their talent and experience that I recommend them without reservations.
It has been a pleasure working with the Agile Humanities team. They have helped us scope major multi-year projects, work with emergent platforms, and quickly polish smaller efforts. The team understands the nuances of software design and development in an academic environment and is fantastic at modeling processes for people newer to digital humanities work.
Agile Humanities helped us transition our wiki-based website to a new platform. This allowed us to reach a broader audience and preserve our work for the future. They have been highly effective and professional in all work with them – and are showing how to expand the reach of the digital humanities.
Agile were indispensable partners in our project. They delivered sharp, eye-catching design that focuses attention on our primary materials. We are thrilled with the results.
We’re an adaptable outfit. Coders and artists. Writers and researchers. Librarians and archivists. Editors and educators. Designers and data architects. We're critical thinkers: our work poses questions, tests concepts, resolves problems, and builds solutions.
Our agile network connects with your project, team, organization, or business. We can assemble a complete team, or work with yours.
We build multimedia libraries and archives, digital books and bookshelves, and virtual exhibits and galleries. We create map, timeline, network, and other kinds of data visualizations. And we design custom tools, plugins, and modules along the way to make all of these things – and more.
We support open-source design and software development. Our code is shared, reused, and maintained for a sustainable community.
Our clients range from California to the United Kingdom, so we’re accustomed to working remotely across continents, oceans, and time zones. We work around the corner, and around the corners of the earth.