The MishMash Website

Summary

This project develops and maintains the public MishMash website — and treats the website itself as a research and teaching project. The site is built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages, with all content versioned in a shared GitHub repository, so anyone in the network can take part in developing it. The thinking behind the site is documented in the web philosophy page of the project wiki.

Through seed funding #2 (2026), the project also develops The MishMash Mesh, led by Aedan Soellaart with UI/UX designer Mihaela Daniela Crudu (INN): an internal co-creative engine that maps members’ expertise and work-package affiliations and recommends collaborations through natural-language queries, a public LLM interface grounded in MishMash documentation, and a WCAG 2.2-compliant accessibility toolbar.

Strategy

The site follows three ideas:

  • One source of truth. Facts about people, projects, institutions, and results are pulled from authoritative sources — NVA, ORCID, and Wikipedia — through nightly automated syncs, rather than being retyped by hand. The project is working towards connecting with Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and other reliable open sources, both drawing from them and contributing back.
  • One text, many readers. The site experiments with stretchtext and adaptive content: pages that offer the same content at three complexity levels (simple, standard, advanced), with the reader choosing the level. The about page is the pilot; how the levels map to typical readers is defined in the centre’s communication strategy.
  • Open, student-driven development. Students build alternative frontends (switchable UI themes) and backend automation on top of the site — see the student development guide.

Work Package

Cross-work-package initiative (WP1–WP7)

Duration

2025–ongoing

People

Institutions