Digital Scholarship

Signing Up for SUNY Create

Signing up for a SUNY Create account is simple and available to staff, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates at Binghamton. 

We've created a handy guide for following along the process which is shown below, but here are the steps: 

Go to sunycreate.cloud and select the 'Get Started' button on the screen 

You'll be asked to fill out and submit an interest form, so go ahead and do that 

That form gets forwarded to the digital scholarship team and we'll contact you about creating an account and ask you to fill out our MOU. 

Once we receive your MOU we'll activate your account and you'll be able to set up a domain name and get to creating! 

There are dozens of applications and tools included in SUNY Create. The digital scholarship team particularly supports: 

WordPress - perfect for class websites and research projects using a variety of media 

Scalar - created to be a space to create a digital book Scalar works great for bigger projects that may branch out in different directions, but still have a central theme such as poetry collections that also offer some historical background on the authors or the poems themselves (or both)! 

Omeka Classic - Great for digital exhibits or collections based on a single project or idea

Omeka S - do you have multiple collections you are working with or part of a small collaboration creating multiple digital exhibits? Having your own Omeka S instance may be right for you

Grav - a CMS that helps you build flat static websites. Get access to plenty of templates to get you started and a useful HTML editing interface

HTML/CSS - you can create your own website right in the public html folder in SUNY Create, no apps necessary! But you'll need some experience or a willingness to learn. 

Have questions about which of these platforms would work best for your project or how to get started? Reach out to us the digital scholarship center and we'd be more than happy to help! 

However, if you are interested in using the other applications or testing the limits of the service through the other C-Panel offerings you are welcome to do so within the confines of the MOU. Please just let us know how your experiments turn out and while we may be able to connect you to people who can help we can't always guarantee to have the immediate answers. 

Why use SUNY Create?

Using SUNY Create lets you do a few things through the C-panel than you could if you were using the same application on it's own. 

Hosting: many applications many not offer free hosting when you create a project and either expect you to pay for hosting or host it on your own server. Creating a project on SUNY Create takes care of the hosting problem for you since your project is created and housed on Reclaim's servers. 

Space: Reclaim comes with a generous amount of space for your files and if you need more we can probably get it for you for free depending on how much you need 

Learn about the web: A SUNY Create account gives you access to a server with all the backend files and tools to explore with little to no risk of actually damaging anything. While you may install WordPress for a class site, you can also check out the file and database managers and dive deeper into interrogating how the 'web' works and is structured. 

Ads: Creating a WordPress website and don't want ads all over your site? Making it on SUNY Create means you won't have any ads on any of the projects your create there. This can help your site look more professional and also make it nicer for your users to navigate. 

Customization: A SUNY Create account gives you access to all you need to create a simple static html/css/php site all on your own if you'd like to, easily sync up a custom domain name and run your own custom project right from the public html folder. If you can put it in a LAMP server, you can probably build it in SUNY Create (no promises, but definitely reach out if you are considering something like this! and are wondering if SUNY Create is right for you).