January 2016 – Page 3

Omega, WordPress and Digital History Website Reviews

1) Some creative uses of the tools we’ve learned about so far. [e.g., how might you use Zotero for something other than citation/research? What could a WordPress blog be used for other than personal reflection? What creative ways can you think of to use Omeka? How might you use these tools in combination with each other or with others you’ve used outside of class. [Be playful with your ideas here.]]

Although I have never used Zotero before, I have definitely used WordPress blog in the past. In addition to using WordPress for personal reflection purposes, I believe that a WordPress site could be used for a small/local business or restaurant website. The WordPress blog is user friendly platform for people who are creating a website that might not have a lot of experience with digital technology. Another benefit of WordPress is that it is easy to navigate for internet users. Omeka can be used for a museum collection, a library collection, and for learning and teaching school curriculum.

2) Based on your review of the Digital History websites above: Think about what you like about these websites as a whole, and what you don’t. What works and what doesn’t? What elements would you want to incorporate and which do you want to avoid in your own project?

For the second part of the assignment, I looked at six Digital history websites including: Great Molasses Flood, Map Scholar University of Huston Digital History, Emile Davis Diaries, UNC and the Omeka based cite The Civil War in Art website at http://www.civilwarinart.org

Great Molasses Flood
- Pros: The website’s first page is a front page of a newspaper with many words, letters and titles that you can click on for more information about the historic event. The bright color of the clickable information on the first page makes the website visually appealing and it encourages internet users to interact with the website.
- Cons:As a Mac user, the website felt unnatural and uncomfortable to navigate.The information provided on the page was not well organized and became very cluttered if you clicked on multiple links on the home page for more information.

Map Scholar
- Pros: Great Resource for cartographers and geographers, easy to navigate and provides links to instructions o to create your own Map Scholar collection online. The news tab provides updated information about map collections, map news and map resources.
- Cons: Website could be more visually appealing and creative

University of Huston Digital History
- Pros: Website is visually appealing, well organized and provides a link to printable versions of web pages. Has a plethora of resources including primary and secondary sources, images, audio clips, movie trailers, links to additional information and quizzes for students.
- Cons: Many of the links open up a new window that is not connected to the main website. Therefore, a internet user has to keep the main website page open at all times.

Emile Davis Diaries
- Pros:Easy to navigate. Emile’s diary entries are easy to locate on the front page and web designers allow internet users to write comments about Emile’s daily diary entires. Visually appealing and professional.
- Cons: Very little critical analysis or historical context is provided in addition to the diary entires.

UNC Chapel Hill
- Pros: Links are at the top of the page therefore, it is easy to navigate for internet users and has a very simple design.
- Cons: Boring color scheme, unimaginative design and an overall lack of creativity.Projects under the heading “projects” are not centered around a common theme.

#1 Omeka Based Site: The Civil War in Art
- Pros: A search box is provided on the first page with links to social media sites.Visually appealing and creative. Includes text, primary documents (text and pictures), teaching resources and suggestions for educators, a glossary of terms for students and additional links to more information about the topic. Suggested links on sub-topic pages. Tags are used to help people find specific information.
- Cons:Some exhibit pages only provide a few paragraphs about the specific sub-topic.

Search The Web.

This week we were assigned a list of websites to look through and pick apart, in order to get a greater understanding for the creative possibilities to further our options for the final group website. After looking through these sights I realized the potential for the site, and it is honestly a bit exciting. One of the sights (http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/) really showed the wide range of historic portrayal capable through a single web page. With mapping, links, and captions. Another page I looked at was the winner of the DH (digital History 2014) award for best data visualization. With this award/title I expected to be blown away, but maybe had expectations that were to high. To me the sight seemed basic, and I will admit it is probably because I do not know what it took to create the visuals, and the interface. The sight seemed to be filled with hyperlinks and the information that is provided seems to be scares. The site that surprised me the most was (http://dsl.richmond.edu/april1865/) this site offers an amazing visual aspect that was not met by some of the other links provided. The layout of the site is very simple and clean while also providing an intuitive interface that can be utilized without strain. I am not yet sure what parts will be able to utilize in our group project, but after looking through the catalog of websites proved I am now optimistic of our endless possibilities.

Using Omeka

So for my group, I, as well as the rest of the group, believe Omeka could be incredibly useful. Creating an exhibition of sorts for displaying the primary sources we are dealing with, which are Civil War-era letters, would be a good way to set up a site so that the public can view said letters. In addition, Omeka’s set-up makes it very easy to layer information; as well as just setting up an exhibition for the letters and adding transcriptions, we can very easily design other sections of the site to display additional information about the authors, people and events mentioned in the letters, and other relevant information. This will allow users to peruse the main feature of the site, the letters themselves, and then research the subject in greater depth through the information on the site, and other linked sources on relevant material.

In terms of layout, among the sites I’ve looked at, I liked the websites for Mapping the Republic of Letters and University of Houston’s Digital History site. The first site has some issues with clearly needing some updates or maintenance, but the general layout was interesting and useful for finding a variety of information; with just one click from the case studies page, you could access whatever specific information you were looking for or interested in. The Houston site was simplistic in its display, but quite easy to navigate and search.

The Molasses Flood website was certainly original and unique in its display, and could definitely not be mistaken for anything else; the way it allowed for closer viewing of the material it displayed was also good, My only criticism would be that especially with having to scroll down extensively on the side-section for additional information, it wasn’t terribly intuitive to use immediately.

For sites I liked less, MapScholar struck me as odd in that it did not seem to exploit Omeka very well, there was little at first glance to distinguish it from your usual WordPress site. The Davis Diaries is clearly a good idea, but it is not displayed in any particularly interesting visual way, and again, may as well be on WordPress; the bar that lets you swap through the dates is sort of neat, but overall the site does not look especially distinctive.

Digital Tools and Digital History Websites

I think that both WordPress and Omeka could be useful for digital history projects. Although we have not yet learned much about WordPress beyond using it as a blog, it could also be used as a website for a digital history project. WordPress makes it easy to create multiple pages and sub-pages that could be used to make navigating and organizing the project straightforward. The search bar could pull up blog posts or pages featuring specific tags. Additionally, pages could be created that link to media like images, videos, or downloadable documents, although the media could also be embedded in a page with text. While I think WordPress might be a better tool for organizing online history projects that involve large amounts of text, I currently think that Omeka works better for archival or collections-based projects. Since Omeka uses Dublin Core, it standardizes and professionalizes the information about each item. Omeka also allows the users to group items into collections and exhibits for online displays, which seems to give it more flexibility than WordPress.

Of the websites I reviewed, I liked The Emancipation Project the least because it was disorganized, only provided snippets of information, did not provide information about the graphic or source on the same page as the source, and did not contextualize the graphics or sources. I found the graphics interesting and they helped me visualize the subject, but they still did not mean much to me without background information. I also found Valley of the Shadow difficult to navigate and not visually appealing. However, I liked that all of the documents have been transcribed and are searchable, which partially mitigates the difficulties of navigating the site. Exploring the French Revolution was also problematic because it used icons to link to sources instead of a small image of the source. I think this hampers conducting research using the primary documents. I also believe that copies of the sources should be scanned so users can look at an image of the original as well as the transcribed version. However, I thought the essays provided useful information despite being unwieldy because the content is on several pages. I also liked how it is possible to search for a specific term across all of the source types to find documents both containing tags or the specific phrase.

I liked Gilded Age Murder the best because it provided extensive background information about both the subject and historical interpretation, the sources had images helping make it easy to navigate, and it was visually appealing. However, the documents have not been transcribed and they are not searchable. While I also liked the extensive amounts of information, timelines, and bibliographies presented in Imagining the Past, I found it difficult to navigate and sometimes repetitive. I also found the lack of standardization distracting. One example was the website’s use of “works cited,” “bibliography,” “further reading,” and “resources” as page names for the bibliography. I also enjoyed Avery’s Architectural Ephemera Collections because the navigation was straightforward and the content was not overwhelming. The website listed each of the categories of ephemera. The category provided a description of the items in the collection, images of a sampling of items, and a link or description of where all the items in the collection could be searched.

Reviewing these digital history websites has made me realize how difficult it is to create one. I like how Omeka can organize items into a collection and provide the information associated with the object because it is easier to navigate. I also think that it is important to consider font legibility and visual appeal.

Week 2: Creative Uses for Tools and Website Review

I do not have much experience with WordPress blogs and most of that experience involved personal reflection. However, a friend and I do have a WordPress for a Church group we conduct for young ladies. On our blog, we include recommended books, saint biographies, calendars with upcoming meeting dates, and links to Google Docs that list supplies we need for meetings. Our blog was also open for comments, questions, and suggestions, so it became a way for us to interact with each other and grow spiritually. I think WordPress works well for things that you do not necessarily want published online, and you can make accounts private or only accessible to those who have the URL.

With Zotero, I do not think I have ever used this site, but I have used a similar one called EasyBib. I am unsure if this exists on Zotero, but an interesting feature could be a way to locate more sources similar to the one you are citing. For example, after you find the source you need to cite, Zotero could give you suggestions for other sources that are similar/related to the one you just worked with, making it easier to locate more. EasyBib has a feature somewhat like this where you type in the name of your source and it gives you a possible list of sources that you could be referring to. Scanning through this list could be helpful in constructing comprehensive or annotated bibliographies.

Lastly, for Omeka, I think that historians could use this tool to create ways to virtually analyze primary sources, and teach people how to approach this. In light of the Great Molasses Flood website, I think it would be interesting to take many different types of primaries, such as clothing, furniture, documents, everyday objects, etc. The way the newspaper was set up, it looked as if it was pointing out important information to pay attention to. This kind of thing would be beneficial to history educators, because from what I have seen in my practicums, primary source analysis is not prioritized, and by teaching it to younger students, this could make for a stronger base of historians in the future. These three tools, WordPress, Zotero, and Omeka could be used to build upon one another. For example, WordPress could be used as a communication forum for historians to talk with each other about digital resources, one of which could be Omeka. The blog could have a link to an Omeka site that contains interactive primary sources, cited using Zotero.

Based on your review of the Digital History websites: Think about what you like about these websites as a whole, and what you don’t. What works and what doesn’t? What elements would you want to incorporate and which do you want to avoid in your own project?

I reviewed the following websites: Gilded Age Murder, Great Molasses Flood, Valley of the Shadow, 9/11 Living Memorial Digital Archive (found under the “Omeka-based sites” link in the syllabus), and Map Scholar. As I began exploring these websites, I found that they all had a button to take you back to the home page, which makes navigating more manageable. The home pages also all had clearly-defined tabs to click to look at different things, which helped in moving around the sites. Even each tab clicked upon on the home page also leads to a whole new set of organized tabs so you never get lost. In short, the good organization of these sites is very helpful and effective. All the sites also had an interactive component. For example, the Gilded Age Murder site lets users move through a map of Lincoln, NE; the Great Molasses Flood lets you click on different parts of a newspaper front page to learn different bits of information; the Valley of the Shadow has interactive battle maps; and Map Scholar lets you build high quality historical maps. I especially like these interactive components because it complements the text and helps keep my attention better than just reading. Aside from the animation itself most of the sites with interactive components also include instructions for how to use these features.

A couple things I did not like with these websites was, in some cases, the lack of information. For example, the Great Molasses Flood is interesting in that you can interact with the newspaper, but I am unsure how all these tiny bits of information relate to each other and form a bigger picture. Also, on the 9/11 Living Memorial Digital Archive, I am unsure what the difference between “collections” and “exhibits” are and this does not seem to be explained anywhere on the site, although I do like the idea of having items grouped together and organized. After reviewing these sites, I would definitely say that for my group’s project with the Slaughter and Murray letters, it would be good to categorize the letters in some way and put them under different tabs on our website’s home page. With some of the more important letters, it also might be interesting to do interactive document pages modeled after the Great Molasses Flood. Using maps built on Map Scholar could also be useful for giving general background information about the letters and their authors, while having a graphic organizer site map like the Valley of the Shadow does would make for easy navigation for site users. I think my group needs to avoid pages with information that has not been contextualized and make sure that it is all crisply organized so that users know what we are doing, where we are doing certain things, and the purpose for it.

Creative Uses of the Tools and Review of the Digital History Websites

I have used Omeka before in some of my Art History and History classes and I have found it very useful. Some ideas that could be beneficial to this class are the ability to create online exhibitions using items from collections. For my groups project in particular I think if we used Omeka to create an online exhibition of the Civil War dairies it could be very useful for visitors and researches. The archive of items with metadata would provide transcriptions and metadata for researchers. We could use a tool to make the diaries display although the viewer was looking at a book. We could include maps and timelines of the battles that the solider was in. WordPress can also be used as a platform for online exhibitions with page building and including maps as well as timelines.

When exploring the digital history websites I found that most of them were very easy to navigate which I think is very important for a history website. The Valley of the Shadow website was particularly interesting to navigate because the creators made the site map look like a museum building with multiple rooms for the different topics. Although I find that idea very creative it probably would not work for the civil war diaries project. The French Revolution website seemed useful because of the ability to search and browse through the sources which could be useful for the diary project. However, the site would have been better if the list of images had a thumbnail and not just the title and if when you click on an image it would take you to the information on that work. The models on the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project website were very helpful for figuring out what the event looked like. Perhaps we could create models of the battle that the soldier was in for our project. Imaging the past was very easy to navigate with the large subject headings and the brief summaries of the various parts of the site. But I thought that all though the information was very useful it seemed a bit text heavy. The Molasses Flood website was very creative and the way the images came up when you click on a certain word was great. The only problem was when I brought up the images the screen seemed a little crowded.

Digital History on the Web

The way that Mapping the Republic of Letters was set up worked and was functional. However on their home sit I found it frustrating that their main image could not be zoomed in so that I could make sense of what it was or read the writing of it. The other frustrating point was that many of the links were out of date or nonfunctional in the publications section. The actual case studies though were incredibly interesting. Once I could get the map under the “visualization” button to work I was really impressed with how it plotted the data. Unfortunately my computer had a difficult time loading the visualizations.

I was impressed with the Digital Scholarship Lab’s different mapping projects. Each project was interactive and also presented the data in a cohesive manner. However on one of the projects when I tried to click into a video it immediately magnified to a point that made it unreadable on the screen.

The presentation of the Davis Diaries was an interesting set up. I think it worked well as a way to represent her original writing and the transcriptions. It was easy to navigate and presented a possible alternative way to display a digitized diary.

Digital History is interesting in how it displays many options within each content era without getting too over crowded. Some of the functions could be a tad confusing at first but overall the site was systematic in how it organized materials.

Map Scholar was another intriguing site to explore, mostly that I enjoyed. The only bad part is that when accessing the maps for a moment I thought that there was spam or advertisements on the right part of the screen, however they were actually just a list of resource links. Another issue was that some of the graphics were a tad jarring in their displays. Overall the tools were incredibly interesting.

From looking at these five websites I found that I had a more difficult discerning which platforms each of them ran. More then likely it was that I still do not know what lots of customized Omeka’s look like so I had trouble distinguishing them.

After going through these websites and others that were provided I tried to implement the task of creatively finding different uses for the tools we know. In the case of WordPress there are of course many options and uses that the platform offers. Businesses, communication networks, and research platforms are all potential uses for WordPress. In terms of Zotero I am having difficulty imaging how it operates outside of research and an individual or groups network. The curation of records by a group is as creative as I can currently envision for Zotero. In the case of Omeka, I also had issues trying to come up with creative ideas. I suppose that it could be used to organize visual works for artists or musicians looking for a way to “exhibit” their work in a new way.

Creative tool uses

(First, quick apology, I thought I linked the ADH category so I don’t know why my DGST 101 post appeared when I did not even link it. I’ll look into this later but it may end up reposted to ADH site.)

With various plugins, WordPress can be used as not just a personal reflection, but reflections of other various other things, such as commerce (Amazon or customer feedback) or a blog between many people (like the ADH site). I have never used Omeka before but after looking at the other sites, it looks like it can display timelines and annotations, map to other pages (inside the same domain and other sites such as Youtube), and Omeka sites can play avi files and different kinds of music.

My group will probably make use of the timelines and annotations and our project will probably be very similar to the Emile Davis Diaries site but we will find a way to personalize it and make it our own.

Digital History Websites

Valley of the Shadow:
Pros: Everything is organized very well, there are links all over the site that direct to pages that go more in depth about what was clicked on, and there is a title page detailing what the site is about before actually going into the details.
Cons: Some pages are very long, uninteresting font and no background, there is only one link to the title page but the graphic to the link is deceptively at the top of every page

Map Scholar:
Pros: Posts are organized chronologically and when viewing a post, one can click to the next and previous post. There is a sidebar that (almost) consistently displays the same information
Pro/con: There is an archive organizing every post made but dates are irregular and there may be only one post in one month.
Cons: Links look exactly like the rest of the text (not clear what is a link and what is not), some posts are just pictures with little/no information.

Emile Davies Diaries:
Pros: Every page has the same layout throughout the site, pop-up annotations appear for some additional details, two kinds of menus (drop down and scroll), scrolling menu does not change page, scans of diaries can be enlarged, and while scrolling down page, the menu at top of the screen stays at the top of the screen.
Cons: When “Davis” was searched, the “About this Site” post returned as a result and when clicking to enlarge picture, picture is not enlarged much (but it is good resolution).

Imagining the Past:
Pros: Timeline can be dragged and specific dates can be selected and menus at the top and bottom are consistent throughout the three main sections of the site.
Cons: Wasted white space on the sides (and bottom on some pages), drop down menu has space between options, menu suboptions appear before first option is highlighted, some subsections are completely empty, some pictures are not centered and waste space by all appearing on the left, broken links, the main sections of the sites are not connected to each other except for the home page, and it appears as though each main section was done by a different person and there was no editor to make each section look the same.

Virtual Paul’s Cross Project:
Pros: Everything is organized well, drop down menus are done well and consistent menu/picture at the top of each page.
Cons: Overview starts with a quote while it is not clear that it is a quote (I thought they misspelled “hours”), there is a map that lets me “choose a location” with some amount of people that does not do anything when I click an option, there is an ambient noise page that does not add anything to the site, urls do not show the menu option that was selected, and some links change the current tab while other links open new tabs.

Main takeaways: Consistency is important, annotations help to give additional details/clarification, clearly distinguish links from the rest of text, if something seems irrelevant, keep it out, make things easy for the user, make sure all links work, and display pages and transcription at same time but allow user to see larger picture of page.

Creative Uses For The Tools We Have Learned

We’ve only had three class periods so far, but all of these different tools make me want to go all out on the semester long project. A site like WordPress that is known for blogging could be used for larger projects like hosting tutorials, web comics, podcasts, and other various forms of media. It can even be used for archiving historical artifacts like Omeka, but I’m sure the latter does a better job at it after having the Omeka workshop.

Omeka is rather interesting. I forgot that I already used it in one of my previous Digital Study courses to map out the origin of the parts used to create an iPod. It would be great to do something similar for the HCC/ITCC and show where each material came from, but that would require us to break up the building or just simply find records of the materials they used to track down their origin. Making a timeline showing the creation of a place like the HCC/ITCC or historical events would definitely be great alternative way to use Omeka.

I already knew you could do some pretty cool things with WordPress using HTML and now that I know that you can do the same for Omeka, the possibilities seem endless if you know enough HTML. For example, I could have a WordPress with all of the information and have it link to or merge with an Omeka timeline or map, so everything won’t be as cluttered as it could be.

After looking at the the sites listed on the syllabus, I really like most of them. A few did look a bit outdated, but I really love The Valley of the Shadow site. I can imagine our group creating something similiar, but making it more like a virtual tour to appeal to incoming students. You can have them click a room and bring up an image with and a description of the room and what it could be use. I would personally like our final product to be rather clean and appealing to our audience or just about anyone who comes across the site. The Digital Scholarship Lab site appears to have a nice balance between images and text on the homepage. The site also has soft colors that are easy on the viewer’s eyes as well, so it’s perfect and it’s what I strive for our project to be. Comparing that site to the French Revolution site, the latter looks a bit outdated and a site like Emile Davis Diaries kind of throws you into it immediately instead of slowly working you into the information. Others may find them suitable, but I personally don’t think they would work well for what we envision for our project.