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 The other frustrating point was that many of the links were out of date or nonfunctional in the publications section.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.
