ADH 5.0

For me this week started with a dull pain in my mouth that grew exponentially in the course of 24 hours, by Tuesday morning I was on hold with a dentist. Luckily I was still home and still able to communicate with the team.

For the contract I initially wanted to keep to my strengths, hence volunteering for gathering documents and etc.; the other project, website layout/organization, I volunteered for based on a rough website layout I put together in class and was well received.

In thinking about audience, the obvious initial use for the site would be as a resource for admissions to advertise the building to prospective students and faculty.

After reading through Chapter 5 this week, a few questions arose as to my group’s project.  Firstly, who exactly will our website’s audience be?  Our project will be connected to the National Park Service, and I envision them serving several different groups of people.  These would include historians and other scholars, tourists, and teachers and students.  Since these groups will most likely vary widely in their needs, our website must be able to accommodate them.  It may be helpful to have different tabs on our website to make sure traffic flows to the area of the site that is appropriate for their uses.  For example, our tabs could read “research,” “tourism,” and “teachers and students.”

A second question that arose was how do we advertise to increase traffic to our site?  We do not have money to pay for something like this, but our site will be connected to the NPS, a prominent organization and resource for Civil War history.  Because of this affiliation, I assume that we will not have to worry too much about this, but instead focus on what key words we can put on our site to make it come up in search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

A final question I had was about site maintenance and if our group will be responsible for things such as fixing broken links even after this semester has ended.  Since we will be connected with the NPS, an established and respected organization, it would look unprofessional if a site created for them was not up-to-date.  I know that Omeka installs updates automatically, but am unsure if this will be enough to keep our site looking fresh.

This assignment was a good interactive way to familiarize myself with these new tools. I have never done a project that involved the use of either StoryMapJS or TimelineJS but I can really see now how they will be helpful for this class and especially my group project. StoryMapJS was pretty simple to use, I had no problem uploading pictures and editing the content. I preferred the StoryMapJS of the two because it looked better visually. I like the integration of the map while the slideshow played; for this slideshow I mapped out all the places I’ve ever lived and visited, and  it was great to see the scope of all the locations marked out on the map. TimelineJS was good, but I think it’s more suited to factual and historical information due to how simple it is. Using the excel doc took a little more time to navigate but it wasn’t impossible either. I simply transferred the info as best as I could from my previous StoryMapJS.

Lastly, I liked how both applications gave me the option to save and share a link to the project, and I also liked that the code was readily available for copy and pasting into our own sites.

StoryMapJS

 

 

TimelineJS

 

This assignment was a good interactive way to familiarize myself with these new tools. I have never done a project that involved the use of either StoryMapJS or TimelineJS but I can really see now how they will be helpful for this class and especially my group project. StoryMapJS was pretty simple to use, I had no problem uploading pictures and editing the content. I preferred the StoryMapJS of the two because it looked better visually. I like the integration of the map while the slideshow played; for this slideshow I mapped out all the places I’ve ever lived and visited, and  it was great to see the scope of all the locations marked out on the map. TimelineJS was good, but I think it’s more suited to factual and historical information due to how simple it is. Using the excel doc took a little more time to navigate but it wasn’t impossible either. I simply transferred the info as best as I could from my previous StoryMapJS.

Lastly, I liked how both applications gave me the option to save and share a link to the project, and I also liked that the code was readily available for copy and pasting into our own sites.

StoryMapJS

 

 

TimelineJS

 

I decided to have a little bit of fun with these tools by using information from my historic preservation thesis on gender and Virginia’s equine landscape. While I don’t think StoryMapJS and TimelineJS are the best tools for analyzing and sharing my research, I enjoyed experimenting.

I liked several aspects of StoryMapJS, including its ability to show locations in relation to each other and its integration of media with text and maps. However, I found the tool to be limited in arranging information about a concept as abstract as gender. Since it organizes the locations in a chronology, I think it would work better as a timeline. I ultimately ended up organizing my information about the horse farms in a manner that shows the male-run farms before the female-run ones. Conveniently, this method forms a clean loop on the map. Had I tried to arrange the farms chronologically, the map would have been more confusing, especially if I added more farms. I also don’t like how the map appears on my blog.

I found TimelineJS to be a better tool for creating a history of some of the women in my study’s racing accomplishments. However, I would have had to add considerably more information about men in racing, U.S. history, and gender roles to develop a meaningful context for these seemingly isolated events. I like the aesthetics of TimelineJS because they are clean, straightforward, and the colors, backgrounds, and media can be manipulated more than in StoryMapJS. However, I wish the images used in the timeline could be enlarged.

Ultimately, I don’t think my group will likely use these tool for our 3D laser scanning project for the James Monroe Museum. However, we could possibly use StoryMapJS to map out the origins of the objects we scan to provide visuals. We could also use TimelineJS to create a map of when the objects were made or when they were acquired by James Monroe, although this information could be broad and defeat the purpose of making a timeline.

Although I find Feedly a little bit difficult to navigate, I hope that it will make it easier to keep up with new blog posts by my classmates and members of the DH Compendium.

MAP

When I began messing around with MapStoryJS, I decided to do a few events that were a important to World War II and the Cold War. I found the tool itself to be fairly easy to use. You can set a title to a location and even add images to the marker to help viewers get a sense of what occurred at that location. It didn’t take long to create the 5 events that I did, but I do not see my group using this for our project at all because we are just focusing on the history of one building. I do, however, see us using TimelineJS and you will see why in a little bit.

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TIMELINE

TimeLineJS took a little bit more work to complete, but I love it. You can insert the same information  that could in MapStoryJS and even more. You  obviously can enter the beginning and end dates of events, but if you have the exact time, you can enter that as well. Like I mentioned before, I do see our group using this for the HCC/ITCC project. We can use TimeLineJS  to record and display when the planning for the building began and when the construction finally began. Creating a detailed timeline with this digital tool would be perfect for us and I’m sure we can make it detailed and informative to all future viewers.

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FEEDLY

I might need to use Feedly a bit more, but I do have to say it is pretty convenient. I created a collection “Digital History Blogs” and easily added everybody to the said collection along with two other websites from the Digital Humanities Compendium.

OVERALL

I’m glad to be learning about even more digital tools, but I only see myself using only one of them for the semester long project. I imagine that some groups can use both, so I look forward to the outcome of each project.

I have worked with TimelineJS and StoryMap before for other classes as well as for my job. For Professor Moon’s Immigrant Alexandria course I created both a Story Map as well as a Google Map as a part of a group project.

This is an example of a Timeline JS I made for practice when I first learned how to use the tool.

Here is an example of a Story Map I made for the seminar with Professor Moon. I also have made quiet a few Google maps for other projects.

Since I had already played around with Story Map and Google maps for previous projects I tested out CartoDB. I used the data set from the site that gave an introduction to the program. I did not include a link for the map I made using the Dutch art research, because it was the sample practice tool and not something I independently created. Getting around the learning curve for the site, I think it is awesome how it takes data sets and makes them look so professional and easily interactive. When I had seen the maps by the Digital Scholarship Lab in our earlier class exploration I was so impressed with the interactive maps they had created. Knowing now that they used CartoDB, a tool accessible for me to use in future projects. 

As cool and interesting as the CartoDB maps were I felt that they probably would not work well for my groups site. We are not really dealing with datasets and our primary goal is digitization of the diaries, so collecting datasets possibly goes off course from our goal.

There is the potential that my group would use one of the mapping tools to represent the information from the diaries. This will be more clear once we go through the collection in the digitizing phase, and have a better understanding if we have solid information for a map. It is also possible that we could make a timeline, however I am unsure if that will flow with the way we decide to set up our site.