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Hist 697: What does digital scholarship look like?
“The Lost Museum” digital exhibit and Josh Brown’s discussion of it and other digital projects that CHNM and other organizations have put together brought me back to “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities” by William Thomas, which we read in Clio1 in the fall. In this piece, Thomas discusses the process of creating a “digital article,” a piece of scholarship that started with the structure of the web, rather than the structure of the journal article. In the fall, we discussed the original web “article” and its goals, successes, and failures. While the idea of creating an article that rethinks the process of scholarship from the ground up is good and necessary, “The Differences Slavery Made” is a persuasive piece of evidence that we have not yet figured out what exactly that means or how to make such a work that is effective and accessible.
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Hist 697: Visual Architecture
The readings for this week focused on creating visual hierarchies between the various elements of ones site, which creates the argument structure of a website. While I had been thinking of information architecture in terms of the back-end of the website, it was good to be reminded to focus on the visual organization of information and the visual coding given to pieces of information. As Jakob Nielsen’s piece argued, while there are many inventive things one can do with design, there are simply some things which make the user-experience more difficult. By doing such things as signaling links in consistent and expected manners, you can increase the usability and effectiveness of your site for a broader audience. Luke Wroblewski also offered a good reminder that, for effective visual narratives, the most important elements of the website should be visually coded as such, by position on the page, by size, and by relationship to other elements.
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Hist 697: Creating Arguments for Everyone
Accessibility and visual arguments. While there was some debate as to whether the Tufte piece was indeed on the list for today, I found the combination of Tufte with the accessibility pieces to be productive. Much of the reading on accessibility dealt with the needs of visually impaired, blind, or mobility impaired users. These users require the information on websites to be organized logically and well annotated. And the tips for creating websites that are sensitive to the needs of these users were very helpful and seem relatively easy, if perhaps time consuming, to implement.
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Hist 697: And done!
Wow.
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Hist 697: Detente with Photoshop
*Please pardon my dust. I was experimenting with themes and homepages and general web presence but have yet to make this one beautiful. *
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Hist 697: Impasse with Photoshop
Oh Photoshop.
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Hist 697: Typography, part 2
I am unsure what to blog about this week. But I thought maybe I would go through my choices for the type assignment and give a sense of where I am thinking of taking the design.
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Hist 697: Typography, part 1.5
This week was more of a “big picture” week for me, thus the half step towards the type assignment. I focused most of my “Clio” brain power this week on website organization, on tracking down possible comparison sites for my project, on thinking about layout, and on searching for fonts. Project Canterbury is a very text heavy site and as such my choices in fonts will be particularly noticeable. This also makes my choice a bit complicated, as the font has to both go with the material, which is largely 19th-century documents, and has to be readable on-screen. Thanks to Megan’s suggestion, I am looking at fonts from the League of Moveable Type, particularly Fanwood for more focused reading sections, and Sorts Mill Goudy. These fonts seem to strike a good balance between referencing the older type of the primary material and being readable on the screen. Now to find a good decorative font to accompany them.
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Hist 697: Typography, part 1
To be honest, typography scares me. I mean, it looks great and I understand why it is important and that you can do many things with typography to make your text interesting. But books on typography seem to enjoy highlighting the numerous ways people use typography poorly or focus on overused and reviled typefaces but rarely explain why (but I like Papyrus…). It is enough to cause me much anxiety. I don’t know enough to avoid the mistakes and end up feeling that it is all rather arbitrary.
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Hist 697: Portfolio is live
So the first iteration of my portfolio is live.