Pre-Activities

Read:

• Ten Factors When Considering Tools by Jack Doughtery and Ilya Ilankyou
• About - Minimal Computing by GO::DH

• “The House That Archives Built”. by Dorothy Berry Up/root.
  At the time that Berry wrote this essay, she was the digital collections program manager at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Today she is a digital curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

• Optional. Cox, Jordana, and Lauren Tilton. “The digital public humanities: Giving new arguments and new ways to argue.” Review of Communication 19.2 (2019): 127-146.

Exploring Platforms, Tools, and Software

Session Activities

Your Data Plan

As we’ve discussed, the humanities field employs has various different kinds of things, or data, to make arguments, tell stories, and answer research questions.

• What type of data do you have?
• What kinds of research questions do you want to answer with your data?
• How do you want to organize and present your data?
• What do you want your project to do?
  • What do you want the user experience to be like? How do you want users to navigate content?
  • What do you want your project to tell users? How do you want your project to help users?
  • What parts of your project do you want to be interactive? What kind of interactivity do you want?
• Who is your project for?
• How much time and resources do you have to maintain the project?
• What kinds of research questions do you want to answer?

Finding a Fit for You Data

In this activity, you’re going to use your sample datasets to create a public-facing visualization or collections. From the list below, select the tool you think is best suited to use to present your data:

Datasets

• Indigenous Art in National Museums
• Tipping in Europe
• U.S. National Park Visit Data

  Tools

• DataWrapper
• StoryMapJS
• CollectionBuilder
• RAWGraphs
• Wax

When we regroup, we’ll consider the follow questions:

• Why did you select the tool that you did?
• How easy was the tool to use? Were there instructions or documentation to help you figure it out?
• What kinds of research questions does this tool help you answer with the dataset?
• Does the tool capture or represent all facets of the dataset (all fields and values)? Why or why not?

Mini Lecture: Static & Dynamic Sites

We’ll be discussing this more during our session on Maintenance & Stewardship, but many platforms and software on the web are divided into two categories: static and dynamic sites. Let’s talk about that.

Static Site Examples

• Venesporan Artists Project {CollectionBuilder}
• Paris-a-Poem {Wax}
• Programming Historian {Jekyll}

Dynamic Site Examples

• Periodical Poets {Omeka}
• Seneca Combs {Omeka}
• Visually Barkcloth {Omeka}
• Educated Guess
• Instagram

Exploring Tools

On your own, explore the list of Collections & exhibits tools in this list of Collections platforms & tools. Pick a tool that you find particularly compelling, then find one example of a project that you feel uses that tool well (hint: use Google or our list of digital projects). Be prepared to share out!

Fix the Fit

Below are four digital projects that are robust and well-researched, but that don’t fit particularly well with the platform they’re hosted on. In your pairs, explore these projects amd identify what the current tool/platform is that runs the site. Note down what the issues with the fit between the content and the platform are. Then, find a platform (or a general type of platform/tool) that you think would be better suited to presenting the content or data included on the site.

• Statues Speak
• Dispossession of the Haudenosaunee
• Repeating Islands

If you need a list of additional platforms to explore, see this Collections platforms & tools list.

Break (15 minutes)

Public Humanities

Session Activities

Post-Activities

Readings:

• When Online Content Disappears by Pew
• (Optional) Endings Principles for Digital Longevity
• Static Web Methodology as a Sustainable Approach to Digital Humanities Projects by Olivia Wikle and Evan Peter Williamson