Project Charter
Post your project charter to the DSSF19 website by 9 am, Friday, June 18. Use the Project Charter category.
Monday, June 14
9:30–10am: Monday Check-In
10am–Noon: Inside the Black Box: HTML, CSS, and WordPress Workshop
Today, we will take a look at the basic building blocks of any website: HTML and CSS. We will pull apart a few websites to see what makes them tick. Then, we will take a look at WordPress, a content management system that powers over 1/3 of the world’s websites. Today’s session is not going to teach you how to code, but it will give you some experience thinking through what makes websites work.
Before the Workshop
- Create a Gettysburg Sites domain and install an SSL certificate using the DH Toolkit tutorial. Remember, what you use for the Choose your Domain field will remain part of your Sites URL no matter what you use it for (example: rmiessle.sites.gettysburg.edu)
- Review the DH Toolkit tutorial for WordPress to get a general idea of how WordPress works as a content management system.
- Watch the following short videos on Don’t Fear the Internet:
- Take the Khan Academy Intro to HTML/CSS course (to start, we recommend only doing the Intro to HTML, Intro to CSS, More HTML tags, and CSS text properties lessons, but feel free to do more). You may want to spread this out during the week, but you will want to complete it by the end of the week, at least.
To Learn More
- Watch: Posner, Miriam. “How Did They Make That?”
- Review digital tools at Hackastory
- Ford, Paul. “What is Code?”
- Glass, Grant. “The Black Box.”
- Marino, Mark. “Why We Must Read the Code.”
Tuesday, June 15
10am–Noon: Optional Office Hours
Register to get the Zoom link: https://libcal.gettysburg.edu/event/7926302
Drop in at any time during these two hours if you’d like to talk more about specific tools or topics we’ve covered recently. Digital Scholarship Committee members will be available to answer questions or help troubleshoot any issues you’re experiencing.
Wednesday, June 16
10am–Noon: Mapping Workshop
Digital maps allow us to visualize data spatially, in modern, historical, and even fantastical constructs. Generally, digital mapping can be divided between narrative maps, that is, maps that follow a path and tell a story, and data-driven maps, or maps that are focused on visualizing various large sets of data (such as GIS). Today we will focus on maps that tell narratives using the ArcGIS Story Maps and Knight Lab StoryMapJS tools.
Before the Workshop
- Watch this introduction to mapping (45:22). DSSFs should include a link to the maps from the Cornell University Persuasive Cartography collection and the Humanities collection of Esri Story Maps and record your responses in the in the OneNote notebook.
- Read: Ice Is Everywhere: Using Library Science to Map Child Separation and look through the Torn Apart/Separados Digital Project, Volume 1 and Volume 2
- DSSFs will receive an ArcGIS Story Maps login prior to the session if they do not already have one. All other attendees should email rmiessle@gettysburg.edu prior to the session if an ArcGIS login is needed.
To Learn More
- Wiseman, Andrew. “When Maps Lie.”
- Maps that Changed History
- Fenton, William. “Humanizing Maps: An Interview with Johanna Drucker.”
- “Twelve Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Story Maps.“
Thursday, June 17
10am–Noon: Timeline Workshop
Just as maps allow us to visualize data spatially, timelines are a way to visualize chronological events that occur in a linear fashion, but perhaps more importantly, show us how to conceptualize a linear progression of time as points of data. We will be looking at one tool specifically, TimelineJS. Note: for this session, you will need to have a Google account (you do not need a Gmail address).
Before the Workshop
- Review the DH Toolkit Tutorial for TimelineJS
- Use this Google Form to create an event in time. The event can be anything, but at the very least, fill out the year, headline, text, and media elements on the form. Feel free to add things to the other form as well.
- Watch this video on time (22:01) (no activities involved).
To Learn More
- Schöch, Christoph. “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities.”
Friday, June 18
9:30–10am: Weekly Updates and Planning
10am–Noon: Scalar Workshop
Scalar is a free, open source content management system and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar works differently than WordPress and Omeka, in that it is an interconnected “web” of pages and media, connected by paths and tags, but it can be used to create dynamic, nonlinear websites. Think of Scalar as more akin to those old “choose your own adventure” novels, in that you give your users options to pick what path they want to go down. Today we will review Scalar and try to see if we can make something happen with it.
Before the Workshop
- DSSFs: Today’s pre-work is a bit different, and can be accomplished as a group. You will probably want to spend a small amount of time working on it during the week as a group. We want you to be creative and put us in Albert Chance’s shoes and give us some choices as to what he is doing next based on the materials in the collection. In reality, he had to go where the Army told him to go … but what if he had some choices? Here’s a possible way to visualize this sort of choose your own adventure path. This was created with Padlet and uses the Canvas style, but use whatever tool you want to trace out a small portion of Albert’s journey through North America, Italy, and Africa.
- Watch the following Scalar videos:
- Introduction to Scalar (15:26)
- Creating an Account and Uploading Media (12:18)
- Creating Pages and More (24:07)
- Take a look at one of the following Scalar projects. How is its structure different from what you would consider a “traditional” website? Are there similarities? Does Scalar seem to be a good fit for this project? What other tools are being used?
