Even though I’ve been a Vivero Fellow for 3 semesters, I still feel like I’m learning more and more about the process of digital projects. I think that’s helped by my project being so early in development, so everyone involved is learning as we go. I think my best advice would be to embrace the process of learning and researching. I feel like I get frustrated when there is no known answer about something, so being a fellow has helped me with finding answers out on my own.
The training structure was more laid back since I was a returning fellow, but I did enjoy revisiting some of the programs I learned before. I don’t learn as well when I only visit something once, but on that second look after some time I start to connect what I did before to its actual effects. I also liked the trainings that focused on broader Vivero topics. This allowed me to really delve into what I hoped to gain this semester with my project.
Using CollectionBuilder for the archive project has been the highlight of my Vivero work, and I think it’s mostly because of how much I could play around with the code within the project (I am at my happiest when I get to use Visual Studio Code). I really liked figuring out ways to break down the website functions into pieces that, once implemented, will almost never need to change later down the line. It was great digital humanities work as well as the general programming that I always look forward to. There are still some kinks that need to be ironed out for the general website, as well as setting up metadata and transferring everything into the proper website, so these are my next steps along with poster scanning. I wrote out the documentation of our progress this semester, and have been working on documentation specific to the CollectionBuilder site, which also needs to be updated as I continue to work on it.
I think content management projects are something I would always like to explore, not only because of the project but because of the relation to web development as a whole.