Blog Posts

I think Twine is cool, and that’s really what this reflection will boil down to. The story building interface is really nice to work with, and it’s always good when a program uses visual coding blocks, flowcharts in this case. I think Twine is a deceptively simple program. I don’t mean that it’s hard to use, but rather there are so many cool things you can do just by looking a little deeper. For example, I accidentally came across the ability to allow a user to input text, but force the input to display a message of the creator’s choosing. I’ve never seen functionality for something like that implemented in an engine outright, so it was pretty cool to me. I would see myself using Twine for small, personal projects, but it definitely has a place in education through an interactive text game.

StoryMapJS is a pretty simple program to use, which really surprised me. Mapping programs like ArcGIS were a struggle for me to understand, and that’s what I was expecting going into StoryMap. However, the program is more like TimelineJS, but on a map. Creating slide cards was easy, and dragging and dropping locations really sped up the workflow of creating the map. I also noticed that the map could be exported as a package to host on a website or shared with anyone. I don’t see myself using this program often, but it’s definitely one to recommend to anyone doing small story mapping projects.

I spent my training this month working with TimelineJS. I like this program because it’s very easy to get the hang of thanks to the integration with google slides. All of the major work is done by the program using the template they provide. There wasn’t much of note during the learning process of the tool since it was so straightforward, so I want to consider the possibilities of using the tool in my current project. A timeline would be a fun use of a UI for navigating the archive, but maybe not the most accessible or convenient. Maybe for display purposes if anything, it could be used to show some of the more prominent department productions.

This semester, I was introduced to a variety of different digital tools for analyzing data. Also, since I took the DST course for the first half, I had a lot more time in class to learn more about the tools. However, I think the general ideas behind the proper use of data was my biggest takeaway from the semester. In particular, understanding that digital humanities is very connected to humanity (as the name would suggest). It’s important to understand that every aspect of the field is done by people, it’s just assisted by technology. There are nuances in the tools we use and how we as scholars adapt to it for our needs, and the proper ways to share our findings while being respectful to anyone involved in the process of getting the information. I think the training model was fine. I liked the amount of freedom we had in terms of what we could explore, and the time we got was substantial enough to complete the training and explore the program even more if we wanted.

The TDPS archive has made a lot of progress, considering I joined it when it was pretty much just starting. We’ve set plenty of objectives during the semester that we will continue to revisit. Things like the hosting site and gathering outside archival resources is something that should continue into next semester, and I would need to reach out to some on-campus resources for them. My leads and I have created a short document to track the progress we made this semester and to track our next steps.

I’ve been thinking about StoryMaps for a while since we first did the training on it. It seemed very similar to WordPress, but after helping a student use WordPress for their project, I realized that StoryMaps was a lot more intuitively designed for interactive elements. Also the UI is so simple that I’m amazed at how much it actually offers. I think it’s a good thing to look into for any sort of personal projects, really because it just feels so fun to use.

https://grinnell.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html (I’m using the training data since I did not use it on my first pass of the program).

ArcGIS is still not a program I’m very comfortable with using, but that is more because of my own inexperience with data mapping than the ArcGIS itself. Although a lot of my previous criticisms still apply: I don’t think it’s very intuitive at times and actually manipulating the data once it’s set is very difficult or even impossible. This time I did get to explore more of how the data is visualized depending on the parameters set, something I couldn’t do with my five object set, so I’m glad I could see a little more of what the program has to offer. Still,  I wouldn’t feel comfortable helping students out with ArcGIS mapping just yet. Not until I understand more about this form of visualization, at least.

I focused the training on the Exhibits. I apparently already had one that I tested out so I tried to add more to it. Using the exhibits to display the pages is pretty straightforward, but I did struggle with some of the settings. Beyond that, Omeka is still pretty easy for me to use, and I found the experience of revisiting it pretty helpful. I am unsure if it will be an option for my current project in the future, but I will still keep my eye on that in case we decide a new webpage is  the best course of action.

After working with Voyant for a little bit, I found that I prefer it over the Gale Scholar lab. I think the main reason is the interface is a lot more organized. Rather than putting the tools into multiple different pages, Voyant organizes as much as it can into one screen. While that doesn’t seem very intuitive, I feel Voyant can get away with this because it highlights the more important tools to the workflow such as the word visualizers and the summaries, while leaving less used tools or settings in tabs that the user would only access if they needed to. I also think the visualizations themselves are easier to understand since they default to formats that allow a user to process the information quickly. It’s like the difference between looking at a bar graph and looking at a table of data. In general, Voyant seems a lot more compact than Gale, which also means it doesn’t have as many tools as Gale and doesn’t processes as many file formats (I could be wrong, but I’m sure that Gale could process text from images. Maybe they were just pdfs). But I feel Voyant is also a little more accurate with the text it’s detecting.

Learning StoryMaps was actually pretty fun. I noticed the general layout is very similar to a blog, but there are so many more embeds you can add that really increase how much interactivity there is. It’s been very simple to use, so I think I could teach others how to use it. Honestly the amount I could do with it is so cool that I would consider using it on my own outside of Vivero. However, I wish the level of data displays carried over into the design aspect. There aren’t a lot of options for the overall theme of the story map, at least not at a first glance.
Update: I actually went back and found the theme creator, and it’s just as easy to use as the story maps. So yeah, I really like this program.

Learning to use WeVideo was probably the easiest tool so far. I think that’s in part because I have some experience with video editing, and WeVideo is structured very similarly to iMovie. There are some things that are strange to me, though. The audio editing was pretty unintuitive, and if there was a way to add multiple audio tracks at once I couldn’t find it. Still, I think I would be pretty confident in helping students with this.  It’s a very simple editing tool that wouldn’t take to much time to learn in-depth.

Despite the theater department archive project only being a thing since the start of this semester, I feel my leads and I have covered a lot of ground. I would say we are still in the planning stages for the project, since we do not have any direct courses of action as of yet, but we are working on ways to accomplish our major goals. Those being figuring out where to put the images, and digitizing the images that need it. As of now, we are looking into potential technology to digitize the photo slides we have available, and we’ve narrowed down our options to the specifications we need. It’s just a matter of finding one that works and purchasing it, which I think shouldn’t take long at all. However, the other goal I mentioned isn’t quite as in reach. Finding a suitable way to host the archive was one of my first tasks when I joined. We figured our best bet was hosting the archive through the communications and marketing department, since they also take a lot of the photos in productions. However, after meeting with the campus photographer, things with that department don’t seem too suitable for us at the moment. That can change with the possibility of them moving to a new content manager, but a goal like that is not guaranteed. As of now, this endeavor has been put on hold and we shifted our focus to digitizing. Our next steps will be going through and digitizing the slides we have once we have our scanner. We still have to work out a place to save those digital copies, but I think OneDrive is our go-to at the moment.