In working on the design for a new project at CHNM, I sat down today to write page titles for each page of the site. These titles will be dynamically generated. Writing a page title has never been so hard before, but in thinking about all of the things we’re supposed to do these days to keep sites semantically marked up, accessible, and optimized for search engines, I paused and asked myself “what exactly makes a good title?” A quick Google search turned up a 2003 SimpleQuiz discussion on Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits website, and I thought it was worth bookmarking here. In a complex site, as my current project is, in which the core and majority of content is historically valuable information in a database. Questions of how to organize and access this information through a web browser are paramount. And, if someone finds a document he likes, and he chooses to bookmark it, what title should appear in the bookmark list? If Google scans our site, what titles will make sense? I can come up with many ideas, but some are so lengthy they seem useless…off to the drawing board to figure out the optimal solution.

Things have gone pretty well over the last week, working on my re-design of CHNM’s French Revolution website, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” In my work this week, compared with the design project, I really appreciate having the content finished and basically organized. Trying to redesign CHNM’s home page was challenging in large part because, as Lee Ann and Paula highlighted, a new organization of the material is essential. (more…)

After reading more from James Paul Gee in his article “Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines” (PDF) I was no more encouraged than I was before about using video games of any kind to teach our children. His argument strikes me as being provocative for the sake of creating controversy and debate on the topic more so than to make a clear and compelling case for adopting gaming technologies for use in educational programs. (more…)

I think I’m going to need every last minute on this one this week. I’ve decided to tackle a fun, free-thinking redesign of the CHNM homepage. I’m trying to think completely differently and do something new. So far, I’ve been through at least 10 different designs–and that’s after I created the first sketch with my idea. (more…)

A key theme I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’ve been reading my posts is that I am a rather impatient person. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to rant a bit. The Internet visits for this week were frustrating for me and a bit of a let down. Admittedly, it could be my mood…

Nonetheless, the Lost Museum seemed really cool at first, but as I started to wander through, I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. (more…)

Manan Ahmed’s “The Polyglot Manifesto” certainly raised many issues: a right-wing conspiracy to destroy the Humanities, the possible contradiction-in-terms of “a public scholar,” and telegenic charm versus ivory tower retreat. Despite the controversy inherent in these issues, Ahmed’s final point —that the humanities, historians in particular, should become publicly engaged through the digital world—should be anything but.

Frankly, I don’t understand how one person can master his chosen historical field (plus a couple of minor fields), a few foreign languages necessary to do exceptional archival research, and learn to create digital archives —actually, I’m sure there are many exceptionally bright people who are capable, but certainly not all scholars are so gifted. It makes me think that, with the exception of the 10 people in the world who are capable of doing all of this, scholars will spread themselves too thin to be effective in their primary fields. We can’t all do everything. If, for example, you are an expert in colonial American history and you have a profound understanding in American constitutional law and political philosophy, how can you also master French, Spanish, XHTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript? Can you really be a master of it all?

But, I digress. I don’t think this is Ahmed’s point. I do wholeheartedly agree that the digital arena is an excellent place for historians, and all scholars in the humanities for that matter, to engage the public. Ahmed raises three main questions: “Who am I, as a scholar? What is my role within my community? What are my responsibilities to the public?” In his writing, there seems to be a hunger for being more than a scholar, more than a teacher. He cites examples of some who have gone beyond the halls of academia to the public realm, primarily through television. This kind of public involvement, to Ahmed, seems almost like conduct unbecoming a scholar—with its “mass-communication demanded sound-bites” and “rhetoric.” To his goal of being a “socially-engaged scholar,” he argues that the digital world is the place where this goal can be met. While I agree, and I’m sure to garner some flak from my colleagues, I have to point out that as a professor of the humanities, you have a ready-made connection to public society: your students. Isn’t this one of the reasons many people choose become professors, to teach? Not only are there your students, there are your writings, your publications, which presumably is one of the reasons why publications are generally required for tenure —because this is how you contribute and engage the public in your chosen field. Not that one shouldn’t strive to reach beyond these two forms of public communication, but don’t forget that they are there. The way I see it, the Internet, especially the “Web 2.0 World,” is an extension of these two realms. Historians, for example, can better reach their students this way, and reach more students; they can reach more of the general public as well. It is really another form of publication that allows new and different forms of interaction, especially with regard to visual communication.

On Jenny Reeder’s blog, I raise the question of whether the notion of historian as interpreter claims too much. It does strike me as rather pretentious, but I know from my own research that this is what we strive to do. Any thoughts?

This week’s reading made me want to get up and yell about how much I love footnotes, especially after reading Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?” I cannot think of how many times I’ve read some history book, full of references, and I have been torn between whether I should flip to read the endnote (lost somewhere at the end of the book, as I’ve never actually been smart enough to maintain a bookmark in that section) or to keep reading. Many times, I’ve been utterly disappointed after struggling to find that nugget of information and discovering (1) that it was only a variation on an “ibid” citation, which I would then have to read backwards in the footnotes to find the complete reference, or (2) that it was just a simple unannotated source reference. I love when historians comment on their sources. I feel I’ve learned so much this way. After reflecting on all the readings, and commenting on Steven’s lovely NOLA-themed blog (in “The Lost Art of Footnoting,” this is why some variation of the pop-up/lightbox would be my choice. Maybe I would even add a link to a nicely formatted “endnote” page (even though I don’t like endnotes), strictly for people to print out and use on its own. Otherwise, the pop-up allows you to quickly see if the information in the note is something you’re interested in. If it is, you can read on; if not, you can move your mouse and continue with the main text.

About the argument as to whether the footnote should be superscripted and why it should look like print, I would say that why shouldn’t it look like print? In the case of history, it seems that we’re mostly publishing items on the Internet that are also published in print (in some form or another). I agree that the Web is a new format and should explore new presentation methods, but as pointed out on Piggin.Net, there are certain visual cues that presentation provides, and to stray too far from traditional presentation methods could risk comprehension of your final product, whatever it may be.

For Part 1 of our assignment this week, I took an example from McFly at Project Seven and changed the xhtml and css, added header title and background images, and produced 3 linked pages that should all be valid xhtml and css (though I could not get the image for the css one…). I was concentrating on keeping it simple, sticking to a rather monochromatic color scheme, with just a couple of images to spruce it up. I created three pages instead of my original single page so that I could avoid the scrolling and internal page links.

For Part 2, creating a portfolio, I spent quite a bit of time redesigning my site this week, and I wanted the portfolio to fit into my overall design. So, I created a new page in WordPress and added some special styling (see the commented section about a third to halfway down called “Clio2 Portfolio Styles”) to the main content of the page. As time goes on, each box will have a thumbnail image (as the first does) as well as a brief description of that assignment.

I also decided to add back in an image for the site logo.

For this week’s HIST 697, we have read a few interesting things about design–both conceputal and practical–and there were a few worthwhile nuggets in each text. Most interesting, and least surprising, to me was the conclusion of the Stanford University study on evaluating a web site’s credibility: that users base their decisions on design more so than on any other feature of a website. I am conscious of my doing this as I surf the web–I won’t buy things from sites that don’t look nice, I won’t choose a doctor with an ugly website, and I’m more likely to revisit sites that are visually pleasing (and not just for inspiration in my design work). I commented on classmate Misha’s blogpost Readings on CSS issues, where she noted that in the pdf version of the article “Who Are You” by Luke Wroblewski the text was too small to read and there was too much white space. I have a large screen and, as Donald Norman’s article “Attractive Things Work Better” says, I must have been in a good mood so I was able to overcome the minor obstacle that was a poor format for the article (as opposed to the likely quite attractive book form).