For digital humanities to be sustainable, I think my question makes much more sense.  Digital historians have to figure out whether people will come to their site, what they need to do to make it meaningful and engaging, and how to get it funded. I don’t see this as very different from publishing a book, except that time on the web goes much faster.

Whether people interact on the site is not necessarily that important. Using the site is.

Of the 2 historical sites we had this week, I would guess that the Historic Tale Construction has many one-time visitors, whereas The Lost Museum has a smaller number of visitors, but ones who return repeatedly. The Historic Tale is fun and engaging, but once you’ve created drawings, I doubt you’ll want to return. It doesn’t provide enough content to get you to return. It allows for participation, but that is not how it should be measured.

On the other hand, The Lost Museum feels really hokey and antiquated with its virtual view, but if you get to the content, there is a lot of it, and it’s good. Well-designed search features which allow you to select media, time frame, keywords and more, would make me come back if I needed to find something. But if you really intend to do research, The Lost Museum might disappoint, since there is no controlled vocabiulary. This means that if you do separate searches for ”black” and “African American” under images, for example, you’ll get completely different results.  There is no interaction at this site, in terms of contributing, but it may well engage a non-participatory audience.

What is my point? You have to know your audience to design sustainable digital projects. Whether your audience wants an interactive website is part of the equation. What will suffice for one group, will not for another. Particpation is part of that equation, not the other way around.

Designing a meaningful, engaging site with good content should be our first priority. Functions that add value are wonderful, if budgets allow for that.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/mona/mona.html

It would also be interesting to see what visually impaired people see when looking at a screen–or to try to understand how vision impaired people access information in some sort of simulation.  Describing an experience is totally different form feeling it. And it’s hard to understand how much we take for granted in the presentation of information, without looking at it from another perspective. That’s why I really enjoyed the WebAim simulation. When you listen to the screen reader, its clear why file names are important (as it reads filenames with numbers in the millions-totally useless information), and should be considered part of the information of your page, not just something in the-back end.
Perhaps this already exists, but it would be cool to have a simulation station, where you could plug in different variables to experience your website from different perspectives, and also optimize to chosen criteria. But in the end, I think a lot of criteria for good web design should already include accessibility, and that we shouldn’t consider it an add-on or favor

Adaptions you make for one group will likely be useful for another, and thus modifications are not ability-specific. For example, for low vision readers you could have extra rich description of images (imagine museum curator narrated alternate text) ). But there are probably many users who would want the same features even if they  don’t have vision problems, if they use a screen reader for other reasons.

It seems to me that w3c validation should have minimum requirements for all ability users, to make web design inclusive from the beginning.

I have played with color for hours and hours. In fact, I set aside hours to play with colors, and nothing else.

I can’t figure out how to get web-safe colors from the handy tools. The palette generators working from jpgs or websites  don’t give good range of tones, either too dark or too light–without allowing to pick gradients.

Think of how much money clothing companies could make if they could generate matching outfits in different palettes.

As it stands, seems the best way for a complete amateur like me is to find a website I like and copy their colors, and not worry about being web-safe right now.

Here’s a link to my favorite colors site right now,  as a muted version of what I have. Though I do want red:

http://www.aaexperience.org/

I tried to change the colors, got over ambitious and messed with a column, and everything exploded. Will try again soon.

I finally have a portfolio up, http://race-in-colonial-mexico.net/.

There are a bazillion things I can think of doing to make it better, but if you have any ideas, I’d appreciate them. I’m swinging between the “fear-of-computer-exploding” phase and the “Wow-I can’t-believe-I did-that” phase.

This is as painful and as fun as learning a new language through complete immersion. But where’s the travel, the food, the  ancient sites? Learning new languages usually offers a lot of collateral benefits that help you get through the pain…

I think of a website as a verb, in action, doing things, but of course, there are the people making that all work. It can be changed on the fly. It is available for an infinite number of people to see. Paper publishing, to me, is much more of a noun. A final product is created, it may get shipped around and shared, but generally speaking only one person can use it at a time. While there was input and process up to the point of publishing, once published, it won’t change.

The Polyglot encourages historians to become familiar with digital techniques in order to open up scholarship to a wider public. One problem I see with his examples is that they don’t challenge academics to think in new ways. Yes, adding hyperlinks and annotations is different, but it is not clear whether he thinks that adding more information is always good. He doesn’t discuss the historians’ role in filtering through tons of material to create a coherent narrative, or whether historians should abandon narrative altogether. I don’t see a change in academic perspective, but rather, a claim that we can add more and make it better if we put it on the web.

Can you get tenure for discussing ideas on your blog, rather than publishing a print article? Why is one format favored over the other? I think these kinds of questions really disturb the standard academic standards. What about if they maintain a website—does that count as publishing an article, or a book? But more importantly, if digital humanities require academics to keep up with the latest via online conversations and websites, what will happen to academics who don’t want to participate in those kinds of conversations? Will they fall behind, become uninformed, be left out of online conferences? I’m guessing that these are some of the anxieties that are underneath squabbles about the usefulness of annotations or hyperlinks.

But this blog was written in 2006, long before the power of social media took off. So what Polyglot didn’t know back then is that the web could become a place of interaction, where ideas are discussed, rather than a delivery mechanism. What academics should be concerned about is whether or how their fields are changing because of new digital possibilities.

I don’t think anyone should be forced to do digital history. At the same time, it seems that academics need to figure out how to value contributions of their colleagues, for both their digital and print work, and work out new guidelines for tenure accordingly.

• Alan, Jan 25
• George, Jan 25
• Curtis, Feb 1
• Dave, Feb 1
• Tracy, Feb 1
• Rwany, Feb 1
• Laszlo, Feb 1

See any of the w3c tutorials for examples.

Yum

It’s great when people show the code needed line by line, but it would be even better if there were a picture of the code rendered, so we could actually see what it is doing. In my fantasy world, it would be nice to be able to reverse engineer from a representation or rendering (not code). In other words, just like you have the option to see having source code, you could also have the option to see just text and images like the website, and could click on an item to see how that effect was achieved, pertaining to both the html and the css.

Another thing that exists in my dreamworld is a compatibility chart. It lists all the different types of browsers (and automatically kepps track of a range of browers giong back 5 years to catch all those who have not upgraded) and the configurations that make them capable across all platforms. Better yet, it would be a database where you could say you wanted to use Century Schoolbook 12, and ask which browsers might not render that correctly, and also list work-arounds. This, too, would be automatically updated to cover all fonts installed in all computers of the past 5 years. Do developers really just know all this stuff? How do they keep up to date?

Final item, which I don’t think is that dreamy. I realize that most of us are on information overload right now. But at some point I would like to learn what things need to be considered in designing a site for accessibility. Ultimately, I think we should build accessibility into the design right from the beginning, rather than trying to patch things up later. W3C does not (yet) have a validator for accessibility, but they do have a Web Accessibility Initiative page.