Punskin57

We got here! My group kicked butt the whole year through and we have an awesome website to show for it! I am feeling jittery about symposium, but I am confident that we will do well as long as we get time to practice tonight (RIP Power in the HCC :/). Here goes!

Wow! We made a finished website that actually isn’t too shabby! I am very proud of my group for sticking with it and seeing this vision out to fruition. Ultimately, there is still work that needs to be done even before seeing Dr. McClurken’s comments like ensuring that ALL accessibility aspects are up to snuff and including more stories written from the oral histories, but just the effort that Lexi put in to get those oral histories up is heroic and impressive enough in its own right. Ultimately, I am happy with what we got done, even if we had to do a little bit more to pick up a lot of slack. As with everything in this class, I am excited and scared for Dr. McClurken’s comments, but that feeling has gotten easier as this class has gone on. Here’s to this momentary lapse in work that I have to do! In the meantime, I need to work on my grinding playlist for when I need it next week.

Feeling STRONG! We all did a l8 night study sesh (two in person, two not) and worked from 7 – 10. I am in the process of completing the timeline.js currently; I decided to throw all of my beans at that instead of the other two articles on Campus Cruising and the Cabin & Swimming Pools. I think it will pair nicely with the pictures of construction that we have. There have definitely been some rough patches in working with this group, as with all groups, but I tried my best to do the best work I can, and that’s all I can do. I have loved the work I have done for this class! As we move into our final touches week, I am feeling strong for this project! We are crushing it!

From the readings, I believe that the key change for historians in an ever increasing digital world relates to how their work is viewed. The web is an increasingly public space, but these digital history websites are usually only seen within the circle of scholars connected to the author of the site. Utilizing the web for digital public history sites enables a connection between a community and the scholars that is always visible and has changes that can be updated instantaneously. If digital historians want their work to be viewed by more people, they will have to join onto projects from preestablished communities looking for someone to conduct the research needed (freelance historians?). This relates to the shift from traditional argumentative history that builds on top of itself through defended arguments to methods such as topic modelling that leave little room for interpretation of the results themselves, instead creating why questions to the raw data created (why did Ms. Janeston write about her potatoes so often?). In short, historians that want their work to be seen by more people will have to be less argumentative in their approach and historians that want to build arguments to challenge established history will need to work harder to get their work seen by more people.

Site 1: Dr. McClurken’s Blog

This was a great site to start on because it provided me with a great example of a professional personal website! The theme is super professional and blacked out, if not a little bland, but still looks good. I didn’t realize that my professor has done just so much! It includes lists of all of the work that he has done and groups that has been on with lots of hyperlinks. This is a prime role model for when I make my personal website and digital portfolio.

Site 2: Digital Tattoo

This site is a student run project dedicated to engaging others on the current discourse surrounding digital identity. The name itself is very captivating and definitely draws the wanted attention to the site. It is very user friendly and has many recommendations for how to use the site. I looked at just a couple of the main topics and they have quite a sizable amount of subtopics underneath them about tons of digital literacy topics, multiple that I am not familiar with! This site is an excellent resource for digital literacy education; I can see a whole high school unit based off of the material presented in this site.

Site 3: Seth’s Blog – Personal Branding in the Age of Google

This is just a quick story of how putting potentially reputable people’s names into Google turned up that they had evidence of them binge drinking and shoplifting. This inspired me to look at my own name on google and Instagram to see what I could find. I am happy with what I found on Google: the UMW Deans List announcement, my Weekly Ringer Articles and a UMW article about move in from my time as an RA. I have been fairly careful around pictures and parties and have recently suspended my Instagram account, but I know some choice pictures at my brother’s frat parties are out (no branded beverages thank goodness, just a stylish metal cup!) I need to not slack off even as I turn 21 because how I portray myself online will stay around forever.

Site 4: Dana Boyd – Apophenia – Controlling Your Public Existence

This site brought up some interesting points. To start, I am turning off Facebook’s public search feature right away. Additionally, when I start blogging I was hoping to be quite blunt with my blogs, but this turned me off from that. I do need to keep ALL of my digital presence not necessarily formal or professional, but definitely PG-13 at least.

Site 5: Prof Hacker – Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics

This site touts three main tiers that must be balanced in creating a web presence: familiarity, consistency and participation. These basically state that I should know what I am getting into data and privacy wise with every site that I sign up for, I should keep a fairly consistent and not abnormal web presence on all platforms and that interacting with others builds your “digital social currency.” One thing that this article stated is that I did want to post that raunchy picture of me backflipping while smoking and shot gunning a white claw (hypothetical of course ;), I could tune my privacy settings so only people that I have approved to view my page could see it. This still allows them to potentially spread the picture around so it is not foolproof.

Got Mr. Lowry’s oral history done and got the frisbee golf map digitized! The future is looking digital and I will need to get on website design, citations and such. I am hoping to learn how to make a website skeleton this week from the DKC and have it made by next week!

For this blog post, I looked at a few historical events on Wikipedia and looked at the revision histories of these events.

Boston Marathon Bombing – April 15, 2013

I thought that it would be interesting to look at a case of an event occurring when Wikipedia was already mainstream, and this was the first that I thought of. This case is especially interesting because the case developed over the next week or so as they looked for the offenders. There are lots of back and forth edits at the start of the article’s history that reflect this. It was also almost immediately that this article became locked to approved editors; I imagine that lots of unverified information would have been on the page without this lock.

Great Molasses Flood – January 15, 1919

The first version of this article came out in 2001 and was just a couple sentences long. Over time, more details were added and recent edits are fixing typos or changing the language to be more neutral.

2024 AT&T Outage – February 22, 2024

This is a topic that is coming out TODAY, so it will be interesting to see how this article plays out. It does say that this issue is ongoing and there is an official Wikipedia warning that “this article may not meet Wikipedia’s general notability guideline.” The post has only had 7 edits and started out with only two short paragraphs. I added the first discussion post regarding that they should add more information regarding how AT&T and other municipalities contacted users about the outage.

Project Predictions Post Scheduling

Welp, we have planned out our schedules! Purely talking from my own standpoint, I think it will be front-loaded with research until about spring-break, and then the rest will be futzing with different website tools. The last two weeks are the Accessibility Week and Polishing Week respectively. Additionally, I have some blank spots in the middle of the project that I can take on some extra responsibilities for other people or from a lack a planning on our part; I need to keep in mind Murphy’s law and to expect the unexpected. I am excited and scared. Here goes nothing!

Accessibility is a spectrum from:

Doing nothing <–>Doing the absolute most for everyone

It is the goal to be as accessible as possible without sacrificing the content of what you are producing.

Headings help to chunk things out at a glance.

But they need to be formatted as a heading, not just by altering the text sizing/formatting.

You can chunk headings within headings!

Like little Russian nesting dolls. How cool is that?

Lists help to:

• Visual Organization
• Improved Readability
• Structural Clarity
• Navigation Aid
• Consistency and Predictability
• Accessibility Standards Compliance

Let’s talk fonts.

Black text on a white background is the gold standard; use caution when veering from this standard

^{_{12 point is the minimum. The more people have to focus on your text, the less information that they will actually attain.}}

Use a contrast checker like Monsido to ensure that your text on background is accessible! Double check with grayscale.

Links n’ stuff

Let them know where links are going! For example, this link will take you to the UMW guide for Accessible Web Design.

DON’T

• Just put a naked link: https://umw.domains/guides/accessibility/
• Say “Click here“

Images

• Use high contrast pictures

Alt Text

Allows those with screen readers/low internet connection to know what is in the image

Transcription

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