Month: February 2021

Marcella’s Midterm(ish) Post

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I’ve spent a lot of this term cleaning up the Carleton Guide to Medieval Rome from Reason site. While I have worked a decent amount with Omeka before, this project has given me a whole new level of appreciation for how much detailed, meticulous work goes into making these types of websites look their best. And while there have been a few times I got frustrated or confused (such as when a random coverage field box would not disappear), it has been really rewarding to see it slowly start to look better and more uniform and to become truly familiar with a collection. Because it turns out that I like spreadsheets. I like metadata. I enjoy the behind-the-scenes work needed to help make projects presentable to a public audience.

I’m graduating soon, so for me I think what I’ve appreciated the most this term, through all the projects I’ve worked on, is the opportunity to cement for myself that I do truly enjoy this type of work. While graduation is still scary, at least now I feel a lot more comfortable and confident going into my post-graduation plans. (Plus writing the Star-Bellied Sneetches Twine story example with Karah was such a fun break from my endless comps research!)

And finally, as requested, a visual!

Karah’s Midterm Post

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Early on in the term I spent a couple weeks working on class handouts for PSYC 384, providing examples for ways the students can reimagine the class’s usual final project to be a digital endeavor. When the class was in person, students would create games that demonstrate how prejudice works and ways to combat bias.

I had so much fun coming up with different ways of creating digital game boards and playing with online tools as we made examples for the PSYC class. I learned how to use Twine, a site where you can build choose-your-own-adventure stories. Marcella and I enjoyed writing a Twine story example about Star-Bellied Sneetches so that it would fit into the class theme of reducing prejudice. We were really able to play around and be creative with this project, which goes to show just how many possibilities the digital humanities can offer classroom settings and beyond.

I particularly enjoyed being a visitor in the PSYC 384 class because we were able to describe all the work we did and share the ideas we had come up with for games they could make. It was also great to simply see the faces of everyone who would be using the materials Marcella and I put together for the class. It’s the smaller things like this that I am appreciating this term.