Solving Problems through Digital Media Tools
Angela Scavone and Dolan McGuire are Marquette history interns who spent the Fall 2017 semester working on a digital project called Protest at MU: Dissent on the Marquette Campus. They created an interactive digital media project that documented the history of protests on Marquette’s campus. Alyssa Duetsch, one of the Digital Scholarship tutors, helped them work through some of the roadblocks they ran into, and interviewed them about their process.
Below, Scavone and McGuire reflect on their experiences using WordPress and Timeline JS to create their website.
Solving problems through WordPress
Alyssa:
WordPress is a great site for anyone who wants to create their own website. It is user friendly and the basics are, for the most part, simple to understand. That being said, with an in depth project like this, discovering more of what WordPress can offer can cause some uncertainty. One issue we ran into was deciding what theme to use to display all of the information that Angela and Dolan had acquired. We talked through the different limitations of certain themes and what could be changed. Some were more visually appealing, while others displayed text better. After experimenting with different options, Angela and Dolan decided on a final theme. Although there is a lot more we discussed about WordPress and a lot that we worked through, after a while, Angela and Dolan were able to navigate and edit the site without much help at all. They became experts on their site and knew all of the ins and outs of managing it. WordPress might have created uncertainty in the beginning, but once Angela and Dolan understood it better (which did not take long) they were able to use WordPress to create a successful site.
Angela:
I have used WordPress before for blogging, but I have never used it before as more of a website. WordPress worked best for the website because it it gave us the most options for hosting a free site. But being more of a blogging platform, it did come with some challenges. We wanted to have a homepage for the website where the different pages of the websites would be displayed with their picture for users to click on a picture and be directed to that specific page. A problem was that with most themes there was no way to have pages displayed on the landing page, so instead of using the WordPress page feature, we incorporated our content into blog posts, which work almost exactly the same way the page would. But one problem that came with this, was the order the posts were displayed on the homepage was out of order. To fix this, we realized we had to change the dates on the blog posts, as WordPress orders the posts chronologically.
Dolan:
This was my second time creating a website using WordPress. Because my last experience with WordPress was very superficial (and a very long time ago), I really was flying blind at the beginning. It was frustrating to set up the initial website because, like Angie and Alyssa mentioned, it was difficult to find the right theme that balanced visual appeal with content display, After some trial and error, though, we managed to find one that worked well enough for our purposes. Although we were disappointed with the lack of customization options in WordPress, particularly when it comes to fonts, images, and color patterns, we were able to tinker with the options the theme did give us to make the site look as best we could.
Solving problems through Timeline JS
Alyssa:
Timeline JS is a visually simple tool. The projects created with it are easy to read through, informative, and allow users to feature large images or videos. However, the simpleness and neatness of the final product does not do justice to what the creation process is truly like. A spreadsheet is used to hold all of the info and links to images. It is not an easy to learn the depth of the tool’s capabilities quickly. A problem that Angela and Dolan ran into was how to link their images. Linking itself is not difficult but where the link brings the viewer was the problem for this timeline. Depending on how they linked their images from Flickr, different captions would show up on their timeline. In the end, in order to get the visual aspect they wanted on their timeline, they had to sacrifice linking to the album on Flickr. If they linked to the album, then they would have an additional caption. They basically had to decide between the two options. Angela, who was the lead on this section, with Dolan’s input, ended up deciding to link to the album and then editing part of the Flickr album to get a uniform caption throughout all the images. A problem arose with one digital media tool, but another was used to solve the problem.
Angela:
This was my first time using Timeline JS and while it can be limiting since you are confined to editing all information by entering it into a Google Docs spreadsheet, it does arrange the information an aesthetic and well-organized way. I am an extremely visual person, so one thing I wanted to do was color code the events on the timeline. It was easy to change the color on the background of the event, but I wanted to have the little flags on the rolling timeline below the specific events to be color coded as well. This proved a bit more difficult, but Alyssa realized that I could use an image of a color inserted under the media thumbnail in the spreadsheet to change the color. Really, all I had to do was Google an image of the color blue and then put the link into the spreadsheet. The biggest problem we had using Timeline JS was getting the images to work in the timeline. This was difficult because Timeline JS only uses photos that are linked to the web, but a majority of our images were scans from the archives, which were not on the internet. Therefore, we had to find a place to host these images so we could put them in the timeline. At first we tried Google Docs, but it only worked for some images. We then tried Flickr and found success there. Using Flickr added a whole other component to the project though. Flickr does a great job of organizing the images in a professional looking manner and I divided up the photos into albums, so users are able to scroll through and view all the images we used in the project. With Flickr we can give citation and title to the image so users will know where we retrieved it from and where to look for more information.
Dolan:
I was exposed to Timeline JS for the first time a year ago, while taking Dr. Lezlie Knox’s “digital media inflected” Black Death history class. There, we were introduced to a number of different digital media applications used by historians to present historical research. So, coming into the project I had a very basic knowledge of how Timeline JS operated. However, I soon realized that my elementary knowledge of Timeline JS didn’t prepare me (or Angie) for the numerous challenges it would throw our way. For one thing, like Wordpress, Timeline JS suffers from a lack of options for customization. Just as we found with Wordpress, we were hindered in what we could do creatively with the site (such as changing fonts, colors, layout etc.). One specific problem with Timeline JS that gave me a lot of grief was hosting videos. I had wanted to include videos in our timeline from the very beginning, but it proved to be a bigger challenge than I could have imagined since Timeline JS requires all media to be hosted on public web servers and some of the videos I had selected were not hosted on such servers. So we had to try a number of different hosting options: first Google Drive, then Dropbox, then another third party hosting site, before we finally decided to simply upload the videos from Youtube (and thus had to navigate citation issues). It took a while, but we were able to get the videos we had selected to appear and play on the timeline. Another specific issue we overcame was the site’s formatting of the captions below images. As Angie mentioned, we were forced to use Flickr to host all of our images, since Timeline JS only displays them if they are hosted on a web server. But when we did this, Timeline JS would put the text from the “comments” section on each image’s Flickr page in the caption below the image. This was obviously ideal from an aesthetic point of view, so we ended up having to switch the citations in each Flickr page to the comments section! It was another issue that ended up being resolved, but not nearly as quickly or cleanly as we would have hoped.
As shown above, these digital media tools created a lot of problems for Angela and Dolan’s project. However, they were able to resolve these problems. And often time, when there was an issue with one tool, another could be utilized to solve it. There is no limit to what can be done when combining digital media tools, and working through projects such as this one just helps demonstrate this. Although a simple answer is not always found, digital tools can be used to create amazing projects and solve any problems that might arise. The solutions come through time and determination to understand what digital tools can offer.
