Inspired by our class and group discussions in last Thursday, we decided our project would benefit from having a companion WordPress site on the Commons. We already have a Commons group where we share all of our files, keep track of deliverables, and conduct most of our conversations via forum threads. Creating the Commons group was fairly simple, and I only had to check a box to create the companion site: So. Simple.
Yes, and no. A weekend and various additional hours later and our site exists, but I’m also not quite happy with it. In our meeting this evening, my group was very supportive of what is built so far. And I know I shouldn’t be quite so hard on myself as this is my first time ever building a website. And yet…
I think the content we’re building on our Commons site is very solid already. We’re envisioning this site as a space where we can better address our audiences’ pedagogical needs–going more in depth about the making of/behind the scenes of Mapping Cemeteries and explaining our thought processes and decisions along the way. Indeed, we’re finding we can reuse much of what we’ve already contributed in our class blog (aside: this post will definitely be making its way into our Commons site blog, and in posting on our class blog I will be experimenting with my ability to simultaneously post there too, rather than posting twice and backdating–see my comment to see if it worked!).
We’ve engaged comments on our blog page, and we’ve engaged Hypothesis collaborative annotating on every page of our site. We also have a “What We’re Reading” page where we are highlighting articles we are finding particularly influential in our research, which we are linking to via Hypothesis–so we can show our audience our own notes and also encourage them to contribute their own annotations. Our current issue is that an article we’ve found fundamental to our understanding of necropolitics isn’t open access. As a student at the Graduate Center, we have access to the PDF of the article via Project Muse. Hypothesis has a suggested tool where I can drop any PDF and make it accessible for public annotating, and I’ve successfully done so, but if we make the link live, then I think we’re violating copyright. We need to discuss the ethics of this with a librarian. Update to come. So for now our Commons site remains private. But I will share it with the class when it’s ready.
[This entry was originally posted to DHUM 70002 Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices (Spring 2021) in Personal Blogs and tagged mapping cemeteries, Personal Blog on March 23, 2021
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