What skills or knowledge from your coursework are you using in your internship? Have you noticed a difference between theory and practice? Why or why not?
Two texts come to mind in response to these questions, one from Kelly Schrum’s class, and the other Mills Kelly’s. When Schrum assigned us Stephen Wineburg’s reflections on “Historical Thinking,” I immediately added it to a class that I was teaching. Wineburg’s thesis was familiar to me, inasmuch as it’s part and parcel of any history class: be sensitive and forgiving. You don’t have to condone Hitler or slavery in order to ask and seek to understand how sensible, non-sadistic people embraced them. A brief, face-to-face, casual insistence on this kind of tolerance from a Stanford psychologist carries a weight that a carefully worded lecture preamble from yours truly doesn’t. Or so my classes suggest since I added Wineburg to the syllabus. Now, what does that have to do with the question above? At the core of my site is an issue that I find myself dancing around in long-winded, multi-clause sentences. In this case, it’s to convey my subjects’ ambivalence about serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. Conveying sensitivity to that is not easy, but is vital to the story the site tells.
From Kelly’s class I recall an Australian author’s call for “generous interfaces” that allow for more stimulus from the site user than a traditional search function. What interests me here isn’t so much the question of what kind of search works best for the Digital Humanities–and more specifically, whether words alone are inadequate. Rather, the text makes me reflect on the issue of interface, and the limitations that Story Maps Classic places on what the user can see at any given moment. We can navigate between chapters by clicking on chapter titles. But the three formats available greatly limit the user’s autonomy: scroll-down text, block images, and the creative melding of the two in “immersive” combinations of text and photos. Which makes me think of someone’s review of the site I built for Kelly’s class. Where do I go? they wrote. How do I navigate? So “generous interfaces” that grant the searcher, or in my case the viewer, more options aren’t always welcome. The challenge is to make the site engaging yet simple. I spoke with my mentor about this for some time yesterday. “It feels like your fingers get tired scrolling through the maps,” I told him, in reference to my narrative maps that zoom in and out as I guide the visitor through a story. He suggested that I post pins on the map, number them, and let the visitor proceed through the story at their own base. Having consulted the LOC’s outstanding “D-Day” Story Map, we settled a middle route between the two: post the pins without numbers, and don’t require the user to click on them in order to see what they signify. Here’s hoping that’s simple and “interactive” in equal measure.
