Doing Digital Humanities
My work on “Cold War Fronts” is on the one hand a lesson in how hard it is to predict where the quicksand of web building will appear, and how easy it is to spend a full day or more searching for a shockingly simple solution. This came up first, when I transferred pages and data from an old Omeka installation and subfolder to a new one. It happened again, most egregiously, when I struggled to embed the kepler maps onto Omeka, the crux of my site. It repeated when I tried to replace “Exhibits” on the navigation menu with the site’s two principal exhibits: Maps and Organizations. (This remains unresolved as of writing, with Omeka Forum’s assistance.) I cannot help wondering whether these errors hinge more on my ignorance of all things “back end,” or whether even if I did know the associated jargon, I’d still have struggled—and for the simple reason that I didn’t know Omeka and kepler.gl well enough. How much, in other words, does the quicksand vary between sites, and how much can experience circumvent it.
The work that I’ve done thus far is also, though, a testament to how accessible web design and building has become. The time spent above is only wasted if I forget what I learned. The product, however primitive, is substantial, and even more importantly, scalable. I have more data to add, maps to upload, and organizations to represent, and now that I’ve cut my teeth on kepler.gl and Omeka, the accumulation will only get easier.
Standing between these negative and positive sides of my work to date are the departures that I’ve had to make from the original plan. Some aspects will simply have to wait. The liberal and anti-colonial exhibits, for example, are missing altogether, while the “Organizations” pages are inchoate, and the associated collection of public domain images that I foresaw accompanying them remain to be vetted and uploaded. Then there are the hurdles that I’ve faced in kepler.gl. My plan envisioned representing events not only by where they met, with a point or heatmap, but also by how many people, countries, or organizations attended. To do so I imagined translating the data into columns like the ones I’d seen on the kepler.gl demo. This, however, seems to require coding of one’s own; and while it’s certainly something I could learn, that requires time and effort that I don’t yet have to give it. I also realized that kepler.gl does not allow me to add up the data sets that I’ve added—at present, eight in all—and thereby indicate how many front events and meetings Moscow hosted as opposed to Budapest. This, as you wrote me, Stephen, requires adding all of the data to a single spreadsheet—perfectly doable, I’m sure, but an unforeseen hurdle to what I initially expected. Finally, I need to add fields for comment at the bottom of relevant pages, where the “information, suggestions, and corrections” that I solicit on the “About” page can reach me.
The recommendations that I received from classmates were positive, as concerned the general layout of the site, and critical, as concerned the total incoherence its content. No doubt even Cold War historians will have the same complaint. What are these groups and what is their significance? But here again I’m confident. The “Organizations” pages require more work, but will soon have it. The question of significance requires a page that reflects my own conclusions—for example, the bit noted on my initial design about how representatives of Soviet bloc states left the bloc more often and in greater variety that we think.
And with that, enjoy: nkrutter.org/cwfronts
