Reflections
Image Courtesy of Computer Love Waiting by Valerie J Brown
To summarize my final project for HIST390 in five words, I would say: "A humbling, yet rewarding challenge."
Overcoming Challenges
This project was very eye-opening for me as a student who previously thought she was relatively "good" with computers. When I worked as social media intern in Ireland, I wasn't aware of how many "crutches" or "shortcuts" I unknowingly used while building my boss's website on the platform Wix. While I have to admit I did prefer that, I have gained a much deeper appreciation for everything that goes into the websites I use every day. I cannot imagine producing the same website I made for my internship had I needed to use this much more hands-on, simple-approach software.
That being said, I am grateful to have taken this course over another IT course for my MasonCore because I feel it taught me applicable skills through an engaging approach. I LOVE my Wordpress and look forward to exploring how to make that site more "my own" once the semester ends. Omeka was definitely more of a challenge, but it also provided more reward in the end. From one day to the next, I might forget how to embed or what the HTML code was for an image or a link, and I CERTAINLY forgot how to use our Map tools more than once. These challenges, while frustrating in the moment, made me a better student in the end as I had to really explore our course material and do my own deep dive into the word of Youtube tutorials and web articles to find solutions to my problems.
Rationale
Having prefaced with that, I'll elaborate on my rationale for this project. My organizational strategy was to essentially do what I had NOT seen done before. My end result may not entirely reflect what I had envisioned, but I am also clearly not pursuing a career in IT after this! In essence, my primary goal was to organize the content of my website in a way that told the story of my subject, Victoria Woodhull, in an engaging and easy-to-follow fashion. This was something I saw severely lacking in most websites I have seen covering this legend, which is unfortunate because there is SO much great information to include. I was sure to include a plethora of pages to break down the content of my exhibit into bite-size bits since the information is so varied and I think this captures the bibliographical element of my project very well. You can clearly follow the life of Victoria Woodhull while still picking and choosing what part of her story to engage with first. It is my hope that through the skills I've learned in class with maps, timelines, HTML and Omeka that my project can stand on its own as an engaging, organized story of an often forgot hero of women's history!
THANK YOU!
All-in-all, I am grateful to Dr. Beasley for everything she taught us, and can appreciate that was NOT an easy task over a silent group of Zoomers. I've already impressed my boss at my summer internship by knowing the basics of Google Maps and Earth and some HTML. MapWarper was my biggest challenge but is going to be really helpful in my real estate internship as we work with various old and new planning maps.. so I troubleshooted MapWarper ALOT the week the project was due to try and understand how that tool really works.. and I was able to figure it out despite some issues with embedding!