Designing Digital Humanities-
a review of the Collective Biographies of Women (CBW)
Burdick in chapter one is framing the fundamental elements, concepts, and theory of how digital humanities (DH) projects start. The author also points out a solution to have a significant design in a useful DH project.
In this post, I will discuss a short review of the Collective Biographies of Women (CBW). This project is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The project is a digital archive of 1200 books that are biographies of women, and the comprehensive list covers the information provided from 1830 - 1940. From this considerable amount of information, they added a database of historical women that allows users to search by using a name to find a bibliography. This type of DH projects is a “Collective Biography” and gives the women’s life story in a narrative way that helps to make the history reference caritive.
The director of this project, Alison, illustrated the aim of making this project open access for a scholarship and available for anyone. Her objective is to make the research accessible to everyone, and this is one of the tools that helps the scholar to be motivated (1). From this notion, the project is normalizing the history data to model the content in graphics products.
The CBW project is organized by people with various skills and resources. They include faculty from the Scholars' Lab and E-Text Center, research assistants, and students from different departments.
Curation, Analysis, Editing, and Modeling in Burdick ‘s book is an essential element to digitize humanities content and create DH projects. (p17). To run these concepts through the CBW, I will illustrate the following points of the critical elements to evaluate the CBW website interface:
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Space and Color: If we have a look at the space, we would say that the website is a straightforward design and included white spaces that help the eye to read clearly. The color in the header and the content text match each other.
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Multimedia Components: “The graphical user interface, still common in a world of distributed and embedded computing platforms, has put tremendous pressure on this generation of scholars and teachers to be attuned to sophisticated visual literacy.” (p.20) In this project, I cannot say that there are many types of multimedia. There is only one type of image. I think if they have this bibliography in a podcast, that will promote the project.
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Navigation: The website helps the user to navigate through the sections easily. On the home page, they listed all the segments by referring to a photo that helps to describe each section. For example, “Search Person” represented by pictures of people. This visual design helps the audience to find the information in a short time since the project is targeting all ages.
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Mobile Friendly: Smartphones are one of the most popular tools to explore online information, so there is concern about the appearance on a phone’s screen. I tried to navigate through the project using my phone and tablet, and it was almost the same as the desktop screen design. I think they might code the interface to fit with the phone's screen.
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Social Media Platform: There are icons for the accounts on social media, but all the posts stopped in 2015. That’s means they don’t update the content. From my observation of many DH projects, the social media area is fragile.
Burdick mentioned that all the design elements and data visualization could be successful if the network and infrastructure are supported by an expert team and technical support. (p.20). I would say that this project has a good foundation in terms of knowledge. Also, the group that works on the project has a large number of people compared to small DH projects. Thus, the project is at the beginning of the first step for building a sustainable project. What stood out to me was the last modification on the website hasn’t been since January 2017. That means the team has stopped working on the content.
In short, I enjoyed reading through the data specialty as it’s about historical women. I hope that the team keeps working on the content due to the unique idea in this portal.
References
(1) Interview: Alison Booth, The Collective Biographies of Women Project Retrieved from https://www.hastac.org/blogs/bridget-draxler/2009/10/19/interview-alison-booth-collective-biographies-women-project