And now, it is done…
At least for now. At least for the sake of Dr. Petrik’s gradebook. You can see my final assignment, “Santa Anna Goes to Washington.” There is still more that I would like to do. In spite of Geoff and Sheri’s helpful advice, I never got around to learning how to make an image map. So, [...]
Final Project Revision
Based on comments from everyone last week, I’ve gone back and revised my final project. A lot. Perhaps it’s not a bad thing that my wife is gone for the next week at the American Association of Museums conference in Minneapolis. At least, I’ve been revising the design. At first, I was reluctant to depart [...]
Preliminary final project
My preliminary final project is live: http://davidmckenzie.info/projects/exhibits/show/santa-anna-goes-to-washington I feel like it’s coming along. It’s coming along a bit more slowly than I had hoped, but it is coming along. Thus far I’ve found working with Omeka both challenging and rewarding. Rewarding, because it’s taken a learning curve to crack, and because it will give me more [...]
Interactivity: Best Friend and Worst Foe
As the Clio Wired sequence draws to a close (except for those of us doing a minor field in digital history), and we move toward the sequence’s end product–a full digital history project–this week’s reading and web visit considered interactivity. Ah yes, interactivity. The best friend and worst foe of exhibition developers, informal educators, and [...]
Starting to bring it together
At the end of last semester, Dr. Leon asked us to comment on a general prompt: What difference does new media make to doing history? After a course that had some hands-on elements combined with a lot of exploration of what others have done (and even some new media theory), we all commented that it [...]
Addendum: Making my own information more accessible
This afternoon, as I finished up Visual Explanations, and furthermore tonight, when I returned home from giving a talk and saw Megan’s insightful comment about ability to compare maps, I realized I had made a mistake of parallelism in my previous blog post. When I displayed the 1846 and Boschke maps of Washington, I didn’t [...]
Making information accessible
As we’ve discussed throughout the semester, design is not just about making things pretty, but also functional–to go back to my former classmate’s telling, the crossroads of art and engineering. This week’s web visits focused more on the functionality part, specifically making websites accessible to people with disabilities, and the reading (Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations) [...]
Photoshop for history
This week’s assignment, working with images, is up. As others have commented, it is amazing how addictive working with images in Photoshop can be. Thankfully I got a plenty early start on it! I chose to give my page a name: “Retouching the Capital City.” I was particularly excited about a Library of Congress painting [...]
More Photoshop play
This week’s reading and video assignments cover more about the magical world of Photoshop, particularly how it can be used to restore historic photos to their former glory. As Dr. Petrik noted in our class discussion last week following the class’s lively blog exchange (read the awesome posts by Sheri, Geoff, Lindsey, Celeste, Megan, Beth, [...]
Playing with Photoshop
For this week, we are moving from setting up pages on the Web to the nitty-gritty of Photoshop. As I read through the book, the articles and watched the video, I started playing with my own images. All of the books for class thus far have been helpful, but Non-Designers Photoshop Book has been the most [...]