Digital History

Clio 3 Long (enough, I hope) Tutorial: Creating a MySQL Database Listing in Your Wordpress Site

Clio 3 Long (enough, I hope) Tutorial: Creating a MySQL Database Listing in Your WordPress Site

Note: I have cross-posted this on the class blog. Should any changes be made, they will appear on that site in the future. Lesson Goals & Reasons Goals In this lesson, you will learn how to create a listing of data from a MySQL database, and have it display in WordPress. You will need:

Playing with new tools

This past week, I’ve spent a bit of time (at least when not dealing with a busy week at work, including leading two walking tours on Sunday) playing around with tools that we learned last week, and looking a bit ahead. After Sasha and Jeri’s excellent tutorials, I was eager to dive into webscraping tools. [...]

Presenting WordPress

This week for Clio 3, I’m presenting on WordPress–the platform on which I’m writing right now. As we’ll discuss in class, though, it’s so much more. WordPress is, indeed, a full content management system. To give my classmates a preview of what I’ll be doing: First, a Prezi (which you are free to browse) giving [...]

The middle parts are the problem.

It’s 3 a.m. … Do you know where your CSV columns are?

Tomorrow, or technically today, I’m presenting in Clio 3 on Data Manipulation. As Professor Gibbs and I defined it on Monday, my presentation on this potentially broad topic is twofold: Using SQL commands in PHPMyAdmin to merge and split fields; e.g., merge or split names; Using PHP to switch a CSV file’s date format into [...]

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 [...]

One of my favorite portions of Rosling's talk came when he broke out wealth within various countries. Here's my not-nearly-as-great visualization of El Salvador's wealth disparity: Top is a scene from my village, San Lorenzo. Bottom is a scene from La Zona Rosa, one of the wealthiest areas of San Salvador.

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 [...]

The two maps, together. I suppose another step would involve superimposing one on the other. Perhaps another time.

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 [...]