lovehistory.net

I found the articles we read for class this week to be very challenging (not only because some of the terminology was completely alien to me), as they forced me to think about the way I have always approached the web as a builder. I’ve had an amateur interest in web design for years, and when I approach new websites I spend a great deal of intellectual energy evaluating the usability and aesthetic of a site from a design standpoint before I consider content. Usually this boils down to: how attractive is the webpage (which special consideration to how legible it is in terms of colors, typeface, etc.) and how navigable is it? How easy is it for me to get from A to B? Is it visually disruptive? Does the physical layout of the page hinder my interaction with it? I’ve come to be increasingly of the clean and simple school in these respects. And sometimes I’ll admit that if the design is too difficult or offensive I’ll leave and never return, despite the value of the content. I’ve never had to design anything resembling a digital history project, though I have written for one (and what I wrote vs. what was selected to go on the web site and how it was arranged could be explored in its own blog post), so to read these articles on the way digital history and design must intersect has given me new perspectives on how to evaluate the history sites I interact with on a regular basis, as well as new ways to consider how I might create and design my own project.

In the chapter from Cohen and Rosenzweig, “Designing for the History Web,” I was struck my the authors’ assertion that “graphical sophistication and occasionally even challenging design can help place historical materials and ideas in formats that solicit powerful responses from the viewer.” This speaks a bit to my previous post about the possibility that digital history could be used as an experiential history project. Historians often debate the ultimate goal of the profession itself: is the role of the historian to present the reader with a factual narration/presentation of the historical record, or should they go a step forward and employ their research and presentation of the historical narrative to evoke a response in their reader that then effects the way they view and interact with the present? This question is as equally relevant to digital history projects as it has been to all other facets of the historical profession, especially since the internet is becoming an increasingly larger way for us to see and experience the world in a non-physical sense. Hearing and watching recordings and seeing images I would argue, however, are physical experiences, and the web makes it possible for most users to experience these kind of historic texts. Further, if we continue to conceptualize of the web as a space and the website as a part of it we ourselves design, it can be viewed then as a space which the user experiences and engages with intellectually and emotionally. We may not be able to control the path the user takes traveling through our site as we might in a physical museum, or how long they stay, as Cohen and Rosenzsweig point out, but the design of the website can create intellectual and emotional reverberations within a user’s mind simply through their visual and perhaps aural interaction with the layout, the information present, and the way it is displayed. Websites can visually and perhaps even spatially convey tone, and their presentation of information can be emotionally evocative, especially if it is visual. As digital history projects continue to proliferate, I think these are important considerations builders should keep in mind, including, when evaluating their work, whether or not these choices have been made consciously.

The way a site is designed can also give clues as to its purpose. The Elings and Waibel article discussed the standardization of metadata, but a similar move toward the standardization of design in digital history sites might have the virtue of increasing usability, though you might lose the potential value of presenting your own interpretation of the material through the visual medium of design.

I was also was intrigued by the way the chapters from Digital History and the typography article (my favorite reading of the bunch) discussed how web design is in many ways a child of the (mostly standardized) design of print books, and that in terms of usability and even aesthetics some of the lessons learned from print books are still valuable to web designers. Reading the article on typeface once again made me think about how I myself design – I think I am more visually than content driven in the initial stages. Visually how I want my site to appear seems to naturally progress into what kind of information I will want to include because I am already spatially organizing the content in the design. My visualizations of the website also help me consider my audience because I am already anticipating the community of people I might imagine responding well to such a design. I’m not sure how well adapted to digital history this approach will be, but in my experience content and design by the end of the process have become inextricably linked. I suppose in saying that I’m not making any new or revolutionary claims, but that was what I took away from a lot of this reading: even in the new digital medium, a lot of the common sense things we’ve learned about communicating information (for example, the way text is presented to the reader from the way the fonts are shaped to the size of the margins on either side of the text, etc.) transfer to the creation of web sites. It will be interesting to see if these conventions hold true over time – do they work so well because we are used to them? Will web design move further away from print design as we grow and adapt to working on computers? The popularity of the Kindle – a digital medium that is so popular in part precisely because it works so hard to reproduce printed text, is an interesting example of how ingrained our physical reading habits are in terms of the way we physically view text, if not necessarily the way we choose to navigate through it.

When Cohen and Rosenzweig stress that you don’t necessarily know who your audience might end up being, and should therefore be willing to tailor your website to the arrival of an unexpected community of users, they make a good point about the way we as historians should view all of our historical work. Digital mediums by their very nature allow us as scholars and designers/builders to constantly respond to the interests of our audience, to update our own work based on changing trends in scholarship, if we so choose. How we present this information may also have to change over time.