Building a Website and a Historical Argument

Important Documents to Reference While Working

Web Development How-Tos for Building Your Site

Building your site:

For your final digital project, you’ll work with a partner (or alone, if you prefer) to build a digital narrative about a chosen set of sources in Princeton’s Digital Special Collections. Your digital narrative will be accessed through a customized website hosted in our class GitHub organization, HUM-331-Princeton.

To build your website, you will copy the “final-project-template” repository in our GitHub organization.

You’ll customize your site following the directions you’ll find in the Web Development How-To Document. The document also contains instructions and a workflow for editing your files in Atom. Descriptions of the various files in the repository template can be found in the README file that comes with your repository.

Thinking about your sources:

Your final project should present a deep dive into a source or set of sources in Princeton’s Special Collections. Archival sources vary in size and content, which means I can’t set page limits, but I can give rough estimates of what would be appropriate. If you’re looking at a handwritten journal, for example, you might aim to read the entirety of the source but then select 5–10 pages of material to focus on for the site. Likewise, if you’re examining letters or oral histories, you might read through dozens and then select only 5-10 that fit a given set of historical research questions to focus on. If you’re looking at non-textual sources (material artifacts), you will need to do significant contextual research in order to present 5–10 objects in some detail and draw comparisons and conclusions from the group. Just as you would extract specific points of evidence from sources in order to present an argument in a research paper, this project requires you to choose representative or especially interesting selections from your chosen archival material in order to build a narrative argument through digital presentation. If you’re unsure whether or not you’ve selected enough archival material for your final project, you should consult with Professor Reynolds in office hours or by scheduled appointment.

Once you’ve selected your primary source archive, you’ll want to brainstorm how best to present those sources in a narrative that takes advantage of the possibilities of digital presentation. When thinking about how to structure your site and what to present to your reader, you may want to consider the following questions:

Which historical questions do I want to answer through analysis of this source?
What will my readers need to know in order to understand this source?
What is the historical significance of the source?
Given that this is a course on communication technologies, what are the specific material properties of this source that structure how it conveys information or knowledge? What is it made of? What kind of script or characters does it contain? What kind of assumptions might a reader make when encountering a source like this? Do these assumptions pose any problems in terms of how we as historians interpret the source?
In this course we’ve also thought a lot about the problems and possibilities of archival preservation and digital presentation. You might offer some meta-reflections on the affordances of digital preservation in your own work. How does digitization affect how readers engage with this source? What are some elements of this source that readers might miss as a result of digitization? Alternatively, how might digitization make it possible to ask new questions of your source?

Requirements:

Each of your websites will be unique, but each should provide the general reader with an engaging, thoroughly-researched explanatory narrative about the sources you’ve chosen from Princeton’s Special Collections.

Site contents:

At least 5 posts or pages of historical analysis: Your site should include at least 5 posts (or pages, depending on how you want to structure your site layout) contextualizing, describing, and analyzing your primary source for readers. What this might mean in practice (though this is just an example and you can feel free to structure your site as you see fit) is that each member of a two-person pair might author one post or page that contextualizes their source within broader historical themes and one post or page that presents a close analysis of their archival source in terms of its contents, its material qualities, and its historical significance. Together, you and your partner might then write a joint post or page describing how your sources should be understood together to reflect on broader historical themes or questions. The structure of your site is up to you, and you can certainly include more than 5 posts or pages.

One new digital tool: You should feel free to reuse digital materials you’ve created in past digital tools assignments within your final project, but in addition to those, you must also create one new digital tool. You might create a new StoryMap or TimeMapper, or create a walking tour relating to your source using GoogleMyMaps, or build a 3D model of a physical object that relates to your source with Trnio and Sketchfab, or present a story about your source or conduct an oral history that you publish in a podcast, or perform a network analysis or lexical analysis using Cytoscape or Voyant–really, the sky is the limit.

References page: In addition to the 5 posts or pages about your chosen sources, your site must also include a References page with links to or citations of the secondary source material that you have consulted for your final project. You may choose to organize this page in whatever manner makes most sense for your particular source set.

Authorship citations: If you choose to use the ‘posts’ format as we have on our course blog, you should include a “Contributors” page to make clear which member of the team wrote which posts. If you choose to build your site as a variety of linked pages, you should still include authorship information for each page. This is obviously a collaborative project, but for grading purposes it will be helpful to know who wrote what. Your individual experience of contributing to this final digital project can be spelled out in more detail in your Final Project Response paper.

Writing: Your writing should be pitched to the general reader, but should still be academic in its tone. Proofread carefully and write thoughtfully. As with all good historical narrative, your work should tell the story of your particular archival source while also making a case for why the source is important. This means contextualizing the source(s) within broader historical trends and explaining what it is about that particular source that illuminates a particular problem, sheds light on a set of experiences, or answers a historical question. And of course, always citing evidence to support your claims!

Digital presentation: At minimum, I expect you to follow all of the Markdown syntax we’ve discussed in class. When you submit this final project to me for grading, you’ll be submitting the URL for your site. When I click that link I expect to see a polished, functioning website. Broken links, busted syntax, and wonky layouts will adversely affect your grade. However, this isn’t a web design course; it’s a digital humanities course. I didn’t teach you HTML or CSS extensively, which means I will not grade you on the design elements you incorporate into your site. You may enjoy playing around with those elements–and I encourage you to do so if you’d like–but your design aesthetic is not the focus of this class. Your historical research and argument are far more important.

Submission:

Final digital projects are due at 5 pm on Dean’s Date, May 5, 2021. To submit your final project, your team will submit the URL of your finished site in the submissions box on Canvas. At 5 pm on May 5 I will change your access in your individual GitHub repositories from “admin” to “read” so that you cannot make further changes to your site.