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Humanities Showcase Project

This version was saved 10 years, 11 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Alan Liu
on April 20, 2013 at 8:07:30 pm
 
This is the developer's FAQ page for the Humanities Showcase Project.  Project Team: Alan Liu (leader), Linda Adler-Kassner, Eileen Boris, Cole Cohen, Leslie Hammer, Jen Hammerschmidt, Pax Hehmeyer, Zach Horton, Lindsay Thomas, Bill Warner. (For the original planning notes for the Humanities Showcase Project, go here.)

 

What is the Humanities Showcase?

What is the technology behind the Humanities Showcase site on the Web?

How can I contribute to the Humanities Showcase?

How to I collect and submit materials for an exhibition in the Humanities Showcase?

 


 

What is the Humanities Showcase?

 

The 4Humanities Humanities Showcase is online at http://humanitiesshowcase.wix.com/4humanities-showcase.  The purpose of the project is to showcase great humanities research and teaching whose value the public can "get" without extensive explanation.  Each exhibit in the Showcase assembles short descriptions, quotations, and pictures and also links to the home page of the item being exhibited.

 

If you know of a great example of humanities research or teaching that you think can demonstrate the value of the humanities to the public, help us out by filling in as many of the following fields in this worksheet as you can.  Don't worry about completeness.  Just do what you can, and we will try to fill in the rest.  (It sure would help, though, if you could do most of the collecting of this info!)

 

Remember: we are looking for examples of humanities research and teaching that the public will "get."  Obvious examples include "public humanities" projects or courses that directly engage or contribute to the public.  But other examples might include core or cutting-edge humanities work that you think belongs in the ensemble cast for why the humanities matter--whether great examples of work on "traditional humanities" (e.g., a great and innovative project or course on a canonical literary or historical figure) or great examples of work on the frontiers of the humanities (e.g., humanities and science, humanities and environmentalism, humanities and globalism, etc.).  Note: it's important that the advanced, technical, theoretical, or "critical" dimensions of exhibits in the Humanities Showcase be layered into a presentation that the public can understand without sharing the mindset of academics or other specialists.

 


What is the technology behind the Humanities Showcase site on the Web?

  • Currently, the Humanities Showcase is a Wix site.  Wix is a third-party service that allows users to create high visual impact sites with themes, HTML5 animation, and other features, all edited through a GUI what-you-see-is-what-you-get visual programming interface.
  • 4Humanities has a paid subscription to Wix to take advantage of features in addition to the free service.
  • The Wix site requires manual editing and adding.  It is not a "content management system" for exhibitions like Omeka that allows curators to keep exhibitions and metadata in a database and then flow the content automatically to a front-end theme.  (Omeka would be an idea solution; but currently the available thenes on the hosted Omeka.net site are not high-visual-impact enough for the purposes of a public showcase site.  Hosting an Omeka installation locally would be prohibitive due to support issues and the need to custom design a high visual impact theme.

 


How can I contribute to the Humanities Showcase?

 

You can contribute to the 4Humanities Humanities Showcase at any of three levels of engagement:

 

1. Contributor Level 1 -- "Five-minute Activism":

Only have spare moments now and then to help?  Just pick something you'd like to help us build an exhibit about on Humanities Showcase and fill out our Word .doc worksheet () with materials for the building blocks of an exhibit--including, for example: Name of exhibit, URL for the research or teaching site being exhibited, short description, essentials (a few bullet points), quotations about the project or class (e.g., from participants, students, or developers), and images (e.g., screen-captures from the project site).  Don't worry if you can't complete all the fields in the template.  Just help us with what you can fill in, and we'll research the rest.

 

2. Contributor Level 2 -- Editor:

Editors are folks who log in to the online Wix site for the Humanities Showcase and create the exhibits based on materials submitted under #1 above.  Editing is in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface that requires no technical or programming knowledge.  We sure could use a few folks willing to help out at this level.

 

3. Contributor Level 3 -- Designer:

Site design is crucial for a project like this intended to display the best of the humanities to the public.  Many of the graphical, design, and user-experience elements on the current Humanities Showcase site could undoubtedly be improved.  If you have design or user-interface experience, we sure would like to hear from you.

 

To sign up as a contributor, write to Alan Liu (ayliu@english.ucsb.edu)

 


 

How to I collect and submit materials for an exhibition in the Humanities Showcase?

 

  • If you are a "5-minute activist" contributor, we've made it easy for you to collect materials for a showcase exhibition. Just download our Starter Kit (Humanities-Showcase-starter-kit.docx) with its included exhibition materials Worksheet (or download the Worksheet separately Humanities-Showcase-worksheet.docx).  These are simple Word docs that you can use to gather materials for submission to us.

 

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