Early last semester, we had a conversation in my Clio Wired 2 course about building websites to meet user needs, and the strategies to take to ensure our websites were usable. Most of our reading focused on strategies for building commercial websites, but unlike building websites for business, digital humanities projects have to walk a fine line between satisfying user needs/wants while providing information/services we think users ’should’ need/want. Its a conversation that has been in the back of my mind for a while now, and this post is an attempt to articulate some of those thoughts.

When a history professor is researching and writing a book, for example, she isn’t necessarily concerned with what her “users” would like to read about. Maybe some are, but most academics are concerned less with meeting audience needs than they are with teaching the audience something new. In fact, they see one of their goals as contributing new knowledge, knowledge those academics think will be useful to their profession as a whole. They don’t necessarily write monographs to make it easier for, say, K-12 teachers to use them in class. In a lot of ways, usability is prescribed in the format of the academic monograph: table of contents, chapter headings, page numbers, paragraphs, footnotes, the occasional figure or appendix. And, if I may speculate, this prescribed format may undermines the need for the creators of academic scholarship to really think about usability.

Most websites, however, are built with user needs primarily in mind, at least most commerce-based websites. Business do focus-group testing, user testing, and marketing to try to meet particular user needs. In that sense, websites try to provide something users want, without uses have to think about how to get what they want. In fact, one of the leading web usability book in print is titled “Don’t Make me Think!” and argues that websites should strive to create interfaces and experience that require little thought to use.

Digital humanities websites, it seems, have to walk a fine line between two very different goals: On the one hand, we do want to provide information and tool that we, as experts, think the audience should use and need. On the other, we can’t simply offer it and expect that our audience will find it valuable. The trick with digital humanities projects, it seems, is to encourage users to think about specific things, think we want them to think about, while providing tools and methods for doing that kind of thinking in an unencumbered, clumsy web interface.

In Train of Thoughts, John Lenker argues there are three parts to providing a effective experience on the Web:

1. Entice – Get the audience interested in your topic
2. Inform – Provide some meaningful information to the audience; Educate audience about a particular topic.
3. Invoke – Encourage a response from the audience, ensure that the information you’ve given them can be put into meaningful action somehow.

Traditional academic scholarship is almost exclusively focused on the second part: Inform. It may dabble in the Entice part, with catchy titles or discussions at book clubs or on the web. And while scholars certainly want to invoke a response from colleagues, the product itself doesn’t encourage a variety of responses. Digital humanities, though, has the means of combining all three into a meaningful, usable experience. In fact, I would argue that any work in the digital humanities needs to accomplish all three to be effective.

As some of you might guess, I get mixed reactions whenever I reveal that I use Wikipedia in my history classes. And not just for reading; I actually assign my students to research and write an article for Wikipedia. And it has consistently been one of my most successful assignments. It shows students the difference between fact-only writing and analytical writing, it provides an introduction to research methods, and it gives them more insight into the working of Wikipedia, so they understand why they should or shouldn’t use it for various situations.

The Assignment

The assignment consists of two phases, each graded separately:

Phase 1: Students choose a topic related to history that either doesn’t have a substantial article already written about it, or a topic that is listed on the history stubs page on Wikipedia. Then, they research the topic and contribute ~500 words to the article. The article must include footnotes, and reference at least two published books, two external websites, and link to at least two other Wikipedia pages. Students must use proper formatting for footnotes, headings, lists, links and other content per Wikipedia formatting guidelines. They must also create a user account, and log in with that user account when editing. If an article’s history doesn’t include the user name they sent to me at the beginning of the semester, they don’t get credit. No exceptions.

Phase 2: After publishing, students must watch the article, see if anyone contributes or changes their article, and if so connect with these users. The goal here is to improve the article, either with others users or individually. If their article is flagged for deletion, students must work to make sure the article isn’t deleted. But, regardless of outcome, students must write a ~500 word reflection on what happened to their article, and how their ideas about Wikipedia had changed as a result of the article.

Notes on Process

Topics

Choosing a topic is fairly straight-forward. I always encourage students to find a topic that interests them, that’s relevant to their major, their job, or even hobbies. Students have written about various historical topics related to psychology, sociology, engineering, sports, art, and theater, to name a few. If students can’t come up with a topic, point them to the stubs page. There are thousands of stub articles to choose from, including United States history, history of science, and military history. All topics have to be approved by me before continuing the assignment. I usually require topics related to U.S. history because that’s my primary field of study, and will approve topics if I think there’s enough secondary and tertiary sources available to allow for an adequate article.

Research

The research process is, more or less, the same kind of research process you’d expect when assigning a short term paper. We discuss how to find resources on particular topics, how to brainstorm, create outlines, et cetera. I introduce students to the librarian on staff who’s relevant to their field of study or topic. (Often, this is the first time students are introduced to these very valuable folks.) Wikipedia also has policies about citation, so I make sure students read the policy on citing sources and verifiability. Additionally, I discuss uses of different kinds of sources, and Wikipedia’s preference for secondary and tertiary sources over primary sources. Students articles must not be original research.

Writing and Formatting

Probably the trickiest part of the assignment is showing students how to write for Wikipedia, particularly the way Wikipedia articles are formatted. We take one class period and review “How to Edit a Wikipedia Article,” particularly the formatting section. There’s a great tutorial and sandbox where students can practice formatting before working on their articles. I demonstrate on-screen how to do different kinds of formatting: footnotes, headings, unordred lists, ordered lists, internal and external links, and inserting an image. There is a useful cheatsheet that details formatting methods for specific content elements.

Publishing and Participating

Like I said earlier, the assignment doesn’t end once the article is published. After they publish the article, they must watch and participate in any change that takes place to their article, for good or ill. I show them specifically two sections of their article to watch:

• History page – I encourage students not to revert things immediately, but to take the time to look at changes, determine if they help or hurt the article, and take the appropriate action.
• Talk page – This is where community members talk about the article in question, offering suggestions for improvement or declaring reasons that the article is irrelevant and show be deleted. Its here that students have to defend their articles, or learn from other Wikipedians about how to improve their articles.

Not infrequently, someone’s article will be recommended for deletion, or their changes reverted. In these cases I show students how to interact with Wikipedia admins, review their deletion policy and the process by which they do deletion review. I’ve had several students’ articles get recommended for deletion, and the students justified their articles well enough to save them.

Why Assign a Wikipedia Article?

I have several reasons why I ask students to write an article for Wikipedia:

• Learn how to do research: A no-brainer here. The assignment involves some basic research and writing skills, a modest but substantial amount for a 100-level survey course.
• Demystify Wikipedia: Most people have preconceptions about Wikipedia, but very little experience actually reading AND writing an Wikipedia article. Fewer people have experience communicating with other Wikipedia users, particularly admins and editors. This, in turn, influences how they interact with others on various social sites and services. Moreover, students learn that not just anything can be published on Wikipedia, there are rules and policies in place for the content that gets to stay on Wikipedia.
• Learn the difference between fact-only writing and analytical writing: Most of my students have a difficult time understanding how to make an argument, how to differentiate between fact-based “reporting” and analysis. By actually being forced to write a “just the facts” report, they have been able to see the difference between the two.

As I said earlier, this assignment is consistently one of my most successful assignments. Students find a topic they’re interested in, research it, learn how to write for different audiences, learn how to use Wikipedia more efficiently, and understand when its good to use Wikipedia and when its not. Furthermore, they get experience with community and collaborative writing, and can take those skills with them and use them long after the course is finished. It does take a bit of work on my part, to make sure students understand the assignment and the technology involved, but in my opinion its completely worth the effort. Its certainly much more meaningful to have students contribute to a larger, more public body of knowledge than to write a term paper for me that will get thrown away at the end of the semester. If this assignment can produce some good articles on Wikipedia, and gets students talking to others and learning outside of class, I consider it a success.

Jeff McClurken’s recent post about Writing a Strategic Plan for Academic Technologies and Libraries asks a really great question: If given the task of writing a strategic plan for a small institution, what would your top academic technology goals be? After teaching several undergraduate courses, and while currently teaching a graduate course, I’ve thought about these goals at a classroom-level, but I think these goals could be applied to a broader strategic plan for a university.

1. Make sure students graduate as skilled, thoughtful consumers and producers of digital media

Several smaller goals fit into this:

• Learn how to search – Read Bill Turkel’s blog. If you’re not convinced search is important, READ IT AGAIN. There is more to search than Google, and learning how various searches work—and, more importantly, how to make search for work you—is an incredibly valuable skillset beyond college.
• Learn how to manage information flow – For better or for worse, the information age is in overdrive, and all is in flux (thanks again, Bill). But there are tools and services to help you manage that flow, and it should be one of the goals of any university to help students learn how to manage that information. If we want to encourage students to expand their learning beyond the classroom (and I really think we should), then universities need to prepare students for managing the mass of information that comes with it.
• Learn how to produce meaningful, well-composed content and share it with others – Rob Wall argues that, in the 21st century, “creativity is the new technology.” Its incredible to think of the various ways people can produce and share content for equally various purposes. Anyone with an internet connection can sign up for a weblog right now, and begin producing and sharing content, right now. Anyone with an internet connection can produce and share data visualizations. Anyone with a computer and webcam can record and share video. Anyone who can search the web can find audio content, and create a podcast with it. With all of this opportunity for new ways to create narrative and share ideas comes a real need for universities to teach students new ways to compose those narratives and share those ideas.
• Learn how to critique content and methodology – Along with providing the ability to produce content in a variety of media, universities must provide the tools and skills to help students critique content, and discern the effectiveness and usefulness of particular technologies and media. One of the tenants of Mason’s PhD in History and New Media program is “critical optimism”. So, while we are optimistic about the changes that new media can bring to the practice of history, we’re critical about the specific methods that particular media employ. This is an approach that, I think, is already common in most classrooms. In my history course, I teach students how to critically read primary and secondary sources, and how to discern other methodological approaches to a particular issue. These skills are equally important—if not more important—when using and producing digital media.

2. Use free, open-source, and/or extensible tools whenever possible, and encourage faculty, staff, and students to do the same.

Universities spend countless millions on closed, proprietary systems like Blackboard and WebCT, systems that are very overbearing in their pedagogical approaches. In contrast, signing up for a weblog like WordPress is free (and there are plenty of other free options), and the uses for blogs in classes are limitless. While a little more difficult for the average instructor, Moodle is a free, open-source alternative to other learning management systems, and boasts a significant developer community contributing plugins and modules for extended functionality. There’s more this, though, than learning management systems: web browsers, word processing, screencasting, image editing, audio/video editing, to name a few. The specific tool, of course, should be chosen based on need and goals, but opting for extensible, open-source, and free alternatives will save universities money, provide more flexibility to instructors, and encourage the university community to do with software what it already tries to do with teaching and research: Contribute knowledge and resources back to the world.

3. Foster academic use of technologies that breaks down boundaries of the classroom, and the university as a whole.

As academic departments face budget cuts and lose staff positions if their enrollments are down, this may be the most difficult, but I think the most potentially beneficial, of all the goals. At the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January, I presented on how I use technology to break down barriers to learning in my courses. Mills Kelly has written extensively on the future of the course, and argues that positive change in learning on university campuses will happen when students take individual responsibility for their own learning. Mills is particularly keen on the ideas of an iTunes-like class, where students can choose specific bits and pieces in a course that interests them. Others have spoken of the networked learner, and of learning environments that are not isolated from the rest of the world, but rather expand through a bottom-up approach. While I really like the potential for learning in a world without walls, I think there are some uses for the “artificial community” that is the classroom; Namely, that courses bring together people who would otherwise not talk to each other, and potentially allow for more diversity in perspectives. Learning based purely on social networking brings with it the danger of learning only inside the enclaves we create for ourselves based solely on who/what we like or who/what we’re comfortable with. But I think a balance can be struck, and I think universities should employ academic technologies to find and encourage that balance between classroom and independent learning.

So, there are at least three goals I think academic institutions should try to achieve regarding academic technology. Its certain good food for thought, and I’ll continue thinking about these goals for my own teaching and research. I imagine, though, that there are plenty more goals to add. So, lets help Jeff out. What would your academic technology goals be?

The American Association for History and Computing has extended the deadline for its 2009 Annual Conference, “Frontiers in Digital History,” to March 2. The conference is taking place at George Mason University on April 3-5. Here’s the updated call for papers:

Frontiers in Digital History
The American Association for History and Computing (AAHC)
2009 Annual Conference
April 3–5, 2009
George Mason University

What frontiers in digital history are we only beginning to explore, or have yet to explore? What promising but under-utilized tools, techniques, and ideas exist in digital media that can help us do better history? Join the American Association for History and Computing for a lively discussion about the frontiers in doing history with digital media. This conference will be of interest to anyone charting new territory in digital history—both online and in the academic and public worlds—including museum professionals, archivists, librarians, historic preservationists, IT professionals, filmmakers, and academic historians.

Suggested topics for proposals include (but are not limited to):

* Museums and exhibits
* GIS
* Aggregating history
* Web 2.0 exhibits and archives
* Designing and developing digital history
* Teaching digital history
* Visualizing the past
* Networked Research

The conference committee encourages participants to go beyond theory and into the realm of practice through a variety of presentation formats, including:

* Project Demonstrations and prototypes
* Paper Presentations
* Roundtable Discussions
* Workshops

All presenters must be current members of the AAHC. Proposals for complete panels should include a chair. All proposals must include a 200-word abstract for each paper, along with a brief vita for each participant. Please be sure to indicate which member of the panel will serve as the contact person for future correspondence. Please include name, address, telephone number, and email address for each participant.

The deadline for proposal submissions has been extended to March 2, 2009. Send proposals (plain text, Word, RTF, or PDF) or inquiries to either:

Jeremy Boggs
Email: jeremy@clioweb.org

Or

Jillian Hinegardner
Email: jhinegardner@ursuline.edu

If you have questions, or are interested in participating, send me or Jillian an email. Hope we see you in April!

THATCamp, the immensely fun and popular digital humanities unconference hosted by CHNM is back June 27–28, 2009. Because of the popularity of THATCamp last year, we’ve acquired a bit more space this year and opened up the number of attendees we accept to be somewhere between 70 and 100. And, judging by the number of applications on the first day, we’re gonna get twice as many applications as we have spots. The buzz on Twitter has been exciting, and lots of new folks have signed up in addition to a few campers from last year. We may let Dan and Tom in, if they promise to let me and Dave organize it again next year!

Last year’s camp was without a doubt the most productive, enjoyable, and rewarding academic conference I’ve ever attended. Calling it just a conference is a injustice. Its a conference/workshop/tutorial/networking/tinkering/playing-around kind of gathering, perfect for folks interested in a variety of aspects in digital humanities who want to expand their skills and knowledge. Its a true working weekend, where people show things their working on, get feedback, toss around ideas, and connect with others equally excited about the possibilities of digital humanities. We don’t read papers, and don’t sit around while others read to us. We brainstorm for ideas. We talk about problems. We come up with solutions.

If THATCamp sounds like you’re kind of event, check out the website, and fill out the application form to see if you can get a spot! If you have questions, send us a note by email to info@thatcamp.org or a message by Twitter to @thatcamp.

Back in January, I had the privilege of serving on a roundtable entitled Teaching History in the Digital Age at the American Historical Association annual conference. In my talk, “Beyond Classroom Walls: New Boundaries for Teaching and Learning with Digital Tools,” I reflected on my own experience defining and redefining boundaries I encountered when I started teaching a US history survey course several years ago. (Slides are available on my SlideShare account.) While my presentation focuses on how I integrated technology and media into my classes in an effort to break down those boundaries, I’ve thought a bit more about what my new roles are as an educator using technology and social media. These roles have become even more apparent to me as I teach History 697: Creating History in New Media this semester. I’ve come up with three so far: Instructor as Role Model; Instructor as Tech Support; Instructor as Cheerleader.

Instructor as Role Model

I think any instructor using technology, in the class or out, should think of themselves as a role model for how those technologies can be used for responsible, beneficial goals. One way I do this is to be completely transparent with students regarding my use of technology. I provide links to my blog, my Twitter account, my Flickr account, my YouTube and Vimeo users, my Facebook page, and my instant messenger screennames. I encourage them to follow me, and contact me through any of these methods. I set up rules for contacting me, though, which are followed 99.9% of the time, and that 0.1% is not enough of a problem for me to change my transparency. I also show students how I’ve used my blog, Twitter feed, and other accounts to build a professional network and share information. While others warn about the ill effects of putting too much of yourself online (which can be true), I try to show students how I use technology to expand my opportunities, not limit them. Overall, I’ve had positive feedback from students about my openness. I think that I use technology and social media responsibly (though I could work on the efficiency part). Setting an example that students can follow is important if we want those students to be more critical about their use of technology.

Instructor as Tech Support

When utilizing social media and technology in my courses, I’ve found myself serving as the primary tech support person when students run into trouble. With my tech background, I’m comfortable with this, but I suspect a lot of teachers are not. Explaining the technical aspects of blogging, wikis, RSS, YouTube, and Flickr can take up time spent on other things in class and out, but I think its very important to take on this role. In a lot of cases, support involves me showing students how to find answers to their questions on the Web, on support forums, or other resources. In other cases, support involves me taking 5-10 minutes at the end of class to explain how a particular technology works. While this can be TONS of work, serving as tech support has, I think, given my students more confidence in my ability to teach with and use technology (going back to Instructor as Role Model).

For example, I have an assignment that asks students to research and write an article on Wikipedia. Its not a big article (~500 words), but the assignment does ask a lot from students: Learn how to do proper formatting for Wikipedia, research an article, and try as hard as they can to ensure their article isn’t vandalized or deleted AND encourage other users to contribute to the article. Learning these things requires a lot of my time for tech support: Explain how Wikipedia works, how to format footnotes, headings, et cetera, and how to find guidelines to follow if a student’s article is up for deletion. This is not the kind of task I’d ask general University tech support, because the assignment is as much about learning these technical things as it is learning about collaborative writing and research. The fact that I can take on a role of tech support helps make the assignment successful.

Instructor as Cheerleader

Out of the three, I think the role of Instructor as Cheerleader is the most important. I really think that there’s a lack of cheerleading or positive reinforcement in higher education in general,  particularly when trying to teach students to use new kinds of technology or social media. At the beginning of the semester, usually after the first class when I’ve introduced all the things we’ll be doing with computers, I get a few emails from students saying something to the effect that “I’m not good with all this computer stuff.” And they probably aren’t; I’m not convinced that this generation, like previous generations, is that tech savvy. But I do think every student I have is capable of becoming more proficient with technology than before they entered my class, and can learn how to use the technology they’re exposed to every day in new, meaningful, efficient ways.

The prospect of editing a Wikipedia article, to go back to that example, is a strange (and sometimes frightening) proposition for my students. Learning how to format footnotes in Wikipedia, insert images, write the proper code for headings and bulleted lists can be daunting to many, let alone connecting with a few dozen completely unknown Wikipedians to discuss the merits of their articles as some face deletion. Encouragement and genuine interest in the success of each students project is imperative, as is patience. There may be some hand-holding involved as students negotiate with sometime rude Wikipedia admins (I’ve done this) or spending some extra time during office hours explaining wiki formatting while encouraging student that they are in fact smart enough to do all this computer stuff (I’ve also done this). Pointing out successes in class, even if its as simple as successfully inserting a YouTube clip into a blog post, goes a long way to get students vested in the assignments and class as a whole.

Results

All of these roles help me accomplish one of my goals in class: Help my students become more savvy, more responsible consumers and producers of media and technology. I think trading of some time covering some particular historical topic to teach students how to extend learning beyond my classroom is more than worth it. In the end, I get more students interested in exploring history and help shape more responsible social technology users. Even if I only influence a handful of students, I’ll consider my class a success.

I’m still going to think about these roles, refine them, and perhaps come up with more as my teaching evolves. I probably missed a few roles that you think are important, or your courses may be different enough to warrant different roles when using technology in class. What others have you acquired while teaching with technology? What are the drawbacks and merits of them?

I spent a little time this weekend updating some plugins I’ve had in the hopper. First, Zac Gordon and I updated ScholarPress Courseware to work with WordPress 2.7. Many thanks to Zac for helping to update Courseware’s interface elements to match 2.7’s admin theme, and for adding an easy date picker to the schedule edit form. There are still some inconsistencies in the plugin between WP 2.6 and 2.7, but we did the best we could. We’ll continue to make improvements to Courseware, so stay tuned at ScholarPress.

I also cleaned up a few custom plugins that I’ve used on ClioWeb and various other sites. These two plugins, CW Author Base and CW Page Categories, do some simple stuff, but they’ve been handy to me, so I’m sharing them here in hopes that they’re useful to someone else.

• CW Author Base—This is a really simple plugin that lets you change the base for author URLs in WordPress. You can already do this for categories and tags in WordPress under the Settings tab, but not author URLs. I think this should be part of the core, but its not. So, if you wanna change the author URL base, save this file as a .php
• CW Page Categories—Another very simple plugin that lets you add categories to a page. It includes a template function called cw_listcategories() that you can use in the sidebar to list pages under a category heading. You can also return an array of pages with cw_getpagesbycat($cat) and replace $cat with the category ID.

As always, if you have suggestions for improvement, or add you own code to these plugins, please share!

I promised Karin Dalziel some resources for doing web typography, and thought I’d just share it with a blog post. These are a few sites, blog posts, and articles I’ve found useful when learing about web typography; this is by no means a comprehensive list, and you’ll find that upon further exploration, there are plenty of debates when it comes to type for the web, especially with sizing type using CSS. (This post also reminds me that I need to clean up some of the type around this site!)

How to Size Text in CSS – Richard Rutter describes various approaches for sizing web type in pixels, ems, and percentages. Rutter pioneered the “62.5% Method” for sizing web type, which I still use.

Five Simple Steps to Better Typography – Mark Boulton’s great blog post series on how to make the type on your website better. Nice, illustrated examples, very accessible to non-designers.

Compose to a Vertical Rhythm – Helped establish the use of a baseline grid, or vertical rhythm, for web typography.

Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid – Wilson Miner shows you how to establish a baseline grid for your website, and how to make type of various sizes adhere to that grid.

Text Sizing – provides screenshots (lots of screenshots) of various browsers to compare text sizes.

I Love Typography – Not just web typography, but type in general. Beautiful site, lots of good coverage of all things type.

Web Design is 95% Typography – Great article that discusses the enormous role typography plays in web design.

Typography is the Foundation of Web Design – I couldn’t agree more with the title of this post. Samantha Warren discusses the process she uses for implementing great type solutions for the web in a presentation she gave at Refresh Baltimore.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – Great resource that takes Robert Bringhurst’s classic on typographic style and applies it to web design.

Web Safe Fonts – Great survey conducted by Jason Cranford Teague that details current web safe fonts and their presence on a variety of platforms and versions.

TypeTester – Lets you quickly and easily compare different typefaces and sizes, and generates CSS.

If you find any other useful resources, please share them!

For those of you who haven’t heard the news on the Omeka blog or the Twitter feed, the Omeka team has released the stable version of 0.10, and in the process upgraded a few plugins and created some new ones. Kris and Dave did some fantastic work on the MyOmeka plugin, which lets your users create accounts on your Omeka site to add personal notes and tags to items. We upgraded the Geolocation plugin to work with 0.10. Jim Safley updated popular iPaper plugin. And, I contributed a new, simple Social Bookmarking plugin that adds a configurable list of bookmarking services to the bottom of public items in your Omeka archive. There are a few more, all of which you can download on the plugins page

Go check out the new stable release, download and install a few plugins, and let us know what you think!

The last part of these series briefly discusses some things I keep in mind when maintaining a site after launch, some things I document for anyone charged with adding and updating content on the site, and some good things to keep in mind with regard to user feedback. Hopefully these tips will help you maintain and expand your project beyond the initial launch, and allow you (with the help of user feedback!) to improve the site long after it goes public.

Site Maintenance

Once a site is live, it will still need to be maintained at some level. If you use a content management system like Omeka or WordPress, you will need to keep up with software upgrades and bug fixes, and apply those to your site as needed. Subscribe to the news blog or email listserv for your particular CMS to keep up-to-date with new releases and bug fixes. For projects at CHNM, I’m subscribed to listservs and blogs for WordPress, Drupal, bbPress, and a variety of plugin comment threads.

When upgrading software, I find it best to perform the upgrades on a copy of the site in a undisclosed folder on your server. If you have a development server, use it. Or you can perform upgrades and maintenance on your local computer if you’ve set up a web development environment on it. (I detail how I set up my web development environment on my wiki.) Of course, be sure to backup any files and databases when performing upgrades.

Documentation

In addition to maintaining the software, you’ll need to provide ways for your content team to continue maintaining content on the site. If your website requires regular content updates, and if you expect the site to be relevant and sustainable long after development is done, its prudent to create some documentation for how current and future members of your project team can update the site.

A styleguide is particularly useful for advising the content team on proper markup and formatting for site content, and for future designers and developers who may have to do more significant upgrades to the site’s design. The styleguide at the New York Public Library is a perfect example. It outlines the DOCTYPE that webpages on the NYPL website should use, proper markup for things like headings and lists, and how to use/modify CSS on the website. You could easily write something similar for your own site, assuming you made some concrete decisions about layout, typography, and colors during the design and development phases. You did that, right?

User Feedback and Community

After launch, its good to provide some means for direct user feedback. Despite all the planning and testing prior to launch, user feedback is vital to the sustainability of a site and ensures you can adapt your site to the needs of your visitors. Also, it provides a way for users to contribute to the life of the project. Hopefully you can build a regular group of users vested in the success of your project, and recommend it to others. User feedback can come in several forms, from suggestions for improvement to troubleshooting. Methods for soliciting and managing feedback can depend on several factors:

1. How much feedback you expect
2. How much time/how many people you have to deal with user feedback
3. How public you want feedback to be.

At the least, you should provide an email address for users to content for site errors and general questions. If you find yourself dealing with the same questions regularly, though, it would be beneficial to create a Frequently Asked Questions page on your site. You could then funnel inquiries through that page, and if a user’s question isn’t addressed in that FAQ page, they can then continue to some other process for feedback. This saves time for both you and your users.

More robust forms of feedback could involve setting up a separate section for forums, in which individual users can have accounts, post questions to a forum, and have admins (and other forum members) respond. CHNM uses this on Zotero and Omeka. Omeka in particular uses a free software platform called bbPress, from the makers of WordPress, to power its forums. We set up forum topics for different areas to focus conversations and make it easier for users interested in similar aspects of the project to interact.

With some of the WordPress plugins I’ve helped develop, I rely on the WordPress forums for user feedback and assistance. I subscribe to the RSS feeds for the ScholarPress Courseware tag, and try to respond to posts there whenever I can. One of the great things about having the support forum there is that other WordPress users can (and do) respond to posts about plugins I help develop. If the code for your project is hosted elsewhere, check if those repositories can also help you set up space for user feedback.

Indirect feedback is also important. This kind of feedback includes blog posts, Twitter messages, and any other things written about your project. Its good to keep up with this activity, and respond when useful, because you should be actively interested in how your project is received by others and encourage others to write about your project. For example, I get Google alerts email for any news and blog posts that link to the Omeka website, I subscribe to the RSS feed for tweets that include “omeka,” and I subscribe to the RSS feed for the delicious tag “omeka.” There are a few others, but the point is to find a few social app and services, see if people using those services are talking about your project and connect with them. Humanities scholars should see the importance of indirect user feedback and engaging with that feedback. While its great to get people to ask you questions at a conference, its also great to have people cite your work in their own scholarship, write reviews of your work, or recommend your work to their colleagues. Being able to track this kind of feedback, and follow up on this feedback when warranted, is an important part of tracking the impact of your project across a variety of audiences on the Web.

Wrapping Up

That’s it! I must apologize for the time it took to complete the series. I hope the series has been useful nonetheless, but I also hope that you take anything I’ve outlined and modify it for your own needs. This is a good process, but its also good to adapt to the changing needs of your project, your team, and your users. In the end, those are the most important things to consider when framing a design and development process for your project.