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Peereboom, M. et al., Van Gogh’s Letters: Or How to Make the Results of 15 Years of Research Widely Accessible for Various Audiences and How to Involve Them. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2010: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2010. Consulted April 29, 2010. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/peereboom/peereboom.html
Read more: Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2010: Papers: Peereboom, M. et al., Van Gogh’s Letters… http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/peereboom/peereboom.html#ixzz0mX481a7D
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
This scholarly article from the currently held Museums and the Web 2010 nicely dovetailed into my Olympia project, as the online Van Gogh Letters project played a part in my “inspirational bibliography.”
The paper addresses the 15 years of academic research by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to the complete Vincent Van Gogh correspondence and documents that were “re-transcribed, annotated, dated, translated” and then digitized. The collection encompasses 902 letters (819 written by Van Gogh, 83 written to him). What makes them additionally wonderful are the sketches of his famous works that are embedded in the letters.
A cross-media strategy (in book form and on website), including mixing in new media that included a blog, an iPhone application, and a multimedia tour, the strategy was to bring access and life to Van Gogh’s letters, his world, and the man himself.
The component of the article that was most relevant to the Olympia Project was the discussion on the Van Gogh Blog and its mission to make it current and dynamic by presenting Vincent Van Gogh’s letters as blog postings to be submitted on the month and day of their original writing. What was quite edifying was their idea of how Van Gogh would address a blog today. Their answer: “If Van Gogh had been alive today, he would probably have been an active user of blogs and social media. After all, he wrote very personal letters, often several a day.” This is was exactly my thought – the critics of the Paris Salon in 1865 would have been blogging like mad, and their denunciation of Manet’s Olympia would have been viral.
The Van Gogh team used WordPress also and attempted to use as many letters with sketches to give visual appeal. Because his letters were so long, excerpts were provided with links to the Van Gogh Letters website to read further and look at the originals at the same time. New posts were given notice through RSS Feeds as well as Twitter and Facebook using twitterfeed.com to generate interest into other social network avenues. The blog was successful in generating as much interest in it as the website of the Van Gogh letters. A key lesson they learned from the process was that the blog was very time-consuming (can relate) and that a blog can attract a lot of spam (need for anti-spam plugins, Akismet).
One aspect that was not brought up in article though which I observed in visiting the blog was looking at the tag cloud. Part of my argument or idea for my Olympia blog was that the tag cloud is telling about the discussion and ideas of Olympia. The same can be said about the things that Van Gogh talked about the most and this I find most fascinating – the primary one being “colour.” Now, that was very delightful for Van Gogh is not only known for his incredibly tactile brushstrokes, but for his incredible color that sweeps over you and engulfs you. Also other primary tags were Gauguin, Millet, painting, sky and trees. How very telling. That alone can speak yards regarding the content of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters.
Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum is an incredible resource, another jewel provided in our Museum Informatics course. She writes on her Museum 2.0 blog how she wrote this book on a public wiki (reminds me of our use of the wiki in class), how she vetted public editors, though she found most participants were only involved during the formative parts of the book. She practiced what she preached about participation: “So when people contributed, I always felt that they were helping me, supporting the project, sharing an insight or critique for me to use.”
I focused on reading Chapter 1: Principles of Participation. In this write-up, I’ve sprinkled numerous quotes from Nina Simon because they are so good and they speak for themselves. I couldn’t believe what excellent advice and information was jam-packed in just one chapter. Of course, some of these chapters are length (45+ pages), so she also offers the option to purchase the book.
She brings up the fact that sometimes museums want to just create any participatory activity or application, yet can run afoul by making a poorly-designed participatory experience. She highlights a poor one immediately in the first paragraph:
A Poor Participatory Design: An Anonymous Chicago Museum
“I’m in Chicago with my family, visiting a museum. We’re checking out the final exhibit – a comment station where visitors can make their own videos in response to the exhibition. I’m flipping through videos that visitors have made about freedom, and there are REALLY, REALLY BAD.
The videos fall into 2 categories:
- Person stares at camera and mumbles something incomprehensible.
- Group of teens, overflowing with enthusiasm, “express themselves” via shout-outs and walk-ons.”
Results: Unsuccessful.
Why unsuccessful: Museum only issued mandate to create without providing “scaffolding.”
Simon offers the wonderful quote from Orson Welles which puts it aptly: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
Now, let me compare this to an example she gives of a good participatory design…
A Good Participatory Design: Denver Art Museum – 2009 “Side Trip” Gallery for The Psychedelic Experience Exhibit
In the exhibition space highlighting psychedelic rock music posters, visitors were encouraged to make their own rock music posters in the Side Trip gallery:
“Rather than giving people blank sheets of paper and markers (and reaching a narrow audience of self-motivated creators)… visitors were offered clipboards with transparencies attached. There were stacks of graphics – cut-out reproductions from real rock posters on display… could place under transparencies to rearrange and remix into poster designs of their own choosing.” Posters took approximately 25 minutes to create.When completed, the visitor gave to a staffer who made a composite by copying it on color printer. Then, the visitor was given the final poster and provided with option to post a copy in the gallery.
Results: Out of 90,000 attendees, 37,000 posters were created. That verges to nearly 45% participation from total number of attendees!
Why successful: Visitors didn’t have to start with a blank slate. They were provided “scaffolding.”
Scaffolding:
Nina Simon stresses the critical importance of scaffolding to participatory design. We have seen in class the example of a good one in the Victoria and Albert Museums “Make an Arts and Crafts Title.” We don’t have to create from a blank slate.
What exactly is scaffolding? Simon elaborates on this and its formation from “instructional scaffolding” with its roots in education and contemorary learning theory.
Some good quotes about scaffolding:
- Instructional Scaffolding is where “educators or educational material provides supportive resources, tasks and guidance upon which learners can build their confidence and abilities.”
- “The best participatory experience are not wide open. They are scaffolded to help people feel comfortable engagin the the activity.”
- Example of an open-ended, non-scaffolded experience: “What if I walked up to you on the street and asked you to make a video about your ideas of justice in the next three minutes? Does that sound like a fun and rewarding casual activity to you?”
- An open-ended, non-scaffolded experience can “feel daunting to would-be participants.”
Another juicy gem is her presentation of the 5 stages of social participation…
The 5 Stages of Social Participation (from Me to We):
Stage 1: Individual Consumes Content
Stage 2: Individual Interacts with Content
Stage 3: Individual Interactions are Networked in Aggregate
Stage 4: Individual Interactions are Networked for Social Use
Stage 5: Individuals Engage with Each Other Socially
Simon applies these 5 stages wonderfully in the case study of the successful incorporation of all 5 stages in Nike’s product Nike+, a combined iPod/Shoe product to track one’s running. It is too good to highlight and I’d suggest if you have the time to read it. It illustrates the five stages and is directly applicable to designing the participatory museum experience.
Other good gems from this article is how she describes how YouTube is a successful participatory experience and the real reason it is successful, that encourages “diverse forms of participation.”
These diverse forms of participation are elaborated in her discussion of what participation looks like:
1. Creators
2. Critics
3. Collectors
4. Joiners
5. Spectators
6. Inactives
What is quite fascinating is that only .16% of YouTube visitors upload a video and only .2% of Flickr visitors post a photo. Wow! She stresses that although the quantity of creators are small, participation (and why social media, YouTube, Flickr, etc. are popular) and mini-creation takes place in the form of collectors, joiners, critics, and even spectators.
Attribution: Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010.
At our onsite all-day Museum Informatics class on the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, we were introduced to the concept of personas in the design process. It was quite mind-altering and made a tremendous amount of sense – how critical it was to design an application towards imagined (identifying kinds of people who might use it) personas rather than what seems to happen most in the technological field (and boy, have I seen this!) – designing it for yourself.
Meg Hourihan in “Taking the ‘You’ Out of User: My Experience Using Personas,” identifies this issue. It is literally taking the ‘you’ out of the user – a sort of unconscious (sometimes not!) narcissism that if I design this for myself, I’ve designed it for all users. Hourihan discusses how her startup company Pyra (anecdote: same company that developed “Blogger” software that bought by Google) were developing a project management tool and “assumed we were developing our product for PEOPLE JUST LIKE US, so we could make assumptions based on our wants and extrapolate those desires.
It wasn’t until Hourihan discovered the work of the originator of personas for software development – Alan Cooper’s “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity” that the fallacies of these assumptions were tested and came tumbling down. When her team actually developed the personas during pre-beta development, they found out – WHAT? - ”Not only were the personas not all like us – our personas wouldn’t even be able to use the system were were building for them!”
Hourihan wonderfully elaborated on mistakes and boy, are these good:
- Mistake 1: We chose flashy technology over accessibility.
- Mistake 2: We assumed users would be more impressed by a robust interfact that couldn’t use than by a less elegant application that they could use.
- Mistake 3: We thought we were the primary persona.
Developers and designers, listen up. These 3 “mistakes” or should I say “critical observations” should be part of your daily mantra when designing and designing for personas.
Alan Cooper in his online journal on “The Origin of Personas” discusses how he actually play-acted his personas: ”…I would engage myself in a dialogue, play-acting a project manager, loosely based on Kathy, requesting functions and behavior from my program. I often found myself deep in those dialogues, speaking aloud, and gesturing with my arms. Some of the golfers were taken aback by my unexpected presence and unusual behavior, but that didn’t bother me because I found that this play-acting technique was remarkable effective for cutting through complex design questions of functionality and interaction, allowing me to clearly see what was necessary and unnecessary and, more importantly, to differentiate between what was used frequently and what was needed only infrequently.”
When I was put in charge of re-designing Microsoft Money in 1995, I had no idea that the play-acting I was doing for my personas was actually a formalized protocol. When we selected users for the usability testing, we attempted to gather persons that covered the gamut of who we were targeting this product for – from young to old, from inexperienced to savvy, from someone storing their banking stuff in shoeboxes (me too!) to those who were diligent about their budgets. We also had them run through several scenarios to see how they liked the software.
I was struck by these users and how distinctive they were. I particularly was effected by a grandmother who told me so much about how well the interface was working – no computer experience, wrote checks by hand, and she got it and loved it right away. I also took away from that usability test getting into these types of personas and while I was designing, think, “What would Grandma (not mine!) think, want, do or what would College Student do, etc.” I had no idea that I was designing for personas, but have to say it was highly successful.
Part of this is that you respect the personas. I think there is evidence of creating a bad persona or putting down a persona and I can’t think of any better example than Microsoft Bob. Some or actually many of you have maybe never heard of Microsoft Bob (and those of you who do, I can hear your screaming).
Kim Goodwin from Cooper (Alan Cooper’s company) calls this “Taking Personas Too Far:” I recently heard about a Web design agency building “persona living rooms” that are furnished and decorated according to the personas’ tastes and filled with magazines the personas read.” Microsoft Bob was a major bomb (perhaps the biggest bomb in Microsoft software history) that took a persona too far, too literally, and was based on a denigrated image of a persona. Voted 7th in PC World Magazine’s top 25 worst products of all time, Microsoft Bob was designed as a “user-friendly” Windows interface and applications for the average Joe (or average Bob) who was computer-naive or intimidated.
And this is where Microsoft looked down upon the user – the average Bob – the idea of this hapless, perhaps dumb and confused person – who needs 16+ horrible animal and animated object guides to help them in an interface that is within a room. That was Microsoft’s greatest sin on Microsoft Bob – disrespecting the targeted user, dumbing him down from a sense of technological and academic superiority.
Research was not based on fact and real-world but on high-paid Stanford academic professors and researchers telling them this is how new users behave and what they want. NOT! Alan Cooper speaks of this when he describes true persona development, calling it counter-logical: ”I suspect that this is why they originated in practice rather than in the laboratory or in academia.” With all its high-paid tomfoolery, Microsoft Bob was an insult to all users everywhere. Even the name “Bob” was insulting to “Bobs” everywhere, as if they were dullards. (Microsoft paid Nike-famous ad agency Weiden & Kennedy to come up with that name.)
Here’s nicely written bit about Microsoft Bob called “The Bob Chronicles,” irreverently and accurately calling it “The amazing true story of the software that DIDN’T change the world.”
Lesson learned (we hope!).
In our Museum Informatics class, we were assigned a project to learn a new technology, particularly a technology that one might be thinking of using for the final project (how it could be used in a museum setting or extend the museum experience).
Prof. Twidale Quote:
You are to look at it from the perspective of how it might be useful in a museum setting.
You can pick a technology you know nothing about, or one you are already familiar with but have always been meaning to investigate further.
As I had already thought of doing a historically-based blog on Manet’s Olympia painting, I thought it would be absolutely advantageous to learn WordPress (or other blogging software). It was possible that in learning and testing the technology that WordPress might not be the technology I wanted to use for the assignment, but after spending hours and days with it, even with its limitations, I found it the perfect vehicle for the Olympia blog. The end result was that in learning the technology, I actually started building the Olympia blog, thus incorporating what I learned in its creation. Of course, it was for me a difficult, frustrating process.
The concisely-written assignment activities are to:
1) Fiddle with the technology
2) Learn how to use it
3) Create something with it (not too big!)
4) Tell us about it, and you experience of learning and fiddling
Fiddling:
I love that word “fiddling.” So while I fiddled with WordPress, my “Rome” (outside world responsibilities took 2nd seat) burned. I fiddled so much that I burnt and broke a few fiddles. I probably over-fiddled, which is my tendency, and it turned into the blog itself. This tendency to over-fiddle brings to mind a classic Prof. Twidale moment that stuck with me…
Words of Wisdom on “Over-Fiddling:”
When our Museum Informatics class was onsite at the University of Illinois paper-prototyping an iPod technology (that was a mind-blower in itself), I spoke with my group of a particular functionality I thought would be important for our application. Prof. Twidale came by and reminded me, “Remember, we’re not creating Microsoft Word.” He also mentioned to me not go into so much particulars at the beginning because these “add-ons” could be done later but stressed a first layer approach (i.e. “get grounded”). Again, this was a paradigm shift for me and he helped get me out of that stuck brain mode. What’s quite funny is that I worked for Microsoft designing applications and I was approaching this paper-prototyping activity like as if I was in that mode. I realized that during and after the activity, Microsoft (and all others) would have probably built cleaner and better applications by doing paper-prototyping over creating huge product specification guides.
Now back to the learning technology bit…
The Report: Learning a New Technology – WordPress
My WordPress Example: Olympia 1865 Blog
The end results of learning WordPress was the creation and development of my blog prototype “Blogging Manet’s Olympia in 1865″ for the final Museum Informatics project.
How I learned to use the technology:
Because I had never used a blog before, any Web 2.0 tools, never used HTML, and being your basic techno-neophyte, I had to dive in and blunder around. Being highly intimidated by the idea and mystery of blogging, I first searched YouTube tutorials and came one I watched first before taking the plunge. I watched Chris Abraham’s 45-minute YouTube video to get acclimated. After watching his process, I got the courage to go to the WordPress.com site and start my blog experience. After signing up, I spent a considerable amount of time exploring the interface, drop downs, menu items, tool bars, buttons, toolbars. Then, I awkwardly and with difficulty learned WordPress by creating the Olympia 1865 blog. Details on how I applied and explored WordPress are described in my post “Progress Report.”
What was easy and what was hard:
Easy:
Tags and Categories: It was surprisingly easy to tag and categorize posts. In each post, you can assign your own tags and create your own categories. In the Post Tag option, you can also choose from your “most used tags.” You can also go back to your posts and add or delete tags and categories.
Managing Multiple Blogs: WordPress allows you to manage multiple blogs from one user account. This is quite handy to have a central way of accessing and utilizing all your blogs.
Hard:
The Post Toolbar and Icons: I don’t know but I think the WordPress team has to take a look at these icons. Some of them are absolutely non-explanatory. For the life of me, why do you create grayed-out icons for your upload/insert items (these are for pictures, media, sound, etc.)? I mean it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that grayed-out means inactive. This blows my mind – particularly on important functionality for blog posts. The icons are also incredibly small and could be redesigned to convey better meaning. In addition the formatting Visual Toolbar could use some help. There is a multi-colored icon filled with small boxes that is supposed to let you know that if you click on it, it expands the Visual formatting toolbar to include more formatting options. This is unbelievably poor.
Bugs - Yes, I’ve noticed some basic bugginess in WordPress. The most obvious one is writing this post. No matter how man times I’ve bolded a word or words, sometimes it sticks and most of the time it doesn’t take. This is particularly aggravating in doing absolutely simple formatting. Also, another bug is that sometimes the images that show up in the “Edit Post” do not show up on the actual blog but only a box with a ? mark. Is it a bug in the theme, or in WordPress? I don’t know why that is.
What was surprisingly easy or surprisingly hard:
Surprisingly easy: Activating the Blog
I have to say the one thing I thought would be the most complicated was activating the blog through WordPress.com. It was the easiest and so instant. Here is the screen where the magic happens:
Next, you supply your blogdomain, blog title, and then click “sign up.” After that a message goes to your email to activate the account. Once that is done, you can sign in to your blog and presto, here you go.
Surprisingly hard:
Creating the Blog: Because I was learning as I was creating the blog, I’d have to say it was incredibly arduous for me to do. I didn’t feel that the WordPress interface was intuitive at all. I actually found it often clunky, unresponsive, full of busy stuff, text being jam packed against another, etc. The difficulty again may have been enhanced in not knowing the program in building the blog. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into creating my basic blog prototype.
Adding Video: First of all, it is not clear that you add video to your blog. Then the only way you can is to embed it as a link from another site. Videos cannot be stored like images on the WordPress.com site. The icon and link to upload/insert media is not clear nor explanatory. You can pay $59.95 per year and upgrade to VideoPress, which allows you to upload video files from your computer to the Media Library and access and play it directly within your blog. Here’s an example screen of VideoPress functionality you don’t get in the regular WordPress.com account:
VideoPress
“Aha!” and “Duh!” moments
Regarding these moments, Professor Twidale provides a critical observation: You find out that “when you suddenly figure out how to do something and maybe realize it should have been much easier, but [realize] the system’s design made it look more confusing than it was.” I’d have to say almost all of my “Aha!” and “Duh!” moments (and especially those “Duh!” ones) come from some awkwardly designed WordPress interface issues.
Aha:
Once I figured out that to choose your widgets, you needed to drag them onto the prescribed areas, I found it quite fun to move widgets around, modify them, and try different ones out:
Another Aha! moment was when I realized that even if I published a post, I could always go back and edit it. I thought that was phenomenal. I was so nervous in even posting anything and saving continuously in Draft mode because I thought once I published it, it is done. The ability to edit all published posts is very freeing, and can allow for corrections and modifications.
Duh:
There are considerably more Duhs! than Ahas! so here we go:
1. Themes: Ok, I just didn’t get it and it took me some time to realize that the WordPress word “themes” really meant “designs” or more accurately “templates.” I don’t understand why WordPress couldn’t follow convention in naming this correctly. I couldn’t grasp how central this was. I spent hours, and I mean many hours, exploring the themes that WordPress has to offer. Again, I didn’t realize that because these WordPress themes are created by WordPress community members, you cannot do the same thing with every theme. An example of this is in my theme I cannot place any images in my header where in other themes you can. This is a major roadblock for me because my image is central to the blog itself – the painting of Manet’s Olympia. This lends itself to the following issue that took me a long time to come up with:
2. There’s a difference between setting up a blog through WordPress.com versus WordPress.org. I wanted to utilize all those cool custom themes that were out on the Web, put couldn’t find a place to enter or plug in the theme. I also wanted to access all that amazing functionality with the 700+ plug-ins that are offered in the WordPress community. Well, in setting up my WordPress.com blog, that “ain’t gonna” work.
The issue is this, as posted on WordPress.com’s Support site called “WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org:”
The distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org can cause some confusion for people. Let’s clear it up. WordPress.com is brought to you by some of the same folks who work on WordPress, the open source blogging software. WordPress.com utilizes the same WordPress software which you can download at WordPress.org. With WordPress.com the hosting and managing of the software is taken care of by the team here at Automattic. With WordPress.org you need to install the software on your own server or with a 3rd party provider.
WordPress.com Benefits
- It’s free and much easier to setup
- Everything is taken care of: setup, upgrades, spam, backups, security, etc
- Your blog is on hundreds of servers, so it’s highly unlikely it will go down due to traffic
- Your posts are backed up automatically
- You get extra traffic from blogs of the day and tags
- You can find like-minded bloggers using tag and friend surfer
- Your login is secure (SSL) so no one can get into your account if you use wifi
WordPress.com Cons
- We provide 70+ themes (and adding more every day) which you can modify and edit the CSS, but you cannot run a custom theme*
- You can’t hack the PHP code behind your blog*
- You can’t upload plugins
* The VIP program on WordPress.com for high-traffic and high-profile sites allows you to run custom themes, custom PHP code, ad code, and WordPress plugins.
WordPress.org Benefits
- Ability to upload themes
- Ability to upload plugins
- Great community
- Complete control to change code if you’re technically minded
WordPress.org Cons
- You need a good web host, which generally costs $7-12 a month, or thousands of dollars per month for a high traffic site
- Requires more technical knowledge to set up and run
- You’re responsible for stopping spam
- You have to handle backups
- You must upgrade the software manually when a new version comes out
- If you get a huge spike in traffic (like Digg or Slashdot) your site will probably go down unless you have a robust hosting setup
WordPress.org is free blogging software. With WordPress.org, you can install themes and plugins, run advertisements, edit the database and even modify the PHP source code. WordPress.org is the home of this software. Anyone can download the software for free but it must be installed on a web server before it will work. Web servers are generally not free. Hosting your own WordPress software can be fun and rewarding; it also places full responsibility on the blogger. If you mismanage your web server, you can lose your entire blog.
For no charge, WordPress.org provides downloadable blog software, community mailing lists, community support forums, documentation, and free themes and plugins.
WordPress.com is different. You do not have to download software, pay for hosting or manage a web server. When you sign up for a WordPress.com blog, you will get a URL like “andy.wordpress.com” or you can map a domain so your blog is available at “example.com” without the “.wordpress.com” portion. You do not control the software or the database; FTP and shell access are not included. WordPress.com is based on a multi-user version of the WordPress software which does not permit uploading of PHP themes or plugins (although many popular plugins are built into WordPress.com ). Popular javascript embeds such as YouTube are supported, but for security reasons some of the lesser known embed codes will be stripped out. CSS is also restricted by default for security reasons, but you can purchase a paid upgrade to gain the ability for full CSS editing. What you can do on WordPress.com is blog for free.
For no charge, WordPress.com provides web hosting, unlimited database storage with redundancy and backups, automatic software upgrades, community support forums, multi-lingual administration and themes, real-time traffic stats, comment tracking, blog and post rankings and other features not available anywhere else. These features will always be free for blogs started on WordPress.com; if you ever find yourself being charged for these at WordPress.com, pinch yourself and wake up!
WordPress.com is a commercial enterprise owned by Automattic, a company started by the founding developer of WordPress and staffed by full-time developers, designers and support agents. It runs a multi-user version of WordPress called WordPress MU. WPMU is also free, open-source software. Developments sponsored by Automattic are regularly contributed back into WordPress.org so the community can benefit.
WordPress.com offers paid upgrades as a way to provide premium features without forcing bloggers to host their blogs elsewhere. These upgrades are optional. Basic blogs will always be free on WordPress.com and the basic services will continue to be upgraded with better features.
3. Dashboards: Another WordPress semantics issue is the term “dashboard.” I just couldn’t understand this term at all. It seemed rather obtuse. Then I finally realized that this is the work space area where you manage the blog. I just came across this on the WordPress site on what the Dashboard is. It also offered a video tutorial on the Dashboard. I didn’t know they had any videos on WordPress but they are found on a site called WordPress.tv.
4. Widgets and Layout: Related to the themes issue are the widgets. The widgets are what adds increased functionality to the blog. What’s frustrating about WordPress is that one is allotted select widgets in each theme design. It took me a long time to get this – mainly by sampling other themes and then noticing how the widgets were different for each them. What that means is that one theme can have widgets you want, and the one you have not have those or have a few of them.
In the theme I picked, I wanted this design format because I thought it lent to my idea of a Paris newspaper rag, as well as looking quite similar in design to Salon.com which I sort of wanted to emulate. However the layout and widgets are constrained by the theme. I particularly wanted the widgets to show up on the right side column, but it will only put them at the bottom of a three-columned content blog area.
5. There’s a difference between Posts and Pages. OK, this took me a long time to grasp but I finally figured out there was a difference between posts and pages. The posts are what I write that shows up on the blog space. The pages are WordPress’ great addition to the blog space by allowing one to create web-like pages on your blog space that can hold different content outside of the postings. This can make a blog act more like a basic website.
Helpful WordPress Guides:
1. WordPress’ Online Manual – WordPress Codex
WordPress offers text-based tutorials on WordPress Codex which is its own website as well as being the tab “Docs” in wordpress.org. WordPress Codex works as a text-based resource for information about WordPress such as:
- Getting Started
- WordPress 2.9 Information
- Working with WordPress
- Design and Layout
- Advanced Topics
- Troubleshooting
- Developer Documentation
- About WordPress
Blogger Lorelle in “A Guide to the WordPress Codex” highlights good places to start within Codex in gearing up on WordPress.
2. WordPress.tv: I didn’t come across this until after this assignment, but WordPress has a site with just videos on it. It also has a “How-To” section with video-based tutorials and help.
3. WordPress Support: WordPress.com has an excellent site that has some clear, concisely illustrated and nicely-worded support documentation on WordPress.
4. Tripwire Magazine’s “100+ Massive WordPress Tutorial Collection” has some free video tutorials on WordPress basics (some of these I had to ignore because they required a custom self-hosted website and thus installation more complicated – not the 5 minute installation for WordPress.com site but having to create a database, edit downloaded .php files etc – NOT!).
5. “How to Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer” is a downloadable book costing $ but offers a free sample chapter that is very clear and easy to read called “Getting Familiar with WordPress.” This is a very nice introduction to WordPress, which I wish I had read earlier in my learning and searching.
6. Free WordPress Video Tutorials are offered on iThemes website. Some of these are the same videos posted by TripWire magazine.
7. Free WordPress Video Tutorials are also offered on Mark McLaren’s (an online marketing consultant) McBuzz Communication’s Business Blogging 101. He’s organized it so that you can view tutorials by topic or by skill level.
8. WordPress Plugins and Tools: Though I haven’t been able to explore plugins (there are over 700+ WordPress plugins available) because I am creating a WordPress.com automatic installed blog versus a manual WordPress.org one plus the time required for customization and coding, Mashable has some excellent lists of top plugins and recommendations:
Mashable has these a good resource plugin lists:
- 50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia
- 30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics
- 30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments
- 30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers
- WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog
9. On YouTube, Chris Abraham offers a long (45 minutes) but friendly introductory WordPress video tutorial. It’s a bit old (2006) but still worthy of use. However, he also posted an updated tutorial (2009) that I utilized. There are other numerous WordPress YouTube tutorials but I liked his friendly tone to just jump in there.
I have to say I am now loving WordPress by using the blog as a “virtual design studio.”
Inspired by Prof. Twidale’s words that design is a messy process, that sketching and doodling is good, that “bits and pieces” and random thoughts are excellent, and to use an online tool such as wikis or blogs to facilitate that process – all these come to fruition in “Making Olympia.” For the first time, I am able to work in a creative mode. Thank you, Prof. Twidale!
It’s amazing how well WordPress works for this process. When I get a thought or idea or find something, I can write up a bit on it quickly, tag and categorize it for easy access, and take a look throughout my blog as to how these “bits and pieces” are looking over all, fitting together, creating a pattern, see what’s missing, and see what emerges. It’s nice to see the versatility of this social media tool actually morphing into a design process tool instead. Pretty darn cool!
Prof. Twidale reviewed my progress report and came up with some great ideas to work around my problems and enhance what I’d like to do with the site.
These include:
1. Dating to 1865
2. Increasing Tag/Word Cloud Visualization
A Twidale Quote:
Try searching for other faux-historical blogs to see if they’ve hacked it.
Crude workaround – use sub-headings in your posting containing a dateline. also maybe create month or week tags
re tagclouds or wordle – maybe try many eyes wikified and paste in a viz - if the blog allows pasted in HTML.
If not – maybe create a webpage with the viz and link to it from the blog
While onsite at a museum conference, Prof. Twidale showed our class through Elluminate some visualization tools – particularly through many eyes wikified. He built a tag cloud or was it wordle that blew our minds and struck me this was the exact visualization I wanted to get out of doing this project – a word cloud from 1865 that by looking at it immediately communicates the scene around Olympia – and then to create a word cloud from modern day and see what the words that describe Olympia are now. Then to put these two together in comparison – and see the incredible change. Yes!
Here’s an example from Wordle:
Period G by Meredith, attributed to Wordle, http://www.wordle.net/
(I should watch this Elluminate class again on Prof Twidale creating this visualization through many eyes wikified.)
Key content resources used will be:
1. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers by T.J. Clark
2. Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet by Otto Friedrich
3. Manet: Olympia (Art in Context) by Theodore Reff
Note: I still have to obtain #2 and #3 books.
Again, much of the best content seems to be in printed works rather than online items. Fortunately, this Massachusetts Review article from 1966 is made available through JStor. There are only six copies in print available through WorldCat.
The Citation:
Manet Caricatures: Olympia
Mina Curtiss
The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 725-752
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25087509
This is a very important work in documenting some of the primary caricatures made of Manet’s Olympia from that time period. Interestingly, Curtiss notes the popularity of illustrating the black cat found in Olympia painting, sometimes used more often than Olympia herself…
T.J. Clark, Paris and the Painting of Modern Life
I think this descriptive statement about T.J. Clark’s work The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers clearly articulates the sense of social and historical context I want to place Olympia in and this blog in.
Here is the quote from the Amazon site:
The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand-new city, equipped with boulevards, cafés, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds–the birthplace of those habits of commerce and leisure that constitute “modern life.” Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T. J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat, and others as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives–be they bar-maids, boaters, prostitutes, sightseers, orpetits bourgeois lunching on the grass. The central question of The Painting of Modern Life is this: did modern painting as it came into being celebrate the consumer-oriented culture of the Paris of Napoleon III, or open it to critical scrutiny?
