By Alec<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

Initially, I was unsure about the usefulness of doing project presentations a full week ahead of the due date. And I wasn’t wrong to predict that many of us would be getting up with unfinished products \u2013 Sherwood found a bug in his site’s visual style, I couldn’t get Palladio to open my project, and one of Eleanor’s pages opened up blank. A few people didn’t even have sites that were ready for primetime.<\/p>\n

And that’s awesome.<\/p>\n

Because for one thing, it’s pretty reassuring to see that other people are running into the same sorts of difficulties as I am. Being able to nod sympathetically at hurdles my peers have encountered or problems they’re stuck on is a good feeling, especially considering how isolating digital work like coding or web design can seem. I’m not sure getting up in front of a class with an essay full of typos would garner the same level of understanding from the audience. These presentations were a friendly reminder that we’re all working with foreign and challenging tools, and that none of us should expect ourselves or one another to be master Neatliners or WordPress gods after just a few weeks.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, there’s also definite value to being forced to \u201cdemo\u201d a site live. I think in our own work with our projects we tend to fall into a routine of testing out the same links or opening up the same pages. When showing our work to others, however, we have to switch gears and present things in a way that makes sense to a new viewer. And invariably, we run into glitches \u2013 glitches we probably would have otherwise overlooked.<\/p>\n

Finally, I can hardly think of a better testament to the essence of digital humanities than to have the phrase \u201cOh, I need to fix\/change\/add\/delete that\u201d constantly muttered during presentations. Digital work is by definition highly transitory, and a digital project’s design and argument can be overwritten in mere seconds or with only a few clicks and keystrokes. I did a good deal of work on my own site this morning, and as a result some portions of my project bear little resemblance to what I shoed yesterday. It’s entirely likely that many of our final projects will undergo significant transformations by the time they’re turned in, and even then they won’t be \u201cfinished\u201d, just polished. And that, too, is awesome.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alec Initially, I was unsure about the usefulness of doing project presentations a full week ahead of the due date. And I wasn’t wrong to predict that many of us would be getting up with unfinished products \u2013 Sherwood found a bug in his site’s visual style, I couldn’t get Palladio to open my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}