Category: Uncategorized

What should someone prioritize in digital design? Nice colors, clear site navigation, maybe big headlines? I’m sure most people can remember a website they thought had some fun feature or format, or some website they hoped would be fun but just didn’t work for one reason or another. This thought process may not be a top priority for many web designers. After all, the internet and websites are so ubiquitous that they have become the background noise to daily life. However, for websites, like most everything else, first impressions matter. A website interface is what gives a user that first impression. This is the main argument in Tara Andrews and J. van Joris’ article “What Are You Trying to Say? The Interface as an Integral Element of Argument.”¹ They propose that the interface of a website is the result of a series of purposeful choices and should be understood as purposeful by the creator and the user. These choices articulate an argument about the content of the page, whether the author intends it to or not. The choices a creator makes can enhance the purpose of the page, or detract from it.

A case study from the in-class activity to explore visualizations of data on Tableau Public can be used to illustrate their point. Using Andrews and van Joris’ idea, foundational instruction from Dr. Otis’ video on Data Visualization,² and the factors laid out in the article “Reframing the Conversation: Digital Humanists, Disabilities, and Accessibility,”³ we can identify a few key features to consider in digital design.

If data is being visualized, the type of chart chosen should be relevant and able to show the data in a readable and meaningful way. Using a type of chart that does not accurately display your data will misrepresent the data and put on the user a high responsibility to decipher and understand the data. Overcomplicated charts make data intimidating. Less is more, and simpler is better in data visualization, especially online.

Data visualizations should be legible without color before color theory makes your chart a gallery piece. Once data is visible in black and white, color can be added, but rainbow color palettes should be avoided. Color theory is not a cross-cultural form of communication, and color should be used to highlight certain aspects of the data, not just to make it fun to look at. In choosing color, creators should consider the pros and cons of different palettes. Different color combinations can be difficult to read for users with astigmatism or color blindness, so features to adjust or invert the font and background colors can greatly improve user experience.

Using these three general ideas, I want to investigate the Tableau Public page “Who Lives Inside Our Bedtime Books.”⁴ The page is a study of the ratio of gender representation in 284 children’s books with animal characters across decades from before the 1950s to 2020.⁵ The page shows 9 decades represented as tall buildings with rows of windows. Each building’s windows are assigned a color representing the gender of the animal characters in the book.⁶ Blue windows signify that all the animals are male, yellow that they are all female, blue and yellow that both are represented, and green meaning the animal is “it.”⁷ Hovering over or clicking on an individual window shows which book is represented, the year it was published, a rating out of 5 stars from an unlisted source,  and lists each animal character and how they are identified.⁸

All of this is to say, even a cute, fun idea can be heavily affected by its presentation. If the interface is not accessible, some users may not get any use of it at all. The data is presented in a way that undermines the stated purpose of the site (see footnotes for comments on data accuracy), and the functionality of moving between windows to see information about the books is slow and cannot be done without a mouse. Ultimately, digital design is a complex undertaking with a lot to consider, and exploring examples like these has been very enlightening. Keeping general principles of design in mind is good, but blind spots exist. The main takeaway from the referenced sources, and from class, has to be that talking about these ideas is key to identifying possible issues and adapting. No one can make a website usable by everyone, but presenting users with options and accepting feedback can go a long way. And one more thing: data accuracy was mostly noted in footnotes, but if you’re going to create a website about children’s books, you have to actually read them.

1. Andrews, Tara L. and Zundert, van. Joris J.  “What Are You Trying to Say? The Interface as an Integral Element of Argument,” Roman Bleier, Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces. Norderstedt, 2018. https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/9106/1/02_andrews_zundert.pdf ↩︎
2. Otis, Jessica M. Data Visualization. ↩︎
3. Brett, Megan R. Otis, Jessica M.  Kelly, Mills. “Reframing the Conversation: Digital Humanists, Disabilities, and Accessibility” Debates in Digital Humanities. 2023. ↩︎
4. Lukashik, Anna. Vizuators. “Who Lives Inside Our Bedtime Books” Tableau Public. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/vizuators.make.over.monday/viz/WhoLivesInsideOurBedtimeBooks/Dashboard
   Note: No matter what I tried, I was not able to compress to potato-ify a screenshot of the page enough to include it in this post as a still image. The link should still work. ↩︎
5. For my classmates, this is the website that broke on my university laptop and became illegible because that laptop has a non-standard pixel ratio, which is its own can of issue-worms that I did not feel like experimenting with. ↩︎
6. No data source is identified in the Tableau, and from comparing a handful of represented books to my own family collection, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that a number of these are using incorrect data. As in, “the creator clearly did not even open some of these books” levels of wrong. I don’t know what went into gathering the data, but it wasn’t reading. ↩︎
7. For the green “it” category, at least one represented animal uses it for one animal, and the 10 other animals represented are not referred to by any pronouns. Some instances of “he/him” actually refer to “they/them” characters or nongendered groups of characters. ↩︎
8. I had decided to use this as a case study before I realized how inaccurate the data is. I feel like this just further proves my point, and I don’t feel like critiquing another example, so we’re gonna go with this. At least the errors are funny when you can compare them to the actual books. ↩︎

With all the ways to tell an engaging story, a textbook seems like a dry and irrelevant narrative. It is, however, precisely that. One thought I kept returning to during the readings, activities, and discussions this week was that history is a constructed narrative. Each historian, by necessity, must decide what will and will not be included in their telling of history. No one is capable of telling the complete whole of every side, faction, opinion, and event at a certain point in history. This particular module gave me much to think about, especially as topics of historical accuracy and storytelling are relevant to my thesis. It is also relevant to the assigned reading this week, which explored different uses of digital storytelling to present historical narratives. In particular, I found the text-based choose-your-own-adventure story The Road to Canterbury¹ to be very entertaining. It presents a narrative that balances well the historical facts of the pilgrimages to Canterbury that took place in the late 1300s with the audience expectations about the events and the interactive format of the website. 

I found especially interesting the aspects of the journey that were adapted, or omitted, for the modern audience. For example, the names of multiple people in the traveling party central to the story reference actual historical figures from the time. One man shares his surname with Geoffrey Chaucer,² who wrote The Canterbury Tales. This is a clever nod to one of the most famous literary works on the popular pilgrimage journey, and several other characters have personalities or names meant to reference historical figures. It is a clever way to meet user expectations while still presenting a nominally accurate and plausible narrative. The risk, of course, with a non-linear historical story is twofold. On the one hand, the usability of actual historical figures is limited by factual information about the character. This can present awkward boundaries in a story or risk an ahistorical narrative, which damages the credibility of the story as a whole. On the other hand, modern media and portrayals of history have given the audience, the users, a set of expectations about history that may be wildly inaccurate. I am sure many people can think of a “historically accurate” movie which was torn to shreds as an inaccurate disaster once historians saw it. I find it difficult as a historian to watch productions supposedly set in areas and time periods I am familiar with. Despite the sea of cringing historians, popular media informs the audience about the time it is set in. Even when it is known to be inaccurate, many people will still associate what they see as the “truth.” ³

Though I do not have the time or energy to go into the many sides of the historical and modern debate on “authenticity” and its value, or lack thereof, in any depth, it is a major concern in historical storytelling. The 2021 book The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism⁴ covers the many issues on this topic in three main ways. It asks first: whose version of history is considered authentic? (Spoiler: the answer is white men) Second, it asks how inaccuracies in media come to be, and how they persist. Last, it asks how creators who claim to be creating a historical narrative go about it doing so, and how their methods of constructing an “authentic” representation result in the final products and are taken in by the audience. This book endeavors to present a balanced investigation as to how and why inaccuracies appear in media, and is careful not to accuse intention behind many of these choices. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History⁵ 2012 does not do that. Trouillot presents history as a textbook and history as a game or interactive story, digital or otherwise, as the constructed narrative I mentioned earlier. Even a historian writing an “objective” history has to strike a balance between expectation and accuracy, as Heartfield did in The Road to Canterbury. However, Trouillot proposes that the very idea of “objectivity” is disingenuous, as all historians are actors and narrators. Further, every writer is constrained by their situation and the power structures they exist in. A publisher may disagree with the content of a narrative and refuse to publish it; governments or other powers may seek to silence it; or the historian themselves may silence large parts of a historical narrative, purposefully or not. To Trouillot, power creates silences, silences reinforce power, and then power seeks to enforce those silences to continue the cycle. What is silenced becomes either lost entirely or ingrained in society as unimportant. This is, for instance, why there is still a need for and differentiation of “Women’s History” classes.

All of these considerations are why I had comparatively less to say in class than I usually do. To say there was a lot on my mind would be an understatement. Still, questions of authenticity vs. expectation create a curious situation for modern historians and digital storytelling. You can be as accurate as you want, but the divide between accuracy and expectation can be wide. Still, I believe projects like Heartfield’s The Road to Canterbury, and many of the digital history projects our class will produce this semester, are great ways to bridge the gap and present a history that is engaging and thought-provoking. Hopefully we can present this history and survive this semester without losing our minds. Okay, hopefully I can survive this semester without losing my mind.

1. Heartfield, Kate. “The Road to Canterbury.” Choice of Games, n.d. https://www.choiceofgames.com/road-to-canterbury/. ↩︎
2. The Wikipedia article for Geoffrey Chaucer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer ↩︎
3. See How Historical Films Misuse Color by Thomas Brodey https://tragedyandfarce.blog/2021/08/21/how-historical-films-misuse-color/
   Or 6 Ways Medieval Life Is Misrepresented in Movies by Nitya Rao https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/misconceptions/medieval-life-misrepresentations-movies
   As just two (or 7) of the many, many examples of this.
   ↩︎
4. Alvestad, Karl , and Robert Houghton , ed. The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism. New Directions in Medieval Studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Accessed October 8, 2026. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350167452. ↩︎
5. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. 2015 Kindle Edition. 1995. Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America: Beacon Press, n.d. ↩︎

The focus of the articles and activity for class this week is the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) in the humanities. The term GIS is very simple for the vast amounts and types of information it covers. In broad and brief terms, quoted from Ian Gregory and Paul Ell’s GIS and its role in historical research: an introduction, it is “any information that refers to a location on the Earth’s surface.” HGIS is much the same, though the relevant information must also be historic or historically relevant. In practice, the examples covered in other articles all use digital systems to track, place, and trace information relevant to the research topic on a map. If you’ve seen a plot map of Civil War Battlegrounds, or a map pinned with locations of historic buildings, that is a good example of HGIS. Each example assigned for this week had its own challenges, but the long-form article by Loren Siebert, Using GIS to Document, Visualize, and Interpret Tokyo’s Spatial History, was a good breakdown of the different types of engagement, challenges, and research that go into these often long processes.

Difficulties Siebert both experienced and proposed included: the sheer amount and diverse range of sources; that GIS systems and results want complete data that is often unavailable; that changes in geography and borders over time can be difficult to find in sources and difficult to visualize in a GIS project; that the data-driven approach that a digital GIS system is meant for can flatten and dehumanize the human experiences meant to be covered by HGIS; and that, while GIS can give historians new perspectives and avenues of research to explore, they can also create the impression of patterns that do not really exist, correlation is not causation.

That last part is especially relevant to Susan Grunewald’s Beyond the Archive article, What GIS Mapping Reveals about German POWs in Soviet Russia. In plotting the location of POW camps and locations of industrial production across what is now Ukraine in the post-war USSR, Grunewald notices a correlation between the site of coal mines and other large industries and POW camps. Grunewald’s conclusion is that the location of industry informed the location of POW camps, and that POWs were used as forced labor at levels unprecedented and unknown to history thus far. However, there were vast numbers of coal mines and other industrial areas across all of Ukraine and much of Soviet Russia, and there is a distinct lack of POW camps at many of the other sites. While Grunewald did discover an interesting correlation, her article shows what happens when GIS becomes the basis for a claim instead of supporting evidence. GIS and HGIS can be part of the research process, but they can’t stand alone as evidence for a historical claim.

During class, we experimented with QGIS software, which is meant for creating and displaying HGIS. I mostly learned that I hate it. As software, not as a concept. After trying to download QGIS on three separate devices, I finally got it to work in just one instance. I managed to break the software in new and creative ways a few times during class. My proudest moment from the activity was not rage-quitting and throwing my laptop out a window. I do think HGIS is a fascinating and important tool, and I am capable of using complex software and even modding, but the QGIS system is infuriating. I plan to do my best to avoid using it as much as I can in the future.

Though I was unfortunately too sick to attend class this week, I was able to thoroughly read and explore the assigned articles and websites. The main and most important question I had after reading Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz’s The war to free science¹ was: how much of my tuition is going to these companies? The 2019 article describes the ways a few major publishing conglomerates control the research and publication ecosystem and charge exorbitant prices for everyone involved. The authors describe these companies as an oligopoly, and that couldn’t be more true. When the article was published, Elsevier alone owned thousands of publishers. The next largest companies had smaller holdings, but still controlled thousands of publishers, and charged thousands of dollars for academics to read their own articles. Even without a technical monopoly, too few people had too much control. The University of California system is cited as having had, and dropped, an $11 million annual subscription. What few papers offered individual paper access often charged $30 or more to view a published work. The small elite group of publishing conglomerates operates mostly unchecked by the government or other standards. They are not technically a monopoly, and they have plenty of lobbying money, and are left to their own very costly devices. The authors explain very clearly the situation as of 2019. I would have appreciated a bit more detail on the very briefly mentioned genre-collecting, where a big company will have control over multiple science journals, and another company will have history journals. It was a single sentence that mentioned this, but I would be interested to learn more about genre-specific consolidation and how that affects pricing and access. Pre-print access, pirating, personally publishing articles, and open-access websites are the ways the authors describe to buck the system. I think individual publishing and open-access peer review and editing are the best of these solutions. Not only does it actively fight the system by circumventing the big companies, but it proves that a different way is possible. Even us nerds can stick it to the man. Speaking of the man, the article does give fair time to the counter-arguments of the publishing oligopoly, but their arguments simply don’t land. The cited 521% increase in journal subscription expenses from universities from 1986-2014 was no mistake. You don’t outpace inflation like a rocket racing a car unless you think you can get away with it. Unfortunately, despite the alternatives and options the authors list, they are getting away with it. 

Also assigned this week was the GMU Copyright Basics² info guide. While technically informative, this webpage is worded very strangely. The phrasing “the use you wish to make” is used instead of “your intended use” or “the intended use” or “how you wish to use” throughout the page. The phrasing seems rather removed and backward, especially since the page is meant to be an easy-access guide for students. Further, sections like Step 3 give the exact legal definitions and specifications that apply to the question at hand (in this case, Step 3: Consider whether there is a copyright law exception covering the use you wish to make). By only parroting the law, the page does very little to help a student. Any of us who can access this website can look up copyright law, and the exact relevant statute is of lesser value if it is not translated out of lawyer-speak. I found this site especially aggravating when I tried to use it to find copyright options for my own photography (see: Photo Gallery in the top bar menu). I ended up just looking up my specific case and finding a watermarking website.³

1. Resnick, Brian, and Julia Belluz. “The war to free science: How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls.” Vox. Vox, July 10, 2019. https://archive.is/20190610151251/https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls. ↩︎
2. https://infoguides.gmu.edu/copyrightbasics/begin ↩︎
3. https://watermark.ws/home It says it is free. It is not free. It is just the cheapest one I could find. ↩︎