My “digital database,” has been launched, though there is still some work to be done. The basic skeletal structure of it is live on wordpress. Here you can see my proposal, information about the research, a works consulted, as well as my first display: a 1912 model of the disaster using apples.
You can find my updated proposal on the “about” page of the site here. I am currently trying to figure out just how much information I want to put in with my various images, as well as the level of interpretation I want to provide. For most displays, I don’t have detailed information about the interpretation within the exhibit itself, so I worry adding too much information based on my own analysis will lead to a bias presentation of the overall display. I also need to decide how I am going to curate my other displays, as they have multiple images and are reconstructed through various media forms. The one I have up now is just one photo–so it was easy. But the next four I plan to include have anywhere for 3-10 primary sources associated with them. I don’t know if a gallery of images, or spreading the images out, would be the most useful and aesthetically appealing. Therefore, the overall format of the database page remains to be finished.
What remains to be done:
- Add blog posts about the other displays that I plan to include: they span from 1914, 1968-1976, 2000, and 2018. This is going to take the longest amount of time, and I plan to block out all of next Saturday to create and edit the posts–so hopefully I’ll have an almost complete draft by April 22nd.
- Decide on the level of interpretation I provide in each post
- Decide an overall, streamline format for each post
- Perhaps try to mess with the design a little more to make it more exciting
The site is looking great. From the one example you have up of a display/exhibit of the Titanic I feel like I am getting a sense of what the site will be. That said, it is going to be great to get more of the full feel for the site after you have added a few more of those up as an illustration.
To your questions about how to set up the pages for some of the exhibits that have more images I think that will largely depend on how much textual content you end up with for each of the exhiibitions. That is, if you end up with enough text to have the images appear inline with the text then that would work great. If they end up being shorter, then using the image gallery feature in wordpress will likely work.
For structure, you might think about making a landing page on your database page that has a list of all of the individual exhibitions on it. That would make it easier to navigate through all of them. That would also let you have a list of them in the order they occurred.
One note on the Gravenstein Apple Fair example post. It was a bit confusing to parse the example. Is the text presented above the image the text of an article or is that your text? If it is text from an article, it would be good to put it in quotes and include the reference on the page.