graphic design

Design and the Digital Humanities CFP

Michael J. Kramer

Co-organized by our own mighty NUDHL contributor Josh Honn!
Topic: Design and the Digital Humanities

With this year’s M/MLA topic of “Art & Artifice,” the new Permanent Section on Digital Humanities will explore issues of, experiments with, and provocations on design. Digital humanities (DH) is often equated with tool-oriented, procedural tasks like text analysis and data gathering. For example, the recent MLA open access publication Literary Studies in the Digital Age, focuses on textual databases, mining, analysis, and modeling. However, Johanna Drucker, Anne Burdick, Bethany Nowviskie, Tara McPherson, and others have argued that interface and systems design, visual narrative, and graphical display are not peripheral concerns, but rather important “intellectual methods” (Burdick et al. 2012). Likewise, DH projects and publications often segment (content first, design last) and/or outsource (hire a firm, select a template) the design process, overlooking the powerful and important dialectic of design and argument, at times to the great detriment of the project itself. In an effort to further the conversation, we invite papers related to any aspect of design and the digital humanities. Possible topics/questions may include, but are certainly not limited to:

  • design of interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, and electronic literature
  • games and virtual spaces
  • hybrid digital/analog fabrication practices and the ethos of hacking, making, and crafting that surrounds them
  • tensions between original designs and prefabricated templates and visualizations
  • the relationship between content and design in a scholarly edition, web archive, course website, or other digital content management project
  • design and affect, design and imagination
  • the tendency of DH project groups to separate designers and programmers on a team; tendency to divide design concerns from “technical” concerns
  • design standards, web standards, responsive & participatory design, and issues of accessibility of online publications and projects
  • skeuomorphism vs. born-digital design?
  • design and code as language art, code poetry, etc.?

Please send 250-word abstracts by May 31st to both Josh Honn (josh.honn@gmail.com) and Rachael Sullivan (sullivan.rachael@gmail.com).
Co-chairs: Josh Honn (Northwestern University) and Rachael Sullivan (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Why I use WordPress instead of Blackboard

Beth Corzo-Duchardt

I know that Blackboard and NUIT have worked very hard to make it a centralized location for course content and provide the tools for productive online dialog among students. I think this is a great idea.

But I hate Blackboard.

More importantly my students hate Blackboard.

Why?

It’s ugly. Also it buggy. But for me, the visual design is key.

This is what students see when they access the automatically-generated Blackboard home page for the course I taught last fall:

And there isn’t even any actual content on this page!

This is what students see when they access the home page of the course website I created for Cross Gender Performance in Popular Culture, using a standard WordPress template:

 

The design is cleaner and much easier to navigate. (You can click on the link above and poke around the entire website to seem more.)

This is not a question of mere aesthetics (as if aesthetics were not always important!). It a question of visual communication. We recognize the pedagogical importance of presenting students with a clearly articulated paper prompt that does not make them work to figure out what is being asked of them. The visual presentation of a course website should be held to similar standards, even if the course content has nothing to do with visual communication. Even though science courses do not teach writing, we still expect a syllabus for a science course to be free of grammatical errors.

I created this site to replicate what I find to be Blackboard’s most useful aspect for my own teaching, the fact that it provides one centralized “place” for course content, assignments, and student work that my students and I can access 24/7. There is much more that one could do with a WordPress site, as Micheal Kramer‘s course demonstrates. And WordPress is not the only platform one can use. I like it because its supported by Weinberg.

I’d love to hear from others who have used other alternative to Blackboard, who can point towards other pedagogical uses for these tools, or who disagree with my ideas about the importance of the visual aspect of our communications with students.