Beale Air Force Base (CMOC), ca. 2000 (Library of Congress)

Working on digital projects means using technology to get your points across. There are many kinds of digital tools  you can use to build your site; the first step in choosing a tool is learning what you have accessible to you, where on your campus you can find equipment and assistance, and how you can adapt tools to the story you are telling.

Think about the kinds of things you will need to build your site. Be creative at the start–the digital medium allows you to do things that you can’t in a traditional paper.

Survey Your Institution

What resources do you have on campus that can help with your project? What kinds of assistance can you obtain there?

Does you campus have a scanning lab, a place where you can record and edit videos, or a digital humanities lab?  Is there any kind of digital humanities tool that your campus has expertise in that you could incorporate into your project?

Survey Digital Tools

Many digital humanities tools are open source and free to use. You might get recommendations from your IT unit on some of the better tools, or from your professors, but nothing beats looking at a few options and trying them out.

Think about what kinds of tools you might employ on your site and compare some tools to see which work best for your needs.

You can learn more about tools from some of the sites below:

Learn more about WordPress

WordPress is the platform that we are using. Find out if you can obtain technical help on campus, if not, explore tutorials and online courses to become more familiar with it. Look at plugins, themes, and widgets to begin to figure out the best way to add content to your site.  Many visualizations created with other tools can be embedded in WordPress pages.

  • For some ideas of the variety of ways WordPress can handle content, review some of the sites on “The Best WordPress sites“

Report on your survey as one of your weekly blog posts. Determine what capacity you have for scanning original documents, for recording audio or video interviews, for editing audio and video, for any other plans that you have.  This post must be completed before March 14.