Process Narrative: A Reflection on the Project's Creation

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        The process of building my website over the course of the semester was very iterative. When I initially built the site in September, it was incredibly bare bones; it featured the required textual and photographic content, but that was about it. I did not focus a lot of my attention on the ease of site navigation, instead choosing to focus on content presentation. This changed, however, after I received feedback from Dr. Wisnicki. The feedback I received helped to illustrate the shortcomings of my website and improvements I could make to it. Besides feedback, the other most essential factor in improving my site was the course materials we read this semester, specifically the guidelines laid out by the Social Justice and the Digital Humanities project. After we read the questions posed by the SJDHP, I gave considerably more consideration to how users might navigate my site. After the second site update for DH Publication 2, I realized that my website was not nearly as accessible as I hoped, so for the final iteration I focused on making it easier to browse. I also added a considerable number of images during the second iteration of site changes so that my site was more appealing. I incorporated images that I took for DH Dev Report 2 and DH Dev Report 6 into my site pages so that the viewer would get a sense of what I was describing on the pages without having to navigate to an external site (i.e. Flickr). Using images to liven up the website was by far the most interesting aspect of the project to me because it allowed me to combine aspects of the course work we have done this semester—the documentation of COVID on UNL campus and in downtown Lincoln—and apply that work creatively.


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