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Wordpress & StoryMapJS for Digital Humanists

Introduction to using Wordpress and StoryMapJS for Digital Humanists

Why use Wordpress & StoryMapJS?

Wordpress logo

Start using Wordpress via the UO. You will need a University of Oregon Duck ID to log into it.


What is Wordpress?

Wordpress is a content management system that allows anyone with access make websites and blogs. It is one of the world's most popular tool for developing publicly available websites online. If you are a UO community member then you have access to Wordpress through the university. Just go to https://blogs.uoregon.edu/ and login.

Why use Wordpress?

There's many reasons to use Wordpress for your academic work. It has an easy to navigate interface for making a blog or web pages, different types of design layouts, and allows you to quickly add digital content to the web using your voice or others. It is a tool to leverage if you want your scholarly work to be freely and publicly available online and reach large audiences. It also has the capability it send you analytics

 

 

StoryMapJS logo

Start using StoryMapJS. You will need a Google account.


What is StoryMapJS?


StoryMapJS is a free digital mapping tool that you can use to create a narrative that highlights locations of series of events. It was created at Northwestern University's Knight Lab to provide scholars and learners who want to communicate through digital storytelling and maps. 

Why use StoryMapJS for Storytelling?

When, where, who, what, and why about specific events and their connected context and significance are attributes to making narratives. Narrative maps go beyond plotting information. They create reading experiences that situate an event within a place they happen. By using StoryMapJS, you can create something similar to an interactive slideshow tour that guides readers through a story that incorporates and juxtaposes text and multimedia.

Wordpress and StoryMapJS leveraged together can be a powerful user experience for anyone who goes to your website looking to learn about your research outside traditional modes of scholarship like a print book. The combination of Wordpress and StoryMapJS grants the capability for scholars to design and communicate humanistic inquiry publicly and freely through web publishing.

Wordpress's features enables researchers to frame and make their work their scholarship more interactive through multimodalities. You can add and integrate and juxtapose text, videos, images, maps, and audio to communicate scholarship on the internet. StoryMapJS is one of these content elements that you can add to a page on a Wordpress website. It has capability to guide readers through a historical or contemporary humanistic narrative or independently choose pins on a map to read text and multimedia about a person, place, or event grants academics from any discipline to participate in narrative cartography. A great example of Wordpress and StoryMapJS used together is the Caribbean Women Healers digital humanities project created by Professors Alai Reyes-Santos, Ana-Maurine Lara, and the UO Libraries.

Wordpress Examples

Screenshot of Coffee Zone Wordpress website

Coffee Zone is a digital humanities project created by the University of Iowa that encompasses the oral histories of coffee pickers, farmers, hacendados, women and teens from the western area of Puerto Rico known as the coffee zone.

Screenshot of the Caribbean Women Healers website

The Caribbean Women Healers Project: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions, is a collaborative research project built as a result of our journeys within Caribbean communities throughout the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest region. In 2016, after four years of meeting and spending time with Caribbean women that keep their Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous and Afro-descendant healing traditions alive. It's a digital humanities project supported at the University of Oregon.

StoryMapJS Examples

Screenshot of Red Thread: The Color that Binds

Narrative map about the historical story of the color Red by Professor Vera Keller, University of Oregon Department of History

Screenshot of the StoryMapJS Golden Gate to Haight: Distrusting the Government, Trusting Love (1960-1989)

StoryMapJS example from University of Notre Dame's HIST 30648/CDT 30340 - History of San Francisco Fall 2016 course.

Screenshot of Keats's Negative Capabilities at 200

StoryMapJS for The Keats Letters Project. The Keats Letters Project is affiliated with Romantic Bicentennials, a collaboration between the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA) and the Byron Society of America (BSA).