The thing with the most value that I have learned this semester has been how to make a WordPress site. This has been mostly through the Elementor site I have built for my main project with Professor Purcell about Grinnell’s concerts history under event planner Georgia Dentel. This itself had several elements, the most important of which were how to do documentation and how to problem solve and troubleshoot. In addition to this, I have learned how to use widgets and make menus in Elementor as well as how to use TimelineJS. Beyond my main project, I also got a lot out of learning to use digital tools such as Microsoft Excel and StoryMaps. I know that these are important tools in the world of digital scholarship, and in many cases the world in general, so I have also taken pride in being able to navigate them better. Aside from digital tools, the accessibility training really stuck with me. I did not understand at all how conscientious I need to be about color usage in my websites in order to accommodate different disabilities prior to this, so it was an eye-opening training. I also did know or had some sort of a sense about things like alt-text but systematizing that, and having small things pointed out to me, like the importance of clearly labeling buttons, I found to be very valuable. In answer to what I would tell myself at the beginning of the semester about being a Vivero Fellow, I think that I would tell myself that I should be extra conscientious about what the end goals are for what I might be trying to do at a given moment, and the ways I could get there. I would also firmly tell myself to make sure that I stay on top of documentation throughout the process. The training modules that I have used this semester have been helpful to me in getting a grasp on the different tools to be learned to a point where I don’t know that there was anything about them that didn’t work for me. There were one or two that were slightly outdated, but those were corrected and in terms of the formatting of the trainings, I do not think I have any notes. Next semester, I plan to update the website I am working on with more things gained from the research being conducted this summer, to make the website work cleanly and seamlessly on mobile, and to continue polishing it in general. I have created 3.5 pages of documentation for how to work on the website so far, with sections for understanding what the staging site is and how it differs from the main site, where media is stored for the website, how the main menu was made, our shared Google account, the incorporation of TimelineJS timelines, and how the slideshow was made. The documentation can likely be made more detailed and with clearer direction, and there are small things that have yet to be documented such as the colors of the website. For topics, methods, and tools I might be interested in exploring more, one that stands out to me is simply the question of what else is out there. I know there are many different tools, topics, and methods in the digital humanities, so learning about what those are broadly is something that I am interested in. I am also interested in learning more about certain tools I have already done trainings for, such as Excel, because I know that it has many functions, is widely used, and I have only scratched the surface.

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