Structure and Design for History on the Web

Focus on Your Audience

• Who is your audience?
• What message do you want to convey?
• How can you make this message clear?
• How will your audience navigate?
• How can your structure aid your message?

http://www.telikin.com/cms/index.php/post/why-a-senior-computer

Visual Cues for Reading

Above: http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-College-Essay 

Right: http://www.buzzfeed.com/christianzamora/taylor-swift-emojis-you-never-knew-you-needed

The "F Pattern"

http://www.pixelchefs.com/blog/small-business-web-design-reader-habits/

Long Form Writing for the Web

• Structure writing
• Break up text where it's logical
• Add photos when appropriate
• Simple, but not boring
• Watch line length (50-75 characters)

http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/

Examples

Default Copy & Paste

Headlines + Narrower

Structure + Images

*Weebly Tip*

Design > Change Themes > Custom Themes > Edit

Change width of content-wrapper

See 

http://www.w3schools.com/css/ for guidance on customization

Images

Photo: Science and Society Picture Library. 

Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, 1840.

http://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10312035

• Use trustworthy repositories for photos
  • Start with lib.msu.edu
  • dp.la and europeana.eu
• Make sure to cite your resources
  • Image captions work great 
• Be mindful of licensing and reuse

Copyright & Fair Use

• Current US Copyright: Author's life + 70 yrs (after 1922)
  • Enter 'Public Domain' after copyright expires
  • Works created & published outside of US have different licenses
• Fair Use - "the grayest area of copyright law"
  • “fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright"
• What about a digital photo of a public domain work?

Summarized from Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig, "Owning the Past," Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/

Citations

Best Practices

• Brief citations in parentheses OR footnotes using [1], [2]
• 'Works Cited' page or section at the end of each page
• Consult recommended Manual of Style

http://digitalhumanities.unl.edu/resources/

students/blocke/newsboys/background.html