Oh boy.

I finished my Omeka exhibit without much issue! I think I really like Omeka, it seems to be a really nice site to use. I love the colour scheme of the theme I chose for my exhibit, too. I tried my best to choose the exercises from each module that I thought best encapsulated what I've learned over the course of this class. I ended up using screenshots of a lot of things, because I had trouble figuring out how to upload other file types. It was not happy with me when I tried. Also, I may have made a mistake by making the exhibit before mounting Omeka to my domain. (Edit: I think I kind of did. But Dr. Graham says it is okay to just send him the Omeka link. I guess I accidentally never ended up using my domain.) But I think aside from that, it went alright. I don't really have much else to say about it, everything went smoothly. You can find it here!

The final project did not go so smoothly. I chose a hard-to-work-with topic that was really rough to work with and represent what I'd learned in the class. I explained my shortcomings more thoroughly in my paradata writeup, but to make a long story short, things did not go well because of the topic I had chosen and the difficulties I had in finding tools to portray the data to support that topic. I also did not leave myself enough time for it, which means that today, the last day of the semester (which, thankfully, I have no in-school classes on), has been an extremely high-tension day while getting things presentable. Deep breaths.

That's not to say it was a total waste of my efforts. It's referred to as "productive fail" for a reason. I certainly learned a lot both about the contents of my project and the tools I used to pull it off. I also learned a lot about choosing a topic effectively, even if that wasn't a willing lesson. I wish I had been able to carry out the lofty goals I'd imagined at the beginning, but it never happened. I wrote more about the good things that came out of the project, both what was effective and what I learned from the problems, in my paradata as well.

A few of the many things I learned over the past week:
-Budget time wisely.
-Overview is a good friend.
-Word clouds are great, but scrubbing the data first is important.
-It's okay to ask for help if I'm having trouble with something!
-Topics should be chosen carefully and with consideration to the data.
-Cookbooks are a really cool source of history!

My final project can be found here, and the paradata accompanying it here.

As for some brief comments on the class as a whole, it has certainly been an experience. I have learned a whole lot about digital history tools, and I've already tried to take some of it into my other classes, especially tools like Regex. It was certainly not what I expected from this course (I thought this would be about the history of technology?) but I definitely do not regret taking it, even if I neglected it a lot for most of the semester because of other course work. As someone who is potentially interested in a career in public history, this and the second year Historian's Craft class have probably been the two most useful courses to prepare me for that goal. Even though the course was EXTREMELY daunting at the beginning, I now feel like I have a lot more tools at my disposal to perform historical analyses and publicly portray historical work online.

I think that I am now going to go victoriously eat some of those cinnamon bun Oreos my American friend mailed me.