My Exhibits
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My online exhibit, “Far From Integrated” gives an in-depth look into American academic desegregation and how it affected Norfolk’s Black teachers during the 1960s-1970s. The website also analyzes Norfolk’s Long Range Plan” to desegregate teachers and staff. When in reality, the plan looked to destroy Black representation in Norfolk’s faculties and uphold its White majority while calling it desegregation. The online exhibit itself is on two platforms for all to enjoy. One is on WordPress, which exchanged its accessibility for multimodality in hyperlinks and embedded graphs. The other platform is Omeka, a simpler website in format, that differentiates itself with its use of databases and accessibility through its format.
The process of making the WordPress version of my exhibit came with its eases and challenges due to the website's creation process. Its site building tools and understandable format made it much easier to add information whenever I needed it. However, within those tools were limitations placed on by the ODU itself due to it using a student account that the university owns. That meant I had limited access to additional plugins, themes, and features that could have helped me create the exhibit. So, instead of trying to find alternatives, I worked with what I had and focused on a simple, but informative design. I wanted to limit the viewer distractions within the website so they could fully focus on the work displayed. The elimination of distractions began with the color scheme, as the white and green allowed the words, graphs, and embedded documents to stand out on a page. The dropdown menus focused on eliminating distractions too, as viewers could activate the menus with the mouse hovered over for a smooth transition between pages. In all, despite the limitations, I managed to create an exhibit that has the same effect as an in-person exhibit in its focus on the material.
In stark contrast to the WordPress exhibit, Omeka has an entirely different system that affected how much I worked on it and how I stored items. First, I couldn’t access Omeka without a faculty account, so I had to have Ms. Canaday log in each time I wanted to the site. Meaning that each time she was unavailable for any reason was time lost to make the site. Thankfully, Ms. Canaday was more than willing to work on the site with me on her off days to make up time. What she worked on was the next difficult aspect of Omeka in its databases. Each time I wanted to upload documents to the site, each one had to be meticulously added to Omeka's database. Along with a shallow site-building process and the limited number of themes, the way I went with creating the Omeka site had to change. Instead of working on both it and the WordPress site at the same time, I staggered my work to complete both on time. While I was working on WordPress, Ms. Canaday and I worked on adding items to Omeka’s databases. On days I worked on formatting or citations, I transferred information from my WordPress site into the Omeka site. Essentially, both sites share the same content, but how they were made and both’s functionality is different.
During the duration of the project, I held the role of lead researcher, web designer, and organizer for both exhibits. While holding those roles, I took away lessons that not only made me a better student but also a better potential historian. One of the lessons I learned was the importance and versatility of web design for historical research. Right now, the field of history is technologically behind other majors, so having the skill to translate work to a digital format is extraordinary as a potential historian. With this experience, I can develop webpages for school projects, local archives, and other organizations looking to translate their old documents into a digital format.
I also learned the importance of organizing for myself and others while creating my exhibits. Organization has always been an issue for me because of my inexperience in working with other people in a team setting. Knowing this, I had to alter my way of organizing to accommodate the weight of my project and to increase the efficiency of my colleagues trying to help me. In all, the experience allowed me to keep other groups in mind when it comes to basic organization, which applies to all levels of study.
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Lastly, as the head researcher, I learned how to make the most of the available information on a lightly covered topic. Due to the lack of secondary sources covering the desegregation of Norfolk teachers, I had to formulate my own opinion without the opportunity of a different perspective. I also faced gaps of information within ODU’s archive itself when I looked for primary sources to support my research. However, I continued learning that documents can potentially hold more information than intended, or link to an associating topic that can help. Knowing this information, I can apply it to tackling more obscure topics or find more information on a widely studied topic as a student. This also applies to my future as a historian, as employers look for those who can dig up the most information.