Thing 7: Online Exhibitions

Well!  That only took four months...

I have mixed feelings about this Thing.  On the one hand, I was really keen on it because knowing how to create an online exhibition opens up an entirely new world of visual communication and with this skill the possibilities for promoting and showcasing archival material are almost endless.  On the other, I feel it was too much work for the confines of this course.  I had the advantage of having done a WordPress course a couple of years previously but even with that under my belt, scanning the images, writing up the text and then building and populating the website took me a solid eight or nine hours to complete.

Initially, I also had trouble understanding what exactly we were asked to do.  While I really enjoyed reading the blog for Thing 7 and learnt an awful lot from it, I found the instructions for the task given to us a bit vague.  Recreate a brochure?  Reimagine the material in different contexts?  It didn't really make sense.  I tried checking how other course participants had tackled it but very few of them had ventured into the realm of Thing 7 (can't really blame them!), and those who had seemed as confused as I was.  At least that was a relief!

Once it dawned on me that what we were really asked to do was to create an online exhibition I froze altogether.  I hadn't a bat's notion as to what kind it should be, and it took me a full three months of dithering before I came up with a suitable idea.  This I readily admit was my own fault and nothing to do with the merits or otherwise of Thing 7!



Just finished Thing 7...
Image by Jessica Cross, Creative Commons Licence 2.0



What I finally decided to do was to bring together and showcase the collections in our archive which relate to the First World War, Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War.  There are nine of these altogether and I felt that the best way to present them was to give a separate page to each one.  It sounds like a lot of work, but it wasn't really.  For the text bit I simply extracted paragraphs from the existing catalogues, and as most of these collections have been fully or partially digitized I initially only needed to source and scan five images.  However some of the images did not look right or were the wrong shape, so it took a bit of toing and froing to come up with the final set of illustrations.

For the online service I went for WordPress for the simple reason that I half knew how to use it.  I had a very clear idea in my mind on the layout I wanted and was thrilled to find that WordPress had a free template, called Twenty Fifteen, which exactly matched it.  It was so good in fact that it required very little customising - all I needed to do was to change the background colour and remove some of the built-in widgets which I didn't feel I needed.  Uploading the images was easy, and the text I had prepared I could simply add by cutting and pasting.  I did come across some oddities though.  I nearly lost the plot trying to centre the image captions, which looked fine on the post editor but were always left aligned in the preview.  I wasted nearly half an hour ranting and raving until I discovered that the Twenty Fifteen theme has been designed to allow left aligned captions only.  What a waste of sweat that was.  I also nearly lost the will to live trying to get rid of the 'leave a comment' bubble which appears in the footer of the homepage.  I finally accepted that I could either jump off a cliff or just get used to the bubble so there it sits and bugs me.

The free version of WordPress is a great way for beginners to start learning about creating a website but it does have its limitations.  For example, there are only 100 themes to choose from, you cannot add any plug-ins, and you will have to put up with ads on your website which I personally find disagreeable.  The free version also limits what you can do with templates.  The Twenty Fifteen template for instance only had five colour palettes to choose from, and these in turn could only be manipulated by changing the background colour.  However, if you are happy with a simple and straightforward website, this isn't necessarily an impediment - I frankly am much happier choosing one theme out of a hundred than one out of several thousands!

So that was my experience in a nutshell, and here is a link to the result.