Blake’s Experience Constructing the Yōkai Senjafuda Digital Translation Project

Votive Slip Folio 17 Verso 2 by Unknown Artist

If you had to describe your experience working through the process of reconstructing a digital scholarship project, how would you explain it to someone who has never encountered a digital project translation?

This term I completed a digital translation of the Yōkai Senjafuda digital exhibition. Essentially, this involved translating the already created exhibition from its platform on Omeka S to a new platform using WordPress. Omeka and WordPress are designed to fulfill different purposes as platforms and thus, while there is some overlap, a lot of the functionality of one is not easily recreated with the other. For instance, Omeka is commonly used for digital exhibitions because of its layout of item pages within galleries. WordPress doesn’t use item pages. Therefore, the bulk of the work for this project was learning to adapt and problem solve issues such as this one.

Even beyond the technological skills I learned through building this website, there were several skills that I developed over the last term that will serve me well regardless of my future career. Having to deal with hundreds of images in very specific layouts forced me to pay attention to how I was storing my data and the best ways to go about actually getting the images from one site to the other. Constant issues with formatting and my lack of prior experience in WordPress made problem-solving a constant part of the job. Whether that was through asking questions, seeking advice, or even googling ways to make WordPress work like I wanted to, I was able to create a final product that I believe captures the essence of the original project well. Working to meet a hard deadline taught me the importance of sticking to a schedule and maintaining a high level of productivity.

In reality, this project was relatively straightforward. The goal was to recreate a website using WordPress. However, this project ended up relying more heavily on my ability to problem-solve than it did my technological expertise. WordPress is fairly intuitive, especially when using the Divi theme. The challenging part was learning how to get the most out of a platform I wasn’t all that familiar with. Determining what elements of the original website were worth spending time to mimic exactly was a daily struggle. Take Omeka’s universal viewer integration for example. The universal viewer allows a user to interact with and zoom in on a piece without losing image quality. WordPress, on the other hand, doesn’t have the ability to integrate a universal viewer. This was one of the most difficult problems to solve because the central question didn’t really have a straightforward answer. How do you include a universal viewer on a platform that doesn’t work with universal viewers? To solve this issue, I did some research and used advice that I had gotten from Gabriele Hayden to work around the need for a viewer. Instead of trying to recreate it, I linked every image to its URL on Oregon Digital which has a universal viewer. I also made it so that when certain images are clicked on, they open in a “lightbox” which makes them significantly easier to view. This is one of many examples of the importance of learning to adapt and work around issues when trying to do a digital translation. Obviously, expertise with WordPress and website building in general would be valuable skills to have for a digital translation, but a large part of the process is learning to overcome difficulties.

Image Credit: Votive Slip Folio 17 Verso 2

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