Marcus’ Experience Constructing the Untold Stories:the Hidden History of the University of Oregon Digital Translation Project

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My project this term was to translate the Untold Stories: The Hidden History of the University of Oregon website, which was built on Omeka to a WordPress site. Before starting my work on this project, I was quite intimidated by all the things that I’m not familiar with. I never used WordPress before, nor did I learn how to build a website on it. It was a strange and new process for me. Not knowing some of the fundamental things about WordPress brought me tons of issues at the beginning.

Essentially, I spent weeks troubleshooting the issues I had with WordPress, and I even had to rebuild the whole website from the beginning. It was a long period of learning and getting familiar with the platform before I finally started on the actual work. However, despite all the obstacles and difficulties I had with WordPress, this digital translation project overall was an exciting and new process for me to learn more skills in website building.

For those who are new to digital project translation, here are six words I summarize for this process: locate, research, collect, organize, design, transfer.

Locate

Before you jump start to the digital project translation, the first thing you need to do is to locate the content that you need to translate. Understanding what the digital content you’ll be translating was built on what platform is essential because every digital project translation has a reason. Otherwise, there shouldn’t be any points to translate a project onto a different platform if it’s already perfect. Also, locating what platform you’ll be bringing the content to is crucial too.

Research

After you located the platforms for your digital project translation, the next step is to research the new platform you are bringing the digital content to. This step is to help you identify the unique characteristics of each platform and understand what you can and can’t do with the new platform.

Collect

Now, you should have a fundamental approximation of the overall work of this digital content translation. The next step is to collect the data from your digital project’s original platform. You’ll collect the images, videos, audio, text, etc. from the original site and do your best to have all the information content recorded.

Organize

To help you keep tracking on the information and content. It’s a good idea to come up with a data management plan to organize all the data collected from the original platform. That said, think about how to build the structure of your file management and how to locate the files you extracted from the content’s original place.

Design

After all, it’s about the time to think about what you can do with the new site you’re creating for the digital project translation. The design part doesn’t necessarily mean to come up with detailed styling ideas on specific things, but rather focus on building the framework and the overall identity of your new site.

Transfer

Finally, after you finished all the earlier steps, you’ll be transferring all the content onto the new site. If you did all the pre-production works well, this final step should be quick and easy. It even can be as simple as copy and paste. In the end, you’ll have a brand new site for your digital project translation.

This is the overall process of digital project translation. Yet, it’s much easier than how you think of it. For me, this is a long process of learning and getting to know new things along the way. As I said earlier, though, some parts may be intimidating, but I think this is an exciting journey to create a unique new site with your own identity.

Image Credit: Do Something Great by Clark Tibbs

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