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?
My experience working through the process of developing a digital scholarship project was beyond informative and such an amazing learning experience. Digital project translations have a wide range of definitions and meanings, but my interpretation of it is simply just taking the main storyline or specific content with different forms of media and information and transferring it onto a different platform that may or may not suit the information better. For my project, I was given a different assignment than my peers, where I did not specifically work on a translation, but rather my project was to make a WordPress website with the usage of Divi for styling purposes that hosted all of the digital translations that my peers created or translated. When I was originally given this assignment, I was unsure of what specific information I should have on this site aside from housing the digital translations.
Upon brainstorming for quite some time, I came to find that the important pages that I may need for a site being used as a home for digital translation examples would need a home page, a page to categorize the digital translations based on their platforms, a page to house the digital translations based on the project being translated, an informative page to learn more about digital projects and translations, a student reflection page, and a page to show all of the contributors. These were all crucial in satisfying the main criteria I had for the site, which included wanting to show my peers’ work in a clear and concise manner, and the ability to properly credit all the contributors who were involved in our DREAM Lab Digital Translations Project COVID-19 Response.
After I was done brainstorming the structure of the site, my next step was wireframing, which is the process of visually modeling out the site before physically creating it. This wireframing process took the most time, as this was the most important step in trying to determine the style and structure of the site. This step consisted of a fair amount of experimenting. My first approach to wireframing was drawing my ideas out on paper and using a lot of sticky notes to allow for flexibility in the structure. After drawing my ideas out and browsing through existing themes on WordPress and Divi, I then made a digital wireframe to allow for a neater structure. Once I figured out the structure that I wanted, I began building it on the front end using Divi on WordPress. The first step I took for this was creating all the pages needed and linking them together properly for the menu. Once I finished doing this, I started adding the theme I wanted for the site to all the pages. Following this, I began personalizing each page based on the ideas I had formed for my wireframe and receiving feedback from Kate and Anna. Creating this website taught me how to manage data, work with accessibility features, and how to take one idea and use my creativity and knowledge of a range of different topics to form a product.