In regards to to “The Real Face of White Australia” project by Tim Sherratt, I saw a few of my fellow classmates discuss categorization, and how it includes not only ideas, places or things, but also people. This is an aspect that I also find incredibly interesting, but decided for this particular blog post to focus on a different aspect: the power and importance in choosing the right format to present your data, especially text analysis.
Upon clicking the link to Sherratt’s site, a collage of faces appear with the title of the project as the header text. When you click on a photo, you can see the form for each individual that immigrated to Australia. The site also includes only two exhibits, ‘home’ and ‘about’. After scrolling and navigating the site even more, I concluded that this was an incredibly powerful way to present all of this document information. What if the creator of this site had simply listed the immigrants’ names, and you had to click on each name to see each photo? For the most part, I think people can agree that another format for this site would not have been as effective. It would not have been as engaging for the user. And the creator chose this format for specific reasons.
This made me realize just how thoughtful of a process it is when creating the “face” of your project, the presentation. Especially for a digital humanities project on text analysis, text can be a turn-off for readers, so how can we keep them interested? These are things all of us working on a digital humanities project have to consider. We have to go through the pros and cons of what to include on our sites, and take ourselves away from the project to consider what may be clear to the creators, but not be clear to our users.
“The Real Face of White Australia” was very engaging and it definitely kept me interested. In fact, it made me want to learn more. Now I can assume that Sherratt wanted to keep the site at its bare minimum where it gave me the information I would need, and would leave me wanting to learn more. At the same time, as a user, I wish there was more on the site so that I didn’t have to click on more links to learn more or search for more information myself. I wish there was more information or maybe even another form of categorization on the site that would allow me to filter and see specifically where each immigrant was from.
I guess this just puts into perspective that the person creating this is doing it for a greater purpose, especially if the information is being published online publicly. It is important to keep in mind the user and help them understand what the project is about and for what purpose, give them the information they may need to fully understand. Especially if they know nothing about the subject matter.