Out from Behind this Mask

(thanks to Claire for taking these notes)

Posts this week were exemplary, in terms of interpretation, contextualization, conversation. Another thing people did well with this week was incorporating multimedia material, for example, photos, and citing them by linking back to the source.

In the future, remember to cite your sources. Use MLA format.

The theme for today is mapping, as a way of getting at Whitman’s New York. Readings for this week included Whitman’s journalistic works in the collection Walt Whitman’s New York. Next week we will look at Whitman’s Brooklyn through the lens of his biography.

Chuck comments that we have not focused on mapping for a few weeks… this is a lens we will using going forward.

The Material Culture project will count as the midterm. Think of it as if you are a museum curator presenting an object to the world. Eventually, you will create an entirely new blog for your museum exhibit. Rather than writing posts, you will write pages. In this way you are building a resource that is more like a website than a blog. Each of the pages will deal with a different aspect of your object, whether your object is Whitman’s opera dandy shirt, Grace Church, Bowery B’hoys, etc.

1. Create a new blog.
2. When you go in to edit your new blog, rather than creating a new post, create a new page. You may end up with 5 or 6 pages.
3. Password protect your pages when they are still in draft form.
4. Pages are handled differently in different themes. Sometimes they will show up in the sidebar and other times as tabs at the top.
5. You can go into widgets and change the settings so that the only thing that appears in the sidebar are the names of the pages. So there would be no list of blog posts, no list of categories.
6. You can also go in settings and change which of your pages is the home, or front, page.
7. Remember the tag – digitalmuseum

Claire’s presentation on Flickr and Flickr Maps
— New flickr group: Whitman’s New York
— everyone is now an admin on the WWNY group
— you can move your photos from your photo stream to the group
— then you can map them

— Adding photos to group map:
1. Upload image to flickr
2. Name it, tag it ww20
3. Send it to Whitman’s New York group
4. In your photostream, go to image and click “Add to your map”
5. Zoom in on map (can search for address) to find spot where you want to put image
6. Drag photo from bottom of interface directly onto map
7. It will show up on the group map within 5 minutes. To see it there, go to the Flickr group and click the “map” link at the top of the page.