Fall term largely consisted of familiarizing myself with coding languages and best practices employed by Carleton’s Digital Humanities Department.
We had discussions on accessibility that were enriching: for example, adopting an inclusive design mentality that centers around progressive enhancement (the practice of creating a basic user experience that works for everyone, and then adding on more advanced functionalities) rather than graceful degradation (a practice which starts with complex functionality as the baseline, and then fixes for a more basic experience in older browsers). Specific to my work, it’s important to consider things like text color for color blindness, or tab order for folks who can’t or don’t use a mouse.
A lot of these best practices seem intuitive, but it’s also important to understand that it often takes extra time and effort to implement them, and small teams sometimes don’t have the resources to do so.
Along with these discussions, I learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and PHP. It’s going to be a minute before I can just whip out code like a seasoned developer, but I’ve really enjoyed learning the fundamentals of these languages that I’ve had a lot of previous exposure to, but no way of working with them other than guessing.
Finally, I learned how Omeka CMS works. It’s a bit different from WordPress, but the fundamentals are all there. This winter, I’m excited to move past the tutorials and get to work with the other interns on WP and Omeka projects the Digital Humanities Department is involved in. Additionally, I hope to see how the things I contribute can move beyond the Carleton bubble!
