The Apprentice Historian

On Color and Design

But first, a note about my Typography Assignment. Somehow I managed to be first for the in-class reviews last week. I was very pleased with the feedback I got on the layout and design. Surprisingly to me, the footnotes (the code of was stolen directly and quite successfully from Professor Petrik’s article on footnotes.) worked and were actually a big hit with the class. It seems I am actually getting the hang of this after all. Quite encouraging on the whole!

So I’ve spent much of the past week trying to understand color and design. This is yet another topic that seems overwhelming in its complexity, even with the understanding that I’m just dipping my toe in the immense color pool. There is just too many variables when it comes to color and design. Fortunately, I read about how even the experts can be overcome with the depth of “color theory.” This put things in perspective for me. Now, instead of having to learn a whole new body of research, I just have to remember a few rules of thumb and otherwise go with something that looks good to me. Much more manageable!

So, my rules of thumb:

• Use color to direct the focus
• Reds warm, blues cool, yellows action
• Keep it simple!!

Clagnut's Compendium of Color Tools is an excellent collection of resources. I also really like the technique presented by David Shea, in his Photographic Palette article. Here he suggests developing a palette by taking base color and overlaying a white and black square with varying opacity to make a shade lighter and a shade darker. This kind of sensible approach is perfect for the web designer who wants a considered color palette but doesn’t have the time or patience to engage in a full-on color theory development.

Isn't that the point?

OK, I have read again Manan Ahmed’s The Polyglot Manifesto and my mind is starting to wrap around it. At the conclusion of my first reading, I was left feeling completely overwhelmed. How is it that I will ever come to understand the vast and mercurial landscape of historical academe? So many different points of view, so many centers of gravity, so much to learn about the centers of influence and the winds of politics. Drinking from the fire hose doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how I’m feeling right now. How am I ever to understand this topography, much less come to influence it or shape it?? Bereft of landmarks or navigation tools, how can I ever hope to figure out what direction promises glory and honor.

And then I took a deep breath, put the hyperbole away, and gave my insecurities a day off. Now, with fresh perspective, I am reminded that this is the environment within which I have been working for the past ten years. Replace “history” with “e-learning” and “academy” with “training industry” and you have a very similar situation. There is an established order within the corporate training community that has been doing things “the right way” for many decades. And the Internet and all of this digital hocus-pocus has come barging in to our idyllic utopia of ADDIE development methodology and Kirkpatrick’s course evaluation levels and thrown everything out of kilter.

The bubble might have popped on the Internet revolution, but we are left with the tools born of those heady days. The thing we are missing is the insights and knowledge of how best to use them, and that cliché of 1990s clichés – a new paradigm. In my industry, as in the Humanities, the thinkers and cerebral types are trying to puzzle out not how much of an impact this Internet thing is going to have (that’s so 2002!) but on just how it has changed on the basic structure of everything. In the interim, the herd pretends that all is just like it used to be, that e-learning means converting your classroom PowerPoint slides to an online slideshow and that interactivity equals the “Next” button. Many of my colleagues would like nothing more than to put the e-learning genie back in the bottle.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution has touched the business of corporate knowledge transfer in the same way it is touching the humanities – and in large part because knowledge transfer is the business of the humanities. Aside from occasional articles like Bruce VanSledright’s “Why Should Historians Care about History Teaching?” I am struggling the find this perspective in the great debate about digital history. This is the thing that is beginning to amaze me – the inward focus (diplomatically called “navel gazing” in some circles) of the Academy and all of that intellectual capacity somehow misses this point. So often it seems that Historians view their duty to share, explain and (to use Ahmed’s term) interpret their studies as a nuisance at best. The consequences of which are hinted at by VanSledright in this month’s Perspectives.

Getting into the swing of things

I'm suddenly realizing just how much work this class is going to be! Keeping track of 15 blogs, making my own blog entries, posting comments on my classmates’ blogs, doing the CSS and XHTML pages, learning graphic design, image editing and typography as well as trying to design my own historical website seemed like such an easy task when I first started. (HA!) Now I, like many people in my class, am coming to realize that we needed to keep track of the comments that we've made on other people's blogs in our own blog. So tonight I'm scrambling to go back and look through everyone's blogs to find out where I've commented. It turns out I've had a lot less to say than I thought I had. Go figure!

Now granted, I've started to use some more tools that should help me keep things straight. For instance, I've discovered that there is an RSS feed or link on most of my classmates blogs including my own surprisingly. I loaded all of those RSS feeds into Google Reader, and now I'm ready to use the reader to keep track of new posts from my classmates. That should help me to know who's posting when and how far behind in the readings I am. Time to start letting technology work with me instead of against me! But then, I expect that's the point of this class, isn't it Professor Petrik?

Still, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by all of the new stuff that's being thrown at me all at once. Any one of these things (XHTML, CSS, blogs, web design, typography, Photoshop, web hosting, historical website) is enough to keep any of us busy for quite a while. But I suppose drinking from the fire hose is what I should expect from graduate school. So check out the column on the right where I've added a new list of my comments. And now on to my other comments for the day. One of these days I should get around to actually commenting on our reading instead of just what my classmates have to say about it....

Speaking of Design

Since tonight’s class was to cover more about design (and will not, since a winter storm has closed the campus this evening), allow me to share a small bit of design wisdom I uncovered this week. This month’s T+D magazine, the official rag of ASTD (formerly known as the American Society of Training and Development, now mysteriously known only as ASTD) has an article about an IBM study that links the length of a line of text with the ease of retaining the knowledge contained therein.

This article, “The Long and Short of Learning” ¹ discusses a recent study in which IBM Learning partnered with scientists at Almaden Research Center to study the physiological effects of line lengths, paragraph depth, font size and line spacing on computer screens. This study builds on research conducted in 1989 that showed shorter line lengths are easier to read.²

The study put wide paragraphs head-to-head with narrow paragraphs to see which was easier to read. Wide paragraphs in this case are 80% of screen width, or nine inches on a computer screen. Narrow paragraphs were 40% of screen width (4.5 inches) and not coincidentally the standard line length used by book and print magazine publishers.

Without giving away the whole article, here’s the conclusion: narrow paragraphs are easier to read, subjects read them faster, and there were two unexpected findings. 1) Subjects did not read all the way to the bottom of the short paragraph passages, and 2) in spite of this, the subjects reading the shorter lines were able to answer more multiple choice questions correctly.³

This has clear implications for our own web development work, especially given that we should be designing our web pages with the goal of transferring knowledge to our readers. IBM Learning has apparently redesigned more than 2,000 individual web pages as a result of the study — one can only hope they were utilizing CSS pages!

________

^[1] See DESIGNING LEARNING, “The Long and Short of Learning” by Peter Orton, David Beymer, and Daniel Russell. T+D, Vol 61, No. 2, February 2007, p. 66-69.

^[2]The 1989 research was by Keith Rayner and Alexander Pollatsek and resulted in a thoroughly overlooked book called the The Psychology of Reading.

^[3] On average, subjects reading the wide paragraphs answered 43% of the questions correctly; those reading the narrow paragraphs answered 58% correctly.

And we're off....

Finally, my Portfolio page is up and running!

http://www.kdcbok.com/portfolio/

The domain name will be familiar to very few people, so rather than go in to a long explanation, I'll tell you to stay tuned — it will be the subject of my final project for this class.

And while I was beating my head against the XHTML wall, many opportunities for posts have passed me by. Manan Ahmed's Polyglot Manifesto is exactly what I've wanted to hear from historians. This is the cadre with which I want to make a name. I will wave the Digital flag along side the Teaching flag during my career. From what I've seen about Historians (granted, a narrow slice, but broader than you might think for a beginning graduate History student), Teaching skills rank at about the same level or possibly lower than digital skills.

Not a good combination for someone who believes that one of an Historian's raison d’être is providing context to current events to the rest of the world. We'll see I can hold on to that hope as I get deeper into the world of Historians!

The Reality of School Is Starting to Sink In

OK, two things: one, I ran in to the first of what I am sure will be many occasions for me to wish I had not elected to go to school part-time. This past week was just one of Those Weeks at work, and it was all I could do at the end of the days to just make an attempt at the readings for this week. So my blog posting is a little tardy. My apologies to my loyal fans, all three of you. Especially my mother, who was kind enough to point out in an email that I had not updated my blog and that I had left her hanging on the question of getting my portfolio online. Yes, Mom, I got it straightened out. I’ll let you know where to find it in a little bit!

Which brings us to two: I solved the web hosting problem the good old-fashioned American way — with cash. I decided to suck it up and pay for web hosting. After several hours of research I settled on GoDaddy.com. You might have caught their ad during the Super Bowl — not one of my favorites (the Doritos commercials were the best, IMO). Ironically I had already settled on them as a solution for the class project website prior to seeing the Super Bowl ad. While their advertisement was clever, it was their pricing that sold me. And, the day after I signed up I got a call from a live support person who welcomed me and left a name and a number to call if I had any questions as I got started. Now THAT’S service that will make me a long-time customer. Way to go, GoDaddy!

So finally, I’m all prepared to turn on my portfolio website. Except for one little detail. In class last Tuesday, Professor Petrick needed an example of a web page to show us some tricks. I happened to have mine available on a flash drive, so I ran it up to the front of the class. Professor P spent the next twenty (yes, that’s two-zero!!) minutes tearing the guts out of the page I had created, all while muttering “Chris, what have you done?” Ouch. Seems I got a little ahead of myself on the complexity of the page. I took it as a valuable learning experience watching her dismantle my work, projected up on the big screen like it was. I corrected some of the things I thought I knew about the #div tag and element labels. Thanks, and how’s the humble pie tonight?

So I’m taking the lessons learned and applying them to a new, simpler CSS page. I will post the link in the sidebar on the right side of the page as soon as I’m finished with it. See my earlier comment on the kind of week I endured to understand why it’s Saturday and I’m just getting around to it.... More to come later, and maybe even some comments about the readings!

Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By...

So I'm about to go into class tonight (sitting in one of the old Student Centers on campus, tapping away in a thoroughly modern way), and I'm stuck. Due tonight: our CSS page assignment. It's all done. It's even uploaded to the Mason webservers. But it's trapped behind some sort of security layer and invisible to the public (that would be both you and me!).

In spite of my best efforts to plead, search, muscle, or otherwise work around the ^%#&@%* Unix Telnet interface that controls who gets access to the directories, I'm out of ideas. And I'm very disappointed by the GMU IT department's motley collection of documentation and kludged-together support pages. I have now discovered three documents that tell me three different ways to login through Telnet and open up my directories, none of which are apparently correct.

First snag of the semester. Let's see what my classmates know (he said, fingers crossed!). [Note the smaller paragraphs — per the excellent suggestion of Bill who noted my verbose nature and requested more digestible chunks. Better?

Function, meet Form

I've been thinking a lot about the discussion we had in class Tuesday night around the arguments of Mssrs. Wroblewski, Norman and Fogg. I'm actually surprised at the resistance to the ideas that design is important in presentation. It seems so obvious to me. I was replying to Steven Scott's "Style in Wed Design" post from 29 January when the light bulb went off. Design is like music. See, I DJ on the side, so I know a thing or two about entertaining with music. Site design is like music at a party. Music will not make a party good, since there are too many other elements necessary for a good party. You have to have the right mix of people, the right space for mingling, a good table of food, accessible booze, etc. Music is just one part of the goulash. But just like goulash, one bad ingredient can ruin the whole batch.

Bad music will ruin a party. Just so, bad design can spoil good content. We can talk about how content trumps design, and that seems to be a shared opinion of the vocal majority of the class, but that is theoretical. And being a segment of the Humanities means that we¹ don’t have the luxury of working in theoretical spaces – we must embrace the real world with all of its flaws and irregularities. Historians are trained to power through dull, boring, dry, texts as a matter of course. So it should be easy for us to say that we’d rather have function over form. But the world (and often the audience of our work) is not comprised of trained historians. The rest of the world puts some value in good design, so therefore we must if we want to connect to that world.

As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to wonder if the opposite of Norman’s argument applies to historians – do they automatically distrust something that’s well designed? Does that attention to detail reduce the authenticity of historical sources? Given the design and layout of some historical monographs I’ve had to slog through, that seems the case for at least a sizable minority of historians.... Or maybe that’s just the cynical, marketing-saturated world we live in today. Perhaps we are being taught that good design can mask bad content and therefore we are coming to distrust good design.

Hmmm. I don’t really like this line of thought – it sounds much too easy to slip down the slope of “the more plain my design, the more authentic it will be to my historian peers.” That risks alienating the broader audience, the one without which we become irrelevant.

¹ I'm excited to report that this is the first time I've referred to historians in the first person! It's a momentous shift of attitude for me and one that was surprising easy. I'm an Historian!