I have grown up in world of technology and having some of that heavy lifting done for me. This means I did not really see a reason to learn Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) or coding. BUT, as I enter Digital History, I have seen that it might be quite helpful in things like fixing my websites or text coding myself. When editing this blog post, I can make sure that the words are correctly bolded or italicized, at the basics and so much more from there.
To fully understand this all, I had to go back to the beginning like with any other topic. I did some readings like HTLM Tutorial by w3schools.com where they also have a Tryit Editor to try typing in HTML to understand it. I felt like I had the answer to the question how it turns out in the end and then had to work backwards. I also feel like some of this comes from how we academically write English with a heading then a paragraphing with bodies of text. There is then XML, an earlier version of HTML which is still used but as a ‘notes’ section of HTML instead of by itself. To be honest, that is still a bit over my head but I am slowly catching up!
I have also been in the midst of seeing how this can fit into my job as well. I have been attempting to look at the HTML to make sure the website is accessible for the museum I am working with. What does that even mean?! Basically I have to look at the page source and make sure that the page is written in English like this; html lang=”en” so it can be translated easier. I am also looking for things like headers being put in the right places so that screen readers like JAWS know “how” to read the page. If all headers are put in the correct order, (i.e. 1, 2, 3) the screen reader knows that header 1 is more important than header 2, etc.
Coming back to DH at a broader level, I like the article Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham because it comes to the issue of transcribing so many documents. By allowing the public to help transcribe, a lot more gets done than when just a few trained people are working on the project. Yes there is approvals that need to be done, but that is probably much faster than doing it manually. However, I have learned that coding is just like any other writing and can have different styles, so it may make perfect sense to me but not to others. There are the basic rules mentioned in the Tryit Editor, but then each person can add flair as they will. I have been told this is how video game coding ends up looking like a mess of “spaghetti” to even the original coder themselves. To end on a moral of the story, coding is cool, just don’t get too fancy and confuse yourself!
While the coding of this module is a bit intimidating from a distance, I can definitely understand its practical application in digital history! Even with a base knowledge on how to do HTML programing, the combined work done on a project can be done much faster as a result!