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Digital Scholarship Resources

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Approaching Site Models

Sophie Abramowitz & Elli Mylonas, 2021

Like any created object, every digital repository or collection is ideological. Figuring out which materials are represented in these repositories and collections—and which materials are left out of them—will help us understand what these repositories and collections are communicating about their material holdings. And while establishing the ideological frameworks of these repositories and collections will mean thinking about their overt and implicit selection criteria, it will also mean determining the design decisions that were made in the production of a given collection or repository. Some of these decisions are technical and have to do with data formats, platform choices, skillsets and technologies required; some have to do with information classification, naming, and discovery; some are rhetorical and have to do with audience, presentation and interaction. It’s at the intersection of material selection and digital design that these collections and repositories produce their meanings.

Here are some questions to jump-start our analyses of online collections and repositories. 

  • Which elements of the website are foregrounded, and which are difficult to find? How do these decisions affect your interpretation of the material hosted on the website?
  • How are you encouraged to navigate this website? (are there multiple avenues of approach, or are you guided through it? Does the website use a sidebar, a drop-down menu at the top of the page, a chart at its center? How do these decisions contribute to the production of website narrative? Is the narrative that it produces linear or multimodal?)
  • Who do you think is the anticipated audience of this website? How can you tell? Does the site invite multiple audiences in, and if so, who are they?
  • Are you able to tell who was involved in the project, and at what capacity? (Is there some form of a “Transparency Statement” or “Project Statement”?)
  • Are there any features of the website that surprised you? Do you think that anything is missing from the website? What, and why? Does the website offer its user/s any possibilities for collection reuse? If yes, how does the website articulate and represent these possibilities?
  • What is the site’s sustainability? How are the designers of the digital collection or repository planning on preserving the site as a whole or the resources within it? (Can these elements be separated?) Are some parts of the collection / repository more likely to be available in the future than others? How do you know? (Is it described on its own page, linked somewhere, etc?) How does this sustainability model affect the way that you approach the website’s content?
  • Does the repository offer an API (Application Programming Interface)? Why do you think this is significant?
  • What kind of access do you think that this repository is providing? How does it want its materials to be used? Which devices does it privilege, or leave out? What kinds of viewers does it privilege, or leave out? Is there a way to subvert the intentions of the repository, and what are the ethics of that subversion?