3 thoughts on “Parish House History”

1. Nice job combining both coding/data entry with more creative methods! I notice the simple html/css themed website, it was an interesting touch!

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2. A very good project! I like how you combined the timeline, stories, and videos. The different media you used help me understand the history of Parish House better.

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3. Team Parish House,

   Your project does a great job of exploring the history and role of Parish House from many different angles and presenting your findings through an equally diverse range of interactive visualizations. The brief timeline provides an efffective overview of the history of the building, the map gives a sense of the increasingly international student body through time, and the videos add a strong personal experience element.

   The biggest issue with the project as it currently stands, however, is that very little of the information you presented in your presentation (on the purpose of the project, the sources and processes used) is on the website. As stated in the assignment, the final project website itself needs to:

   • Incorporate a strong narrative, storytelling element leading the user through your data
   • be presented with clear narrative introduction, bibliography and supporting documentation

   The presentation you gave in class contained much of this information, which you embedded, but without the oral commentary this is not enough to explain the project to your audience. The presentation is meant to summarize the information on the website, so you need to extract and expand on that information in prose on the site itself. Especially needed are:

   • An introductory about page that describes what the project is, why it was made and who made it
   • A detailed description of your processes and methods
   • More contextual information on each section to show how it relates to the overall argument of your project. For example, how does the timeline map relate to Parish? And how are users supposed to interact with it?

   Finally, you clearly customized the WordPress theme quite heavily, in what appears to be an attempt to use the Carleton maize and blue colors? If so, the official color values are available on Carleton’s website and would be slightly less intense for the viewer. I would suggest switching to these hex values and maybe making the text white to provide more contrast against the darker blue background. For accessibility, high contrast is desired and you can check different color combinations in the WebAIM Color Contrast checker.

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