Wish I Was There

Due to my continuing back problems, I was unable to attend WordCampEd 2008 (though I am the brown guy with his head hunched down the extreme right of the header image on this website). I sure wish I could have been there, as THATCamp was a blast and I spent most of last year working for as an evangelist with the Center for History and New Media for Zotero.

If I had made it down for the camp, focussed on using WordPress for educational and academic communities,  I had hoped to talk about the experience of building and designing the SUNY Stony Brook History Department website. This was my first attempt at a multi-user blog system for an academic department, and the template was based on work by Jeremy Boggs for the GMU Art History Department. The site went live in September, and has been developing iteratively for the past one year through the inputs of historians Chris Sellers, Eric Lewis Beverley, Larry Frohman, and Nancy Tomes.

With help from Jeremy to cut my teeth on css, I built on his core design to incorporate sidebar widgets and extensively furnished author profile pages and dashboard where faculty can upload their own photos, bibliographies, and run their own mini-blogs inside one Wordpress site, posting to their own home pages, front page department news, and thematic blogs for different research areas within the department. As faculty participation in the site grows, these categories and areas will be easily extended to represent the strengths of the departments’ historians in such areas as Latin America and fields such as gender and the environment.

For this site, the open source ecology came to my aid in designing a new feature for faculty profile pages, where I extensively relied on Marco Cimmino’s excellent plugin Cimy Extended User Fields to manage custom fields and tags on the member pages for the historians at Stony Brook. These pages are easily the most important for any faculty, and I wanted them each to have a blog and feed which could be used for communicating their work, sharing ideas, and as a classroom tool. I paid for the developer to create a new feature for rich text fields for their bibliographies — this feature will hopefully appear in the next version of the plugin.

WIth faculty, staff, and graduate students, well over four hundred registered members in the Stony Brook History Department, using Wordpress presented significant challenges due to its individual blogger orientation. Some significant limitations remain in Wordpress’s user management and security functions, which plugins such as Role Manager help to address, such as custom user groups and controlling permissions — but not resetting passwords — for each group. Some other plugins at work on the site are Sidebar Login and COinS Metadata Exposer which embeds citations for each post as microformats.

Zotero can grab these embedded citations, and with the rich textarea fields on their profiles, faculty can simply drag and drop reading lists, a class syllabus, or their own publications into their home page or blog posts and have them slurped back into Zotero for later reference. This is something which I have done with another site called Bombayology in Wordpress, where every post is for a meeting of our workshop on urban history and culture in India. The citations to assigned texts are embedded with OpenURL COiNS — which Zotero does in a simple drag and drop in your browser — and also linked to password-protected PDFs of the fully digitized text of the readings for that meeting.

If only I could have been at this special WordCamp, I would have also liked to talk about the other Wordpress sites which I have developed and maintained over the past several years, including the personal archive and teaching blog of social anthropologist Keith Hart, the Memory Bank; the site of urban research and design group CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust); the Writing Cities network between MIT, Harvard and LSE; the Urban South Asia workshop.

I have no doubt that the expert minds and hands of Dave Lester and Jeremy Boggs have created another excellent peer-learning experience at WordCampEd. I hope I’ll be there next year.

(Cross-posted from my blog Heptanesian Archives)