Locating Your Essay

Goals: Navigate the essay web page

Estimated Time to Complete: 10 minutes

Now that your project site is set up, let’s take a moment to examine the web page where you’ll be writing your multimedia essay.

Step 1. Navigate to your project repository

  1. Log in to GitHub (https://github.com).
  2. Once you’re logged in, select the dropdown arrow in the very top-right corner of your browser window. Once you select this, a dropdown list should appear that starts with the words “Signed in as [your username].” On the dropdown, locate the link titled “Your repositories” and click on it. This will take you to your GitHub account and a list of all the repositories you’ve ever created.
  3. Locate the name of the repository you created for this project, and click on it. This will bring you to your project repository and website, where you can continue editing files following the steps below.

Step 2. Open your website in a new browser tab or window

  1. In the “About” section of your repository homepage (the section to the right of the green “Code” button), locate the URL for your project site. Right click this URL and select either “Open link in new tab” or “Open link in new window.”
  2. Now you should have two tabs/windows open: one with your GitHub repository (the “back end” of your site) and one with your website (the “front end” of your site). You’ll need both of these tabs/windows open for the duration of this Lab, and you’ll work with both of them open in future Labs.

Step 3. Introducing the Essay Page

While viewing your website (the front end), click on the “Essay” link in the navigation menu. This should take you to a page titled “My Essay Title.”

Scroll down this page, taking note of the different heading styles, font styles, bullet point lists, images, pdfs, and citations.

The Essay page is where you will write your multimedia essay! You’ll be deleting all of the demo content and adding your own text and visualizations to this webpage.

Now that you’ve viewed the front end of your essay, follow these steps to discover how to edit the content on your essay page:

  1. Navigate to the browser tab/window that contains your GitHub repository.
  2. In your GitHub repository, locate and click on the “pages” folder.
  3. Inside the “pages” folder, click on the file titled “essay.md.”

The essay.md file is the “back end” for the “Essay” webpage. In other words, when you write content into the essay.md file, that content will show up on the “Essay” page on your website.

Step 4. Planning Your Essay

Over the course of this project, you will use your project website to create a one-page multimedia essay that includes supporting resources such as primary source documents and images, as well as text analysis and topic modeling visualizations that we’ll cover later in the project.

At minimum your essay should contain:

  • 3,000 words
  • 4 visualizations of any type (image, pdf, or topic graph)

You can include more than four visualizations if you’d like, but the minimum should be four.

For further guidance on the content of your essay, please see the Assignment page.

Ready to get started editing your essay? Proceed to the next step.

Section Overview Writing in Markdown