Introduction

The Writing with Visualizations project template is a static web framework that facilitates the publication of multimedia web essays that incorporate supporting material in image and document format.

Optionally, the template can also be used to explore Digital Humanities methods such as text analysis and topic modeling, and contains options to incorporate “distant reading” visualizations into the essay as well (note that this option does require more instructor prep).

All project documentation for instructors and students is contained in this site, including resources that will help beginners to learn GitHub and Markdown.

Instructors will follow these steps:

  • Work through the Learn-Static GitHub Foundations Module and Markdown Foundations Module to ensure you have working knowledge of how to make a GitHub commit, turn on GitHub Pages, and write content for the web using Markdown.
  • Familiarize yourself with this “Writing with Visualizations” documentation site (it is recommended that you walk through the student steps before teaching this project).
  • Optional: if you’d like to implement the Digital Humanities portion of the project, you’ll need to obtain and clean a corpus of text to be used in Voyant Tools and jsLDA.

To get started as an instructor, go to the For Instructors Project Overview Page.

Students will follow these steps:

  • Work through the Learn-Static GitHub Foundations Module and Markdown Foundations Module
  • Copy a GitHub repository and turn on GitHub Pages
  • Write and format an web essay using Markdown
  • Locate and incorporate supporting evidence into your essay in the form of primary source images and documents
  • Optional: Explore a corpus of text in Voyant Tools and incorporate visualizations into your web essay
  • Optional: Name topics generated from topic modeling software jsLDA and incorporate topic graphs into your essay

To get started as a student, go to the Get Started Section Overview Page.

At the end of the process each student will have created a personalized web essay, complete with embedded images, documents, and visualizations, and footnote citations.

Section Overview