Month: April 2025

How would you feel about helping someone else learn how to use it? What are the benefits and limitations of this tool? What sort of accessibility concerns should you consider with this tool? Look at the StoryMap examples provided below. From what you can see, what makes a good StoryMaps? What is something to avoid?

Learning to use ArcGIS StoryMaps was much easier than I expected. The interface is intuitive, and it felt a bit like building a slideshow with interactive maps mixed in. I’d feel comfortable helping someone else get started, since it doesn’t require anything technical to make something that looks polished.

One of the biggest strengths of StoryMaps is how it combines narrative and location—it’s perfect for telling stories tied to place. That said, it has limitations. Without proper alt text or clear organization, users relying on screen readers might struggle.

From examples like Segregation is Killing Us and The Voices of Grand Canyon, what stood out was clarity and flow. They used maps and visuals to support the story rather than distract from it. On the flip side, How to Make an Awful StoryMap showed how clutter, inconsistency, and poor pacing can ruin the experience.

How would you feel about helping someone else learn how to use it? What did you find most interesting? What did you find most frustrating? What questions do you still have, and what parts of the tool do you want to explore more deeply?

I would be happy to help someone try to use it. I think the UI is less overwhelming than I expected so it looks easy to navigate. However, I wish I could turn on dark mode. When I searched it up online, it says I have to go to Edit > Preferences, but there was no Preferences under Edit. Perhaps there is another way to turn on dark mode, but clearly it is not easily accessible. Also, it is frustrating that whenever I press command + tab to switch to another window from Audacity, it “switches” to Audacity. Even when I click on another window, it “switches” to Audacity. I really wonder why that happens. Maybe it is not built to be very compatible for Mac? I would like to explore if Audacity can automatically remove static/mouth noises/background audio from the audio.

How would you feel about helping someone else learn how to use Gale Digital Scholar Lab? What did you find most interesting? What did you find most frustrating? What questions do you still have, and what parts of the tool do you want to explore more deeply?

What are some of the steps that the student researchers have to take? Does seeing other student’s work change your view of the tool or of text analysis, and does it change your confidence in your ability to use the tool?

I think it’s very interesting that it’s able to count the frequency of the words. It reminds me of when I went to a linguistics conference this spring break. They talked about developing a corpus and I wonder if they used this resource to do so. It does take a while for the program to finish analyzing though, which can be frustrating. I would like to explore all the various analysis tools that Gale offers. I think it would be fun helping someone else learn how to use Gale while I myself am still learning it.

Student researchers have to take several important steps: identifying a research question, building a relevant content set, cleaning the data, running different types of analyses, and then interpreting the results in a thoughtful way. The process requires critical thinking at every stage, which I appreciate. Overall, I’m interested in exploring the tool more and seeing how I could apply text analysis methods to topics I care about.

What do you think is necessary to create good documentation? What documentation will you and your project lead need to create for your Vivero project – and what steps do you need to take to make this happen?

I think clear instructions and images are necessary to create good documentation. A possible documentation we can make is how to duplicate a page in WordPress. I would need to try to duplicate the page myself and take a bunch of pictures along the way.