Location
Room 201/203 Traditional Presentations
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
24-2-2018 2:15 PM
End Date
24-2-2018 3:45 PM
Description
When starting a DH project, the questions are seemingly endless—What is the scope? What tools will I use? How do I organize the data? Where will the funding come from? Sometimes missing from these conversations is the question of audience. Who am I trying to reach, what do I hope they take away from my project, and how will they find it? The actual audience too often ends up being smaller and more specialized than hoped, largely made up of professional associates and other digital humanists. How can DH reach a wider public audience? Whether the goal is education, advocacy, entertainment, or some combination, connecting with users outside the academy can be a key to a project’s success.
My presentation will explore how we might reach the right audiences, using as an example my current work on the Joseph Smith Papers Project. The JSP is a decades-long documentary editing project to digitize, transcribe, encode, and annotate thousands of pages of the letters, journals, discourses, revelatory texts, legal documents, business records, and other texts left behind by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. From the start, we have aimed for an academic audience, with the goal of improving the quality of scholarly discourse on Smith and early Mormonism. We quickly found, however, that the scholarly audience makes up only a small percentage of the people who actually buy our books, visit our website, and follow us on Facebook. The overwhelming majority of these people are lay members of the Latter-day Saint faith, and their reasons for using the Joseph Smith Papers differ dramatically from traditional academic uses. The needs of these multiple audiences have shaped many decisions we make, from questions of encoding in TEI and choosing publication channels to transcription approaches and annotation conventions.
Two areas relating to audience deserve particular emphasis: user-experience design and outreach activities. We have completed several website redesigns in the past few years, often in response to user feedback, and I will talk about what we have found that works and what does not. In the area of outreach, I will discuss effective use of email newsletters, social media presence, presentations and conversations with the general public, and forming strategic partnerships to increase a project’s reach. In particular, I will talk about a successful marketing campaign where we reached out to thousands of users of the website FamilySearch to inform them that their ancestors were mentioned in the Joseph Smith Papers corpus. My presentation will touch on a variety of topics related to DH: TEI markup, single-source publication (HTML, e-book, print), search algorithms, design principles, marketing, and social media. My colleagues and I did not start out as experts in any of these fields, but we have learned a lot and hacked our way into solutions that will hopefully be of use to others at the conference.
Included in
Reaching (for) Wider Audiences with Your DH Project
Room 201/203 Traditional Presentations
When starting a DH project, the questions are seemingly endless—What is the scope? What tools will I use? How do I organize the data? Where will the funding come from? Sometimes missing from these conversations is the question of audience. Who am I trying to reach, what do I hope they take away from my project, and how will they find it? The actual audience too often ends up being smaller and more specialized than hoped, largely made up of professional associates and other digital humanists. How can DH reach a wider public audience? Whether the goal is education, advocacy, entertainment, or some combination, connecting with users outside the academy can be a key to a project’s success.
My presentation will explore how we might reach the right audiences, using as an example my current work on the Joseph Smith Papers Project. The JSP is a decades-long documentary editing project to digitize, transcribe, encode, and annotate thousands of pages of the letters, journals, discourses, revelatory texts, legal documents, business records, and other texts left behind by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. From the start, we have aimed for an academic audience, with the goal of improving the quality of scholarly discourse on Smith and early Mormonism. We quickly found, however, that the scholarly audience makes up only a small percentage of the people who actually buy our books, visit our website, and follow us on Facebook. The overwhelming majority of these people are lay members of the Latter-day Saint faith, and their reasons for using the Joseph Smith Papers differ dramatically from traditional academic uses. The needs of these multiple audiences have shaped many decisions we make, from questions of encoding in TEI and choosing publication channels to transcription approaches and annotation conventions.
Two areas relating to audience deserve particular emphasis: user-experience design and outreach activities. We have completed several website redesigns in the past few years, often in response to user feedback, and I will talk about what we have found that works and what does not. In the area of outreach, I will discuss effective use of email newsletters, social media presence, presentations and conversations with the general public, and forming strategic partnerships to increase a project’s reach. In particular, I will talk about a successful marketing campaign where we reached out to thousands of users of the website FamilySearch to inform them that their ancestors were mentioned in the Joseph Smith Papers corpus. My presentation will touch on a variety of topics related to DH: TEI markup, single-source publication (HTML, e-book, print), search algorithms, design principles, marketing, and social media. My colleagues and I did not start out as experts in any of these fields, but we have learned a lot and hacked our way into solutions that will hopefully be of use to others at the conference.