This website was created to help Professor Amy Morsman, to whom the various images and documents included on the site belong, discover some possibilities of how users can interact with and understand her research in a digital multimedia format. Before I began working on the project, we had a meeting to discuss some ideas of what might work best; for example, some ideas were focusing on portraying personal stories, providing an overview of the population, small-scale maps, large-scale maps, and fly
overs. To resolve this dilemma and demonstrate some possibilities, I made a website through WordPress on Middlebury’s MiddCreate platform, where I used various plugins and the 3D modeling software Sketchup to work with several documents Professor Morsman shared with me.
Though it also made this project initially challenging, I enjoyed that it was open-ended and that I could experiment with different ideas. I was able to learn a great deal about WordPress and realized how powerful it can be but also what some of its limitations are. I also was able to use Sketchup for the first time and appreciated the intricacies of 3D modeling. Overall, it was interesting to think about the portrayal of data from both the perspective of feasibility for the person creating the site, but also what would be most engaging for a viewer.
The test site can be found here.