Marissa Foley

Devlog Four: Building a Static Site with a Hugo Template

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I attempted to build a static site (like this one) using a different Hugo template more suitable for a project, rather than a personal page.

During this attempt, I hit several snags that left me siteless after hours of trial and error. The late hour of nearly 2am meant I had to quit attempting to build, but by this point in the evening I was finally starting to understand my problems and make sense of the issues. This, paired with a sit-down with my prof a few days later, taught me a lot about what went wrong.

I can’t say I am at a position where I can easily build my own site yet, but I’m thrilled about the handful of things I’ve learned so far.

When I set off to build this site, I had assumed everything I downloaded would be packaged in the same way as the “Academic” theme, and could be placed in a GitHub repo and deployed through netlify. So, I initially downloaded the theme package I wanted off of Hugo, copied it directly into my new sites GitHub repo, and tried to deploy it through netlify. Error. This failed miserably, and I quickly realized I had a lot of information to build my site missing - I literally just had the bones of a theme but nothing to which I could apply the theme!

This prompted me to jump onto youtube to consult some tutorial videos. My search terms for videos really highlights my lack of understanding about what a static site is and how it is created and served. I had no idea it could be served from my own machine and that I could use the command line to generate, create, and more. Honestly, I didn’t think anything could happen outside of my GitHub repo. With that, I searched “Hugo site on GitHub and netlify.” This directed me to a few promising videos including JAMstack Tutorial - Full site using Netlify & Hugo by freeCodeCamp.org, Building a Serverless Blog with Hugo and Netlify by FooBar, and (my personal favourites) Hosting Your Website With Github and Netlify and Building A Website Using Hugo by Chris Stayte. I have a feeling that the Chris Stayte videos were my favourites in part because they were the last ones I watched. By that point in my adventure, I had consumed enough content on this process that I knew the Academic template was different than what I was working with.

Each of these tutorials introduced me to a handful of new tools and actions. Primarily, I learned how to (loosely) use: * Terminal * Visual Code Studio * Github Desktop

I also used home-brew to set up Hugo on my machine, and learned a handful of simple commands to use in terminal, like cd to change directories and mkdir to make a new directory.

While watching these videos, I had several problems that were preventing my site from appearing. For starters, I was creating a site, but not placing the themes folder in it. Another time, I put the theme folder in the wrong place. On a separate occasion, I uploaded the entirety of my new site folder into my GitHub repo, and not just the public folder. None of my errors were ever too big, but my basic misunderstanding of what my machines role in this process was, and of what exactly I was trying to create, made every minor blip feel insurmountable.

Fast forward: a week later I talk with my prof about this issue. Following this chat, I learned that my computer was in a way taking the role of netlify and each deploy was being built by my machine following instructions in the command line. Then all I’d need to do is re-upload the public folder of my site into my GitHub repo. Prior to this conversation, I saw my machine as only playing a role in the early set-up stage of the site folders, and after that thought all work would take place online, as it does for my Academic site. Yet again, my primary issue with figuring this all out was that I went in with blinders, thinking I already new what had to happen and ignoring any information contrary to this. Despite all the videos implying that my machine was where all this work would happen, I kept trying to jump ahead and questioned them when they weren’t working in a GitHub repo… Silly me!

Another major lesson learnt, as one may be able to guess by the lack of details in the description of my issues, is that I was not taking notes about my process throughout. Not only would this have helped me in writing this devlog, but it also would have given me some insight into why my site still isn’t working as anticipated - surprise, surprise! While everything looks great in the locally hosted version, the actual site as hosted through GitHub looks like a butt-ugly word doc or something you’d stumble on in the early 2000s. Though I still do not have a working, presentable site, I am a step or two closer and only carrying a quarter of the frustration I started this process with.

Devlog Three: A Second Pair of Eyes

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I began writing this devlog over a week ago, but (as is always the case mid-semester) I began losing track of things and it fell to the wayside. With this in mind, I am going to keep things short and bitter, building on what I started to write oh so many days ago:

Two days ago, while I was creating my Guerrilla DH Project: The First Class Check-In post about a dh visual art project, I got tangled in what felt like another unsolvable problem. As a visual art project, including images in the post was essential, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to do so!

I tried several different pieces of code to try that I found through a simple google search. Googling is always my step one. This search led my to a github forum that suggested: A. [my_image](files/my_image.png) B. <img src="myimage.png">

So, I popped those in as-is and merely changed the “my image” name to whatever each of my images were called… Error. But not the kind of error where netlify flashes the big red failure button for you (thank goodness - I always take a real ego hit when that happens). Instead, my images were merely just appearing as little thumbnail stand-ins with the alternative text listed in their place.

My next step is to try adding the full file path in, rather than just listing it as “files.” This makes a ton of sense to me because my images aren’t even kept in a folder titled “files.” I adjust these with the full file path, and smugly flip to my site to see the images finally appear. Error, again.

My third step in this process: close my computer. This can be solved another day, in a less frustrated state.

*I should note here that I was attempting to throw this post with images together late at night (when all my most pressing work is done) after spending several hours working on another large project. There is something to be said for timing and awareness in all of this.

Step four brings us into the classroom the next morning. Here, I ask my professor for help. After some more experimenting with different file names and moving stuff around, we realize it isn’t the whole file path or no file path that is needed - instead, the thing just needs to know the folder the image is in, but no path further back beyond that needs to be included. I make my adjustments and BAM, two out of three images are up and running.

This seems like a big win, but… TWO OUT OF THREE? C’MON! Are you kidding me? After all that? I copy and paste from the working lines - trying, retrying, reretrying, again and again. 10 minutes of me tinkering with this issue pass. Nothing.

At this point our time in the classroom is up. People are filing out, and my confusion and frustration begings multiplying all over again. Then Shawn walks over to my machine, takes a 2 second look, and sees I sloppily saved my file name with a - instead of an _ as I had done with all the others. One simple character was the issue. I made the quick fix and voila, there was my post, images and all, and all the images.

So, moral of the story: the value of a second pair of eyes should never be underestimated as the simplest mistakes are often the hardest to spot.

Other moral: Working after midnight often results in simple, sloppy mistakes.

Guerrilla DH Project: The First Class Check-In

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What stories do you think you’ll be addressing? Why this story?

ARtful Environments reimagines the story of Canadian environment as depicted by the Group of Seven. The Group of Seven’s paintings, created between 1920 and 1933, are iconic in their representations of Canadian landscape, and as such they offer an opportunity to open an historically-rooted dialogue about environmental degradation and the climate crisis.This is not specifically an Ottawa story, but rather a national and international story that is anchored by this city and it’s reputation as the national capital.

This project, the stories it tackles, and its methods are conceptualized through four main pillars:

Canadian landscape art & the Group of Seven
Digital interventions in museum spaces
Climate context of 2019
Historians as activists

Our aim is to enter into a dialogue with the artwork, using digital tools to explore changing environmental realities.

This project is not done with the intention of discrediting the work of the Group of Seven. Rather, the intention is to identify the nuance and environmental-consciousness already present in their works and reconcile this with our contemporary context.

How might it be dangerous and to whom?

Working and behaving in non-prescribed ways in a major institution can be considered a “dangerous” subversive act; however, this is only dangerous if people/institutions see. Consequences for this subversion falls on the creators as well as the users that are going against the institutional grain. With this in mind, our goal is to approach this work with an open-mind and the intention to start a dialogue.

Being guerrilla

The guerrilla aspect of this work is that we are offering this content to viewers without explicit textual interpretation. With this approach, we are asking viewers to consider the image in changing historical contexts as well as their own involvement in the image and the world it represents.

How has your chosen tech been used in Ottawa? How could it be used? What are its affordances and edges? Where and why do these resonate with the history you wish to tell/explore?

ARtful Environments is a guerrilla augmented reality (AR) project that engages with Group of Seven paintings in the National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection. Using a narrative-based AR interface - ARIS - this project allows gallery visitors to scan select paintings, and discover an alternative and contemporary visual retelling of the painting which acknowledges and explores a near-century of environmental degradation.

By imposing unauthorized AR interventions depicting modern environmental threats upon paintings of Canadian landscapes, this project reimagines the narratives of environment-focused paintings in the present-day context and calls viewers to consider the “space in between,” from the painting provenance to the present. This “space in between” is the historical context.

AR has been used at the National Gallery before at the Anthropocene exhibit last fall.

Affordances: accessibility and mobility, apparently user-friendly, pre-designed program

Edges: Marissa couldn’t figure it out and make a demo work - so perhaps not as easy as it seems

What is it that you don’t know but need to find out?

Tech: While we have a strong interest in using AR tech, our initial trial run with ARIS was a failure. We need to investigate why it didn’t work. Another experiment with ARIS (or two, or three) needs to be carried out to understand what our experience can look like. Finally, if troubles with ARIS persist, we need to find a new AR program to use.

History: There is an extensive body of scholarly literature on (a) environmental and climate history in Canada, and (b) Canadian landscape imagery and its meanings. We need to narrow our scope and develop a manageable bibliography for the historical underpinnings of this project. As well, we have kinks to work out regarding “the space between” and how to communicate this through the project.

Logistics: Specific images have to be selected, and their augmentations have to be created. Length of AR experience to be determined (what is manageable and digestible for the visitor). How to integrate accessibility into the app experience (image descriptions for screen readers, for example).

Potential conclusions: Should we present a set of conclusions on what we think these reimaginings tell us about the current state of the climate crisis, or should we let viewers draw their own conclusions after being encouraged to consider the issue through an historical-lens? How much agency do we give the viewer? As well, how much should be communicated textually versus visually? Here lies a tension between visual art and history with which this project must grapple.

DH Unplugged

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Developed by the 2018-2019 Digital Humanities class at Carleton University, DH Unplugged is a collaborative analogue deck-building game addressing current issues through a critical DH lens. See the concepts at play and download the game and rules for free here

Devlog Two: Collaboration and Brainstorming

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The following post was written by Ayda Loewen-Clarke. Together, Ayda and I are collaborating on a digital public history project foccused on the streets of Ottawa. The exact form of the project is still under development, but through this series of devlogs we will outline our journey in creating whatever it is we are making right now! Follow along with the “excitement, chaos, delight, frustration, and messiness” of our creative journey through these devlogs.

Here is Ayda’s first devlog on our project:

What we want to do

a visual art GPS exhibit OR augmented reality place-based art exhibit

associate each street with a piece of artwork that visually tells the story of or offers an alternative to a street name. When someone submits a route for places in the city, the streets that are a part of that route & their associated artworks become a personalized curated visual art exhibit they can experience as they walk their chosen route.

(all cred to Marissa for this very cool jumping off point for our project)

AR option: the street sign itself triggers an artwork to pop up on a device’s screen

Goals

offer to people who are exploring the streets of Ottawa

this will involve: + a visual counter-narrative to Ottawa’s history as it’s presented in street names (often white, male, colonial) + a different way to experience the streets as you’re walking through them + an alternative way to identify and historicize the streets than the names

Potential geographic focus

ByWard Market - street names in the Byward Market include William, George, Cumberland, St. Partick, York, Daly, Stewart, Murray…

potential theme in the Bywayd Market: bringing feminine aesthetics to a historically (and presently) male-dominated space

fun fact: if you search “Byward Market” in the National Gallery’s online collection, ten results come up. All of the artworks are by men.

Components

artworks sourced from open collections? created by us? public call for artwork? a combination of all three?
map google maps code – GitHub (range queries, point A to point b)
geotagging
think Echoes but with visual images
QGIS plugin?
augmented reality?
capacity for participation/submissions by other people

Interface options

app/mobile-friendly site (designed to be used outside, on the streets, as you move through them)
website (designed to be used at home, in the ‘planning’ phase of a trip – hopefully sparking reflection later on when they are in the place in question
ebook or zine developed alongside the exhibit – think of it as an exhibition text

Concerns

what are the rights of use of images in, for example, the National Gallery of Canada?
ethics of appropriating another artist’s work to fit our own narrative?
if we make a call for submissions from local artists, how do we approach the issue of compensation? As we’re not in a position to offer financial payment for their labour, how do we approach this?

Banner created on Canva. Background Photo by Lala V on Unsplash. Icon created by Kantor Tegalsari from Noun Project.

Devlog One: Messing Things Up

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A detailed account of how this site almost wasn’t

This site, in theory, should have been easy-peasy to put together. It is based off of a template that really only requires you to fill in the blanks. In practice, things didn’t go quite so smoothly for me. During the class when we went through the site building process, I latched onto one thing that was mentioned: the “#” makes items invisible. That, however, is only part of what was actually said, and this incident is a prime example of why context matters.

When I got home after class and sat down to make my site, I went into the index in my repository and went wild throwing #’s infront of any info I didn’t want to share on my site, like my social media links, publications, and location information. At the same time, I was also updating my bio and some of the more simple details, like my university affiliation. I saved it my changes, flipped to my netlify deploy log, and watched as the error messages started to roll in. Because of the one piece of info I remembered in class, “# makes items invisible,” I approached fixing the problem having already decided the one thing it couldn’t be were all the # keys I sprinkled in. So when it directed my to an error on the line of my bio, I somehow thought the program must have disagreed with how I described myself and that was the source of the error. This is something I seriously believed, enough to change my bio and redeploy multiple times. In hindsight, this is a hilarious line of logic.

Once I realized (about 8 deploys later) that the changes I was making weren’t useful, I put into action some of Shawn’s suggestions for how to move forward:

Close your machine. When you get frustrated and can’t figure things out, sometimes the best way forward is to walk away and give it some space.
Read the instructions that the creator of the template put together exactly for situations like this, and google a heck-ton to fill in the blanks. There is a great guide for getting started with the academic template.
Check the deploy log and see where the error is. Note: You should refer to the most recent deploy failure rather than than scrolling back to the first one.
Investigate the code in github that your deploy log identified as the source of the error. Refer to the history of the file on github to see exactly what was changed and how it differs from the previous iteration (which was an iteration that worked)
If you’re still confused, reach out for help. Email Shawn to take a look.

Shawn was able to come in, take a look at my repository, and push changes to me that I could then merge/pull into my own erroneous code.

After this first blunder, I learned to really let go of what I thought I knew to be facts and operate on the basis of not knowing anything and being open to seeing everything as a potential problem or solution. It was my stubborn hang-up on the idea that the #’s were right even if the error code was pointing to their line that caused me to miss the obvious.

Moving forward, everything has been going a lot more smoothly, and I’ve employed another strategy for my work, specifically for when I’ve tried to build something where an existing template in my repository is missing: copy and paste it from someone else, like Shawn! If people have their code open and available for sharing, take advantage of it! No need to reinvent the wheel when it’s already organized and functioning perfectly fine just a few clicks away.

All in all, it was a rough start, but things are finally rolling.

Banner created on Canva. Background Photo by Lala V on Unsplash. Icon created by Maxim Basinski from Noun Project.

Hi! Welcome!

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to my site! This website has been created for Prof. Shawn Graham’s Digital Guerrilla Public History course at Carleton University. Here, I will be posting devlogs - aka development logs - tracking my work, experiences, and discoveries during the course of the semester.

Here we go!