ELECTRO PUNO

Findability within a digital archive is wrapped up with design and curation. While gathering materials, digital or otherwise, helps with the creation of the archive, the

organization, categorization and findability within the archive relies on curation. Curation in digital mediums can be facilitated by writing code, designing the organizational

scheme, and/or selecting a platform—like Omeka. Omeka is a free, flexible, and open- source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and

scholarly collections and exhibitions. While some archives rely on the software itself for curation, like the WPA-L, others work with designers to create digital spaces. Curation is

typically collaborative, but may be initiated by an initial archivist and then maintained by one or more people. Or curation could be ongoing depending on how open-source the digital archive is, which should be determined by the archivist. The WST exemplifies the collaborative nature of archival design. In their article, “Composing the Writing Studies Tree,” Miller et. al. mention that they used Drupal 7 to construct the WST. Drupal is an open-source platform for building digital experiences. It's made by a dedicated

community. Anyone can use it, and it is expected always to be free. Drupal offers many options for digital organization, but the danger in using a platform that offers so many options is that using too many may become confusing for the user—especially if the archive relies on users for much of its data.

While much institutional data can be found about different universities online, many programs may choose to keep data private. However, questions of platform are raised with the inclination of privacy. For instance, the Arizona State Digital Atlas, a WPA administrative archive that was developed and is maintained in Dropbox, allows for privacy, but the curation that Dropbox allows may not be as nuanced as other digital platforms. Because WPAs are not archivists first and foremost, they may not consider the complexities of developing an archive in a digital platform that may not continue to be maintained. While platforms like Omeka and Drupal are widely available, WPAs may tend to stick to creating an archive in course management sites, Dropbox, or social media sites that are more familiar.

For example, graduate students in Michigan Technological University’s Humanities graduate program have the opportunity to teach an upper division undergraduate level technical communications course if they take a pedagogical and

curricular development course. Since the Humanities department is so interdisciplinary, not everyone wants to teach technical communications. Those who do and continue to teach the course are part of a Facebook group called “RTC Grad Instructors Resource.” While considered a public group, members must be invited or ask permission to join. Additionally, Facebook itself is constantly changing and considered a social media platform as opposed to a more stably curated website specifically for curricular archivization. While this is not an example of a digital first-year writing curricular archive it harbors many of the same limitations because it is difficult to find and subscribe to and it may disappear when the current grad students who maintains it are gone. Further, the platform itself is unstable because it is being used for a purpose for which it was not intended, so the design may not even qualify as functional. While this is considered a “resource” and not an archive, it is being used as a repository for curricular material. I will discuss curricular archive design in Chapter 4, but see this “resource” as an example of a way that institutions are answering the WPA archival call without identifying a specific person as an archivist--by having a repository that does not require design or curation. While repositories, such as the “archive” for your email, are

searchable, should we consider these digital spaces archives if they are not explicitly curated?

The design of the digital archive must be considered and tested. As WPAs and instructors, we constantly ask our students to consider design aspects of their work and produce multimodal projects. The digital WPA archive could also be viewed as a

multimodal, interdisciplinary project, and, therefore, should be evaluated for its design as well. As Anne Wysocki points out, “there is little or nothing that asks composers and

readers to see and then question the values implicit in visual design choices, for such design is often presented as having no value other than functionally helping readers get directly to the point”(6). Similarly, Alana M. Miller, a content strategist at the California Digital Library, evaluated user experience for The Museum of Modern Art Archive’s website in 2013. Miller points out that archives are often designed by archivists or digital librarians, who may not be the same as typical users, such as academics, students, or professionals.

Design is a choice and must be assessed in the same way as content itself. Jody Shipka considers the assessment of multimodal designs for her students, just as Wysocki relates design evaluation and choices to student work, but what of our own archival work? “Being rhetoricians in public archives involves coming to terms with our hybrid roles and recognizing how they become sites for invention,” according to Graban et al. Further, these authors build on Barbara Biesecker’s work by stating that “being

rhetoricians in digital archives means constructing archival tools that enact the kinds of invention we think possible (quoted in Graban et al., 238). Potts also “calls for scholar practitioners in rhetoric to engage with the digital humanities as user advocates, experience architects, and participant-centered researchers” (255). Design is part of invention when creating digital archives and there are multiple roles for scholars to take when creating digital archives. But how is appropriate usability determined?