Process Narrative

At the beginning of the semester, when the class was deciding which individual they would base their project on, I felt drawn to Markino’s insatiable need to involve himself in such a variety of creative expressions. His paintings so perfectly captured the rainy atmosphere of London, and I discovered that I wanted to know more about this Japanese explorer and his experiences with the west. But he was more than just a painter; he was also a writer, a social commentator, and an avid participant in the culture of London. At this moment, I had only gotten a cursory glance of Yoshio Markino, but I was hooked.

The semester continued, and the class as a whole started to think about how to build their projects. We had done numerous readings about how to analyze our digital projects in various ways, which included anything from critically assessing the accessibility of the site to thinking about how our own biases impacted the way in which we developed and presented information. I was eager to start using these ideas and strategies within a real project. Along with these critical readings, the class began to experiment with technological tools and platforms (such as Mobiries and Wordpress⁠—original reviews posted below) that could be used to create the project or project materials. 

Around this time, I created a basic plan for how I wanted to build the project. I wanted a main hub site containing the basic materials (Biography, Author’s Works, Project Information) and then links going outward to the more creative sides of the project (these resulted in the Timeline Map, the Virtual Museum, and the Watercolor Blog). I had the idea for the Watercolor Blog pretty early on and began to gather materials (research about how Markino painted and the physical materials needed to paint) and plan out the specific paintings. I chose each painting due to the different types of styles and techniques I would be able to try. The paintings took me most of the semester, and it wasn’t until they were finished that I began to add the corresponding text and incorporate some of the research I had found into the blog.

The Virtual Museum was the first part of the project that got developed. It began when the class first started to look at various tools on the internet, and I ran across a site called Twine, where people built the “choose your own adventure” stories. I thought that the program could be easily utilized for developing a virtual space where the user could choose which way to go from room to room. Before doing any of the work on the site itself, I chose the paintings that I wanted to put in the museum and created a map (drawn on paper), segmenting them into different organized collections. I then drew up a digital map. The way Twine works is that you create a card for each page, and you can add images and formatting into those pages via code. To convert the image into code, I used a Base64 image encoder. Needless to say, I did a lot of googling to figure out how things worked.

These were the two aspects of the project that I worked on for most of the semester while also developing the weekly assignments, which included, but were not limited to, the identity statement, the intervention statement, and the value statement. The value statement was extremely useful as it helped me to reexamine my focus on the project and realize that I needed to do more research of what other activities Markino was involved in besides writing and painting in order to stress his position as a multi-faceted individual. Due to this I added information about his role in theater, and it eventually led to a revision of Yoshio Markino’s short biography on the main page. 

It wasn’t until about a month from the end of the semester that I began to build the main page of the site, but it was mostly a matter of inserting the materials that I had already developed and messing with the design of the website. A lot of thought went into the backgrounds and the images. I decided that I wanted to use Markino’s own paintings as page backgrounds in order to emphasize his role as an artist and to create the aesthetic of the site. From there, I created the Timeline Map and began to input the links to make the project whole. Even then, I did not stop constantly revising and adding new things to the project. I always had a long list of things to do that never seemed to end. I believe that the most important thing I learned about the digital humanities field is to always take notes when you get an idea and to keep your files organized. It will result in a lot less headaches and desperate attempts to remember something that you probably never will.