If you encounter any problems with the website, do not hesitate to contact us. Please also have a look at the following introduction as it may answer some of your questions.

Getting started
How can I start a new group?
What is the difference between public content and group content?
How can I use the ICT Calendar?
What content is featured on the homepage?
How do I write good online content?
How can I contact other community members?
What taxonomy is used on the site?
How does the folksonomy (i.e. user taxonomy) work?
What is a tag cloud?
Advertisements/commercials
How is my privacy protected?
Can you ban users from the site?
Any further questions

Getting started

Use the front page to browse content by discipline or key topics or try the search in the top right corner. The top navigation gives you easy access to the different types of materials we have. For browsing, the right hand menu is automatically updated with relevant information relating to the page you are on.

How can I start a new group?

Registered users may also start their own groups on our site (see the contribute section in the main navigation). Groups can have their own discussion forum, blogs and group calendar and have private areas to share content and ideas. If you are already using these on your own website, a presence on arts-humanities.net is a good way of letting the wider community know what you are up to and to make new contacts.

What is the difference between public content and group content?

All content posted will automatically be available to all users. You can also mark content as belonging to one or more groups - this will make the content appear on the group homepage and trigger a notification email to group members, alerting them about the posting.

How can I use the ICT Calendar?

The calendar is for any registered user to announce upcoming events related to digital arts and humanities that they are interested or involved in. If you mark an event as part of a group it will appear in both the group and public calendars.

What content is featured on the homepage?

We use the "Featured Content" section of the frontpage to alert you to postings and material that seems to be of wider interests or importance. We do also regularly feature materials from various sections of the site.

How do I write good online content?

To create the most effective content for arts-humanities.net you might want to consider these guidelines:

The first few lines – around 400 characters - of your text will become a ‘teaser’ to interest people in reading your full contribution. Make sure that the teaser contains meaningful information to get the community’s attention.

When posting events remember that the time and date are included in the posting – there’s no need to repeat them in your text.

Keep your paragraphs short and use paragraph breaks.

Copy and pasted text from emails doesn’t always make sense online – it’s a good idea to preview what you have written to check.

Images can often be the best way to illustrate a point but too many images become distracting. Review your images in the text to check they make sense in the context you have placed them in - just having an image for the sake of having an image is worse than having no image at all.

How can I contact other community members?

Registered users can search the profiles and research interests of other registered members of our community to identify potential collaborations and get in contact. Go to the section "Members" to start searching.
Please note that members’ profiles are not publicly available.

What taxonomy is used on the site?

The taxonomy used to organise content on the site is taken from ICT Guides. A full list of methods and subject categories can be found at http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/methods/allMethods.jsp. We offer the list of arts and humanities disciplines (based on the AHRC subject coverage) as a scrollable list to help you categorise content. The full ICT Guides methods taxonomy is part of our folksonomy, i.e. you can simply type in tags for all items on our site and the system will make suggestions (you can of course also create your own tags).

How does the folksonomy (i.e. user tagging) work?

The user generated tags categorize and retrieve content using tags or labels. As it develops, a user taxonomy becomes a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, the people who are using it the most. By combining the terms in the user taxonomy with the categories in the ICT Guides taxonomy, you will be able to search for and organize content more effectively.

Follow these rules when creating your tags:

• Look around at how other users are tagging the same kinds of content
• If there are a few options – choose the tag that seems to be used most. This can help a dominant tag to emerge for that subject that will be more useful for retrieval.
• Use plural forms of words, for example computers not computer
• Remember that you can always re-edit your tags if you feel that you’ve used the wrong tags for a piece of content or if the meaning of a tag has changed.

What is a tag cloud?

A tag cloud is a visual depiction of tags used on a website. The most active tags are displayed in the biggest text.

Advertisements/commercials

We do think that mentioning, discussing or even recommending products and services has its place on this website, insofar as they are necessary for the digital arts and humanities and appreciated by the community. Advising other members of the community on the best software for a particular problem or debating the merits of scanners are obviously helpful and encouraged. However, posting purely commercial advertisements without context is not appreciated and we reserve the right to delete such postings without further notice.

How is my privacy protected?

See our privacy statement.

Can you ban users from the site?

See our disclaimer.

Any further questions

For all questions regarding arts-humanities.net, please contact Torsten Reimer.