page: Help - Questions and Answers
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?
Using RSS feeds
What is podcasting?
I have problems uploading files
How is my privacy protected?
Any further questions
Getting started
Use the left hand menu to view content by discipline, method or type and to create content. An explanation of the different types of content is under Contribute. To subscribe to groups choose Explore -> Groups from the menu.
For browsing, the right hand menu is automatically updated with upcoming events and recently added or discussed content.
How can I start a new group?
Registered users may also run their own groups on our site – please contact Torsten Reimer if you are interested in setting up a group. Groups can have their own discussion forum, blogs and group calendar. If you are already using these on your own website, a presence on Digital Arts & Humanities 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. Marking content in this way lets other users know about your group and what you have been doing. It will also help users from other parts of the site identify where content comes from.
If you want to make content only available to registered members of a group then untick the public box before 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?
The Digital Arts & Humanities homepage is a place to announce new postings to the site and upcoming events that we think will interest the community.
How do I write good online content?
To create the most effective content for Digital Arts & Humanities 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 "People" 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.
Using RSS feeds
RSS feeds are a method for websites to disseminate new information to interested users without always requiring those users to visit the pages that feature the new data. RSS feed data is usually a short summary of more comprehensive information that is accessible via a link contained within the RSS data.
Digital Arts & Humanities automatically creates RSS feeds from the content on the site. You can find an overview of available feeds and subscribe under Explore. You can also subscribe to the feed for any page with an orange RSS logo in the address bar or at the bottom on the page.
You may like to use this simple and free feed-reader: http://www.feedreader.com Simply download the software and add new 'feeds' as required.
Subscribing to our news aggregator is another good way to stay up to date with interesting sites focused on digital arts and humanities. The aggregator automatically compiles news from relevant sites chosen by the DAH team.
What is podcasting?
Podcasting is a way to automatically retrieve audio files without having to actively go to each website in turn to check for new uploaded material. Once the file is downloaded it can be listened to on a PC or can be synchronized with a portable media player.
To subscribe to a podcast, copy the URL of the relevant podcast feed into the appropriate location of whichever podcast system you have chosen to use. Our feed is available at: http://www.arts-humanities.net/audio/feed
The best known software package with podcast functionality is iTunes, developed by Apple Computer Inc..
Other podcasting listening systems are available, including:
Juice: http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php
RSS Radio (for Windows): http://www.dorada.co.uk
I have problems uploading files!
File uploads are currently limited to 8 MB per file. If you want to upload larger files, please contact us
How is my privacy protected?
The only information you need to give during the registration is your name and email address. We will not share your email address with any other party, not even with registered members of this site. All other information you decide to make available in your user profile will be accessible, but only to registered users, not to the general public. You can always delete or change that information.
You can also control who has access to the postings you make on Digital Humanities - they can either be made available to members of specific user groups or to the general public. All comments you make on others' postings are accessible to the audience the original poster has chosen.
Any further questions
For all questions regarding Digital Arts & Humanities, please contact Torsten Reimer.
