Digital Strategy
Things move fast in the digital world, so it is necessary to balance innovation with durability, when selecting which technologies to use in a digital project. Even during the lifetime of our project one of the tools we were using, Storify, announced its closure, which illustrates the precariousness of digital projects.
A condition of the funding for this project is that the website will be live for at least five years. With that in mind, we have used a number of tools, both proprietary and open source, to create our visualisations.
To ensure that our work endures beyond this period, we have developed a preservation strategy, that insures all new research created by the project will be preserved according to best practice guidelines, and stored within the Digital Repository of Ireland.
The Website
This website has been developed to showcase the research conducted by the Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures team. It was created in WordPress, an established content management tool, which is easy to update.
We selected WordPress’s own twentyseventeen theme which is fully responsive on all digital interfaces, and required minimal adaptation. We have kept plug-ins to a minimum so that the site will remain as stable as possible once the project has been completed.
The website has a traditional menu layout, but the interwoven nature of our research is reflected in the site content which uses hyperlinks to connect common ideas across themes. Breadcrumbs have been employed throughout the website hierarchy to help users navigate the content.
The website is hosted by HEAnet.
Visualisations
The project strategy was to employ multiple technologies rather than focus on one, since digital technology is continuously evolving. For that purpose, we have developed a range of interactive visualisations to compliment and present the range of thematic content presented on this website.
Visualisation Tools
Knight Lab’s TimelineJS is an open source tool and was used to create our ‘Timeline of Scientific Discovery at Lough Hyne’.
StoryMapJS is another open source tool created by Kight Lab, and is the software underlying ‘Lough Hyne: Past and Present’.
ESRI’s Story Maps are created using their proprietary software. At the time of writing, ESRI are the market leader in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software. We created ‘West Cork Travellers’ Accounts‘ using their Story Maps.
ESRI’s ArcGIS Online is also proprietary and was used to create the layered ‘Interactive Map of Lough Hyne‘.