This week, I mainly collected and selected material to be uploaded on my website. The work is still going on, mainly focusing on the “immigrants’s stories” part. I would like to demonstrate through individuals the achievement, tribulation, or just ordinary people’s life under Chinese Exclusion Act. Yamei Kin, the first Chinese woman doctor who obtained a medical degree, I’m writing my dissertation on her and I am selecting the material from the sources for dissertation to upload. For other Chinese immigrants, I read stories on the website https://chineseexclusionfiles.com to select who to include in my website. For this “immigrants’s stories” part, I think I might need to write the story by myself for some immigrants rather than copy and paste, like a short essay, because the sources are scattered in different files, books and online sources.
The challenges I face now is 1. some of the pictures I uploaded do not have metadata and subtitles because to save time when I constructed the website, I didn’t input them. I need to make up the work. 2. the webpage seems only be able to show the original size of the pictures I upload. This causes the problem that some pictures are big while the texts I match with them are small, making the webpages look ugly. There are other options to arrange the pictures such as thumbnail, I tried them all but still don’t solve this problem. 3. The theme of the website does not match well the content. The current color and design are not good enough. I tried to make a new plugin of a theme but in Omeka it says the plugin is not valid. I will try new ones later. 4. The titles on the webpage, including that of the whole website, don’t catch eyes enough. I’m thinking to have better titles of categories. This takes time.
In short, currently I am reading, collecting and selecting material for the website. I plan to take care of the design and construction work after I upload all the material I need. At that time, I may have technical problems in the process. But for now, the challenges are what I stated in the paragraph above.
