Assignment Tutorial Blog Post (Due Thursday, 3/3)
For this assignment, create a step-by-step tutorial as a blog post demonstrating a particular technique, tool, or other helpful how-to discovery you’ve made over the past several weeks in this course.
Pick a DH tool that we haven’t discussed yet and figure out an interesting use case for it (or, vice versa, pick a use case and figure out a potentially viable DH tool or methodology). You can highlight a technique that you have discovered in class, or in the preparation of your projects, as long as it is not one we’ve all covered together already. You can use a tool we’ve used, but don’t duplicate the functions described in the class labs.
If you’re stuck for ideas, check out the DH Awards or the Dirt Digital Research Tools directory, which used to offer an extensive list of software for academic uses, and can still be accessed via the WayBack machine (although it proved impossible to maintain).
Once you have an idea, create an online tutorial for the rest of us and the wider world to start paying forward what you’ve learned in the course and becoming the “local computer expert.” For examples, you can look at some of the posts for this class, think back on all the tutorials you’ve looked through, or see the software posts on the Profhacker blog.
Create a new blog post on this site, tag it “tutorial”, and make sure to include:
- An introductory paragraph explaining clearly
- what the tool or technique is and
- why or in what context it would be useful
- A step-by-step walkthrough of how to accomplish a specific task using the tool that contains
- At least 5 steps
- EITHER screenshots illustrating the steps where appropriate
- OR a screencast video in which you record your actions while speaking about the process into a microphone
- A link to at least two further resources like the software’s documentation or other tutorials around the web
For screen capture software, if you Google “how to create tutorials screenshot” you’ll be overwhelmed with options.
- At the basic level, you can use the
- Grab keyboard shortcuts on a Mac to accompany your text (this is what I usually do)
- or the Snipping Tool in Windows
- If you want to annotate your screenshots there are a number of fancier tools to do so, among them:
- For video screen recording, there are also numerous options out there including.
