Using WordPress for Interdisciplinary Research

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon. I am Hedren, a new media and design librarian at NTU.
• #3: We have been working quite a bit with faculty and schools to develop different types of digital collections or archives. They ranged from digitalised materials to visual repositories of student works.
• #4: And in recent years, be it based on figures or by observations, there have been a significant rise in interdisciplinary projects or projects becoming interdisciplinary. Here you can see a chart showing the evidence from Web of Science, a citation database.
• #5: So today, I will be exploring on the interdisciplinary research, covering: What is interdisciplinary research? How Wordpress is used as the vehicle to capture, communicate and promote the scholarship of research outcomes? What are the roles played in such projects?
• #6: I will be using one of our ongoing projects as the case study to discuss, that is the DIHA digital archive. As shown here is actually the main page of the blog.
• #7: DIHA is short for Digital Intangible Heritage of Asia. It is a research cluster at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in NTU. Collectively, the cluster consists of projects that bring people from different disciplines together, such as linguists, designers, computer engineers, etc. It focuses on the conversation, interpretation and the access of knowledge generated, which is one of the main reasons behind having a digital archive. To set the stage, let look at one the projects from the cluster. Here is a video.
• #9: But in actual fact, it consists of 30 plus people working together in this project – linguists, designers, artists, librarian, etc.
• #10: However, it is not just about all of us coming together with our skillsets, but about synthesizing and developing new approaches into something unique.
• #11: And here is the information structure. From the main site, you can access a listing of DIHA projects that are ongoing or completed. A project can have a sub-site where it contains the assets generated from the project. Each asset will have their own post or page that contain the details. Here you can see that Wordpress can be used to create many different layers of content.
• #12: When designing and developing the digital archive, we are developing with the mindset that somebody who may not be well-versed with WordPress can continue to maintain the site with ease. Therefore, the digital archive is primarily created using the following technical components: blog@NTU – our university-wide WordPress platform Chose the Divi theme, which contains a page builder where you can build different layouts for pages / posts fairly quickly The main plugin that we used is Formidable Forms Let’s me do a run-through for the digital archive to see how they technical components work together
• #13: So this is the main page for the digital archive once again. It is actually build using the page builder from the Divi theme. I have also sometimes used the page builder as a prototype tool for layouts. The main site is also an aggretator that pull projects and project assets generated under DIHA. – Very similar to course blogs or teaching blogs as shared by Joan and Vishaka earlier.
• #14: From the site, here is a listing of projects. When selected, it will show a snapshot of the project with the descriptive details.
• #15: The details were shown from entries entered through a form created by formidable form – No need for the people maintain to go into the Wordpress Dashboard. Frontend editing and adding of content is possible with Formidable Forms.
• #16: So each project can also have a project sub-site. This is where we can dive in deeper into the project level.
• #17: Again the main page can be easily created using a page builder theme like Divi. This is a sub-site of a project that studied endangered languages.
• #18: Similarly, each project asset is added using a form. Depending of the format of the asset, specific fields can be set to gather the necessary information specific to each type. As it is important that each asset is best represented, we can also create a customised post using the page builder and link it to the record.
• #19: Here you can see the difference between two layouts. A default layout that can be applied to different assets on the left, and a customised layout on the right.
• #20: Here is an example of how a dataset can be displayed. In this case, it is a collection of video interviews conducted in the Abui Tribe. Users can filter by specific fields entered into each video record. Here is the record page of a video. It contains the basic descriptive details, transcripts in three languages and the source files where scholars or linguists can download to conduct their own analysis.
• #21: A collective space to archive DIHA Projects A showcase platform for project assets A website to communicate and encourage future scholarship and collaboration
• #22: Wordpress itself is a versatile enough platform for us to implement different approaches of presenting content, which is crucial in the academic world With theme features such as a page builder help to save time to create customised layouts Formidable form plugin provide a standard way to create and organise content in the blog It also extend the standard Wordpress taxonomy by creating customised access points Together, the theme and plugin extend the capabilities of Wordpress and allows us to create layouts that will can best re(present) content of different nature.
• #23: Future developments Researcher profiles Using digital tools to showcase relationships among project assets and outputs, such as mapping the movements of languages
• #25: Future developments Researcher profiles Using digital tools to showcase relationships among project assets and outputs, such as mapping the movements of languages