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tags: course support, visual communication
---

# HISTSCI1932 Workshop 1 - Visual Communication
**October 19, 2021 3 – 5:45pm**

## Pop-up Camera Museum and Website


Today we're going to
1. think a little bit about visual communication, design and rhetoric by
* learning a few basic graphic design principles and
* thinking a little about the ways cameras tell stories
2. then we'll check out a few museum websites (like [MoMA's](https://www.moma.org/artists/2963) and [the Getty](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/hgURK27kXuoYng?hl=en)--maybe even [this immersive 3D tour of the Vatican](https://www.youvisit.com/tour/vatican), [or this experiment from Google Arts and Culture](https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/freefall/random)) analyzing their visual structure, but we'll also...
4. think a little bit about the databases that like behind or beneath these sites (the relevant link here is [this Airtable base of Pokemon](https://www.airtable.com/universe/expBnjEvgt28vYKbG/the-airtable-pokedex)) 

4. finally, we'll actually create our own little pop-up museum and website prototype.

We'll do steps 1-3 collectively as Marlon runs through a few things on the computer, but then for step 4 you'll be doing it all yourselves in groups. Here are the steps!

1. this is going to be the website for a museum of cameras, so your first step is to **grab a camera!**
2. the next step--before we do any visual design--is to do a little very basic **data-modeling**. This may not initially seem to be the most exciting element, but we're going to want to decide on the fields that each "Camera" record will have (we'll be creating a database based on this step) and maybe even whether there are other "entities" in the system that we'll need to track
* as an individual, list out (on separate index cards) as many interesting properties as you can think of in 2 minutes. Think of the basic facts about the camera, but also the questions you have about it, and the stories you might want to use it to tell
* then, in 4 groups, share your cards one by one--any time someone else offers an attribute you thought of, put your card on top of theirs. For today's activity, we're going to go with the most commonly desired attributes (but we won't simply discard the others!)
* finally, we'll get each of the four groups to report their most commonly requested attributes to the whole group, and we'll decide on at least a few that we'll try to fill in for each camera
4. once we collectively decide on the attributes of each record we'll track, we'll do a little research to fill in these blanks (and we can use our imaginations too, because this doesn't need to be completely accurate information for our purposes today)
5. Your first visual step will be a simple "paper prototype" of what a page in the "Collection" portion of our museum will look like on the 11x17 paper provided (this is akin to what we saw on the MoMA site). If your camera is a good size for placing it on the paper directly, go for it. Otherwise you can do your best to draw a wireframe version of it. We'll be sharing these out with the large group under the overhead cameras as you complete them.
6. For the final step, you'll work in [Canva](https://www.canva.com/) to create a richer story of your artifact (akin to what we saw on the Getty site), one that goes beyond the static collection page, perhaps telling us the story of how the object is USED, perhaps showing us some images that come from the camera in question.