The traditional way that most theses are presented is in the form of an 80 000(ish) word report. University regulations usually specify that this should be bound in hard copy format, and ready to be posted onto the shelves in the Library stacks. Recently, in the spirit of openly sharing knowledge, it is becoming common for Universities to also require a digital copy of the thesis for posting to the institutional digital repository. For me then, this will be through the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive, SHURA. We are also now required, where permissible, to post the data that our research generates. This aligns with my own feelings about research being as open as is ethically permissible, so I have no problem with any of this.
I’m glad to hear about Scalar and look forward to checking it out myself. I’m a bit surprised you hadn’t heard about Omeka. Their main site has some great examples of it in use which might help your investigations for examples. I recall seeing some interesting map-related projects by Anelise Shrout that used Omeka which you might appreciate for their interactivity.
Since you’ve got several sites on WordPress, you might appreciate potentially using it to provide some of the functionality you’re discussing.
For pop-ups on references you might appreciate the Academic Bloggers Toolkit plugin.
For highlights and potential feedback, you might take a look at Hypothesis which is an interesting highlighting and annotation tool. It allows private groups which a writer might share with an advising committee or even provide for public facing markup and sharing. There are available WordPress plugins for expanding functionality on one’s site, though the tool is a free-standing one.
I suspect that if you look around the plugin repositories for WordPress and Omeka, you’ll see a variety of plugins that can extend the functionality to do some of the things you’re interested in executing.
And here’s another thing. That first Farm Aid concert apparently raised $9 million. You could presumably help a lot of poor old dirt farmers with that kind of cash. But Farm Aid wasn’t actually about poor old dirt farmers, it was about people like Willie Nelson. He lost $800,000 the year before Farm Aid. Nine million dollars doesn’t go too far when individual people are losing that kind of money.
Jeffa is one of the pioneers who turned West Cork into a heaven and a haven for cheese-lovers. One of the special characteristics of Durrus and many West Cork farmhouse cheeses is that they are washed rind cheeses. The young cheese is inoculated with specific bacteria (some cheeses pick their surface moulds up from the atmosphere) and is then frequently washed or moistened with a brine solution, which gives those bacteria a boost and keeps other micro-organisms at bay. The result is what many people call a stinky cheese, although the actual flavour of these cheeses is often mild, sweet and creamy.
Marty McGuire
Barnaby Walters
