As a class, I feel strongly that we learned, we created, and we conquered. I grew exponentially as a student and a young art historian, as well as nurtured a passion for the digital humanities. As my final blog post for A Virtual Enlightenment I would like to re-cap my experience with my participation within the Materials and Makers group as well as delineate my personal hopes for the future of our group’s website.
I will create two “portal-like-bars” (one for primary materials and one for primary colors) using css and html on a wordpress platform. The purpose of the color bar and material bar is to stand as a home base that accumulates and categorizes most if not all of the objects in the Met’s Tésse Room by their material nature. It is essential to my project to link materials to their makers. I will do this by linking color and material history of the objects to my peers’ more in depth annotations of the objects themselves as well as connecting specific plates from the Encyclopedie. The plates from the encyclopedie will serve to illustrate the mechanical and labor processes used by guilds and merchants during the enlightenment. I will infuse history and origin of the six Sévres porcelain colors.
Above is my original focus statement written at the onset of this project. In the end, I feel the final products of my contributions align pretty closely to what I set out to do. Rather than two bars, there is a single bar on the home page of Materials and Makers that starts with color and ends with material.I feel as a group, we worked extremely well together and our final product definitely exceeds what we set out to do. To recount, my role in the Materials and Makers group was project manager and my contribution to the webpage included eighteenth-century colors and the role of the encylopèdie. I am extremely proud of our website as we submit it for review this Monday May 11 and I look forward to seeing where it goes this summer in post-production.
As for future goals for Materials and Makers website, I feel it is necessary to (1) have a section dedicated to the eighteenth-century guilds (perhaps as a contributing page under the Encyclopèdie section), (2) a section dedicated to biographies for Madame de Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Jean Hellot, and Germain (linkable to their names cited throughout the website), (3) incorporate block quotes on each page that summarize the gist of the text, (4) to go further detail in a separate page under 18th century color on the Sèvres soft-paste porcelain recipe, shape molds, kiln times and illustrations, and to provide a more in-depth history of the manufactory, (5) to include an eighteenth-century map of the world and link materials to the country’s they were imported from, and finally, (6) to write a page about the portrait hanging in the Tésse Room.