Here are some notes as I'm beginning to fill in the links in my Webbed History. I've already taken the first several chapter lectures, which were already helpfully broken down into bite-sized chunks because I was using a PowerPoint deck to present the content, and made a page for each slide. The next step was to double-bracket every term that I want to explain to the students or expand upon. Some of these -- probably most -- will get their own pages. I'm breaking the website into several folders for the narrative pages, primary sources, and a "topic index" that's going to contain all the additional explanatory pages I add.
Once I get a chapter and its sources added (each week, as I progress through the course), I'll go through each of the links I added and decide whether to make a page for the work or just add an external link. The pages I don't add will end up looking similar to the internal links but will have a little arrow designating that if the reader follows it, they'll be leaving the local web and going out to the WWW. As I add each new "index" page, I'll be creating another bunch of links that I'll need to also fill in. The idea is NOT to have any empty nodes. So this is going to take some dedication, making sure I'm closing all the loops I open!
One thing I haven't figured out how to do, yet, is how to get the Obsidian Publish graph to do colors. Maybe it's not possible. It would be nice if it was, because then my readers would be able to see what I can see. Part of the point of putting the primary sources, index items, and narrative pages in different folders is that I can then set the folders as paths for grouping the nodes into different colors. Right now, I'm using green for narrative, blue for index, and orange for primary sources. These nodes in the graph grow as there are more links, which should help readers find sources or index items that are "important" in the sense of popping up frequently.
Very early stages yet, but I'm liking it!
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