History Graduate Students Web Information

General Introduction

The aim of this project is to give us a web presence while replaces the awful .pdfs which currently confine our information on the History Web site. For various technical reasons, this has to happen in a separate webspace which nonetheless broadly looks and feels the same as the current History Department web site (a similar situation to the websites for the History of Science Program and the Center for Collaborative History). The site uses the same 'Content Management System' as the History Department, called Roxen. When we go live and visible to the world, we will be https://www.princeton.edu/histgrads/ and accessible through links on the History Department website. While it is being built, however, the website is cordoned off in an area only accessible to Princeton History Grad Students and Administrators, and you will need to log in with Princeton netID and password to see it.

To take the website live, we need your help and more importantly your content. This goes especially for the creation of individual student profiles, which only you can make and in which you will be able to express your complex and multifaceted academic interests or the ways in which your dissertation will revolutionize scholarship - all in an 'official' context that will link you to the constellation of other brilliant minds which inhabit Dickinson Hall. The GHA has taken on the responsibility of making sure all information is appropriate and up to scratch. Final departmental oversight of content will be provided by Kristy and Lauren.

You can view the current state of the website (please do not click 'enter edit mode' when browsing the site at this level but see below for instructions on creating and editing profiles) at the following URL: https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/histgrads/. You will see that there are pages for viewing students sorted by Field of study, Cohort, or alphabetically, as well as a Section for Job Candidates (currently empty) which will ultimately be managed by Lauren in conjunction with the Job Dossiers and can include information on those who have defended. When viewing the site, for your own benefit please follow all the steps for checking your current information below.

Please feel free to email me (iwatts@princeton.edu) with comments or any problems.

Checking your information

The information used to generate the lists of students was based on data provided by Kristy (and originally used to generate the History website's current students .pdfs). It has been processed a little to standardize things as much as possible. Please follow the steps below to check the information which applies to you and email me, Iain Watts at iwatts@princeton.edu, if you find errors (I will then coordinate with Kristy and Lauren to ensure they have the up-to-date version of your information). You can also let me know if you see errors that do not relate to yourself. In particular, some people who have defended and left may still be present in the tables.

1. Find yourself in the alphabetical list (you may need to log in with Princeton netID and password) and check that your name is correct. Check that you email address is correct.
2. Inform me if you want to use a different, preferred name for your departmental web identity than the one currently listed.
3. Check you are in the correct cohort in the list of students by cohort.
4. Finally, find your name on the main page's list of students by field and check you are listed under the correct field. If your field is incorrect and you wish to be placed under a different field heading, please let me know. Note that some students (eg, those who feature in the transnational/comparative section) may of necessity be listed under more than one field, but we are trying to minimize occurrences of this to avoid making the page too long or confusing. The field headings are based on a reduced version of the Department's own list of fields for admissions. They are a convenience for organizing information on the website, and are not meant to reflect a profound statement about the nature of the discipline of History. No system for doing this is perfect, since obviously our sprawlingly comprehensive discipline and its practitioners don't really always divide up nicely into neat little subcategories, and it would be rather a shame if they did. But people do need to be sorted somehow, and this seemed an efficient way to do it.

Creating a New Profile

The graduate students website has to be approved overall by Princeton's Office of Communications. To ensure this happens, I am trying to keep the website, including the student profiles, at some broad level of standardization. An uncharitable interpretation might read this as curbing, nay stifling, creativity. Perhaps. But the ethos behind the student profiles is to convey certain kinds of academic and biographical information in a format that is fairly close to the format mandated for History faculty (for a faculty example, see here). If you find this horribly confining and want to fly outside its iron cage and get really creative with your academic persona online, you should create your own website and link to it from your 'official' profile.

What this means in practice for the web profiles:

1. Please, no excessively goofy photos. we need to get this approved by the Princeton Office of Communications to go live to the web and I doubt they entirely share our finely-developed graduate student senses of humour. I know some of us delight in goofiness: please curb it just this once or if you must, save it and create a personal website which you'll be able to link to from your profile and in which you'll can foster an unrestrained utopia of goofiness to represent your academic persona if such is your desire. Non-goofy photos of you in interesting or even exotic places are obviously no problem. Perhaps I sound like a killjoy for saying this, but I don't mind: it will stop the Office of Communications coming to me (spreading onerous delay to our web presence left and right) and demanding that the profiles need to be 'more professional' or some such thing before the site can go live with Princeton's official blessing.
2. Please try to keep to the standard template for profiles that your new profile will have when it is created: basic information on left, photo on the right, followed by paragraphs of text. If you want to get supremely snazzy with web design, again I urge you to create your own website and link to it.

With all this in mind, to create your profile follow these steps:

1. For best results, use a browser that is not Internet Explorer, eg Firefox or Google Chrome. IE will still work, but your content editing environment might be inferior.
2. Point your web browser to https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/histgrads/profiles/index.xml (you may need to log in with Princeton netID and password). This is a semi-invisible page whose only function is as a launch-pad for the profile creation process.
3. Click the very small link 'Enter edit mode' at the bottom of the page.
4. A new toolbar should have appeared across the top of the website you are viewing. Click 'New' in the toolbar. In the box that appears asking for a title, enter your Princeton University netID (the characters that go before @princeton.edu in your email address). Do not consider entering anything other than your netID in this box - that would be a bad idea. Please make sure you have got your netID right and do not include any spaces. Click 'Next' in the toolbar. In the following step, click 'Create Page' in the toolbar (do not alter the selected Page Stationary - leave it as it is).
5. Your profile is born. It lacks any real content and even your name, and you need to provide these. Hover your mouse over the text 'Replace with your name' on the page and look for the little 'Edit' arrow. Click the edit arrow and you will be transported to the 'Content Editor'.
6. You will see your profile as seen in the Content Editor, divided into the components 'Header' (which will be your name), and a 'Text and Picture' component (which will contain everything else). Your email address will be displayed automatically under your name/Header using a piece of code whose function is to prevent it from being spammed. You don't need to put your email address in your profile yourself. Please don't alter the overall format of your profile page too much, such as by using weird font sizes or styles, putting your picture in an odd place, etc., as we want profiles to share a common format. Make changes within the existing 'Header' and editable 'Text and Picture' components, as described below.
7. Currently, the 'Header' component is being edited. Replace the 'Replace with your name' text with your name (naturally), and click the little green check mark at the top right to save and close this component.
8. Open the 'Text and Picture' component by clicking 'Text and Picture' in the left margin and start editing it. At the top, replace the text it says to replace with the appropriate information. Your 'fields of study' do not necessarily have to be the standard fields used on the main page.
9. Replace the paragraph below the "Profile" heading with the paragraphs of information about your research interests, dissertation project, biography, publications and so on that you want the world to see. This will probably take a bit of effort to write, and you can come back to it later if you wish. For an example of the kind of thing from a current student, see here.
10. Again, to save changes in the 'Text and Picture' component, be sure to click the little green check mark at the top right.
11. To add a picture, first make sure you have one of the proper size or it will completely mess up your profile formatting. Around 200 to 250 pixels for the largest side is a good rough guide. Resize the picture using image software and save it - or you can try using an online tool such as this one for the purpose. Once you have your picture, start editing the 'Text and Picture' component, click 'Browse & Upload' in the Picture section, and follow the instructions (tip: once you have uploaded the picture, make sure you click on the small version of it that appears in the upload popup window to use it in your profile).
12. When you are done editing the profile, don't forget to click 'Save Page' in the toolbar at the top.
13. When you have finished working on your profile and are happy with how it looks, it is time to commit it into the website and make it visible to your web Czar and other users (you can still continue to edit it after this). To do this, click 'Publish' in the toolbar at the top. Confirm this by clicking 'Publish Page'.
14. Once you have 'published' your creation, I will (in due course) activate a link to it in the lists of students and you will be able to navigate to it from the front pages of the site. Before this, if you wish to view your profile or edit it again, it is located at https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/histgrads/profiles/yourNetID/, where "yourNetID" needs to be replaced by your Princeton netID, eg https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/histgrads/profiles/aperson/ for the netID of aperson. For editing an existing profile, see the brief guidelines below.

Editing an Existing Profile

1. If your name is already hyperlinked in the lists of students at https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/histgrads/, simply click on your name there to go to your profile. Otherwise, point your browser to https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/histgrads/profiles/yourNetID/, where "yourNetID" needs to be replaced by your Princeton netID (the characters before the @ in your email), eg https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/histgrads/profiles/aperson/ for the netID of aperson.
2. You should see the profile you previously created. If not, check your browser is pointing at the right URL. If you really can't find your profile again, and you are sure you created it, email me (iwatts@princeton.edu) with the problem. Or, if you are feeling brave, you can try finding it in Roxen's Content Editor.
3. When you are looking at your profile page, click the 'Enter Edit Mode' link at the bottom. Once in edit mode, to edit the page in the Content Editor hover your mouse over the text until you see the 'Edit' arrow appear, then click the Edit arrow.
4. You can then edit the profile in the Content Editor using the same techniques you used when creating it (for which see above).
5. Don't forget to save every time you edit something, and to click 'Publish' when you are done and satisfied with the changes you have made.

--Iain Watts (iwatts@princeton.edu), Fall 2011