Interdisciplinary research integrates knowledge, methods, and perspectives from different disciplines to solve complex problems or explore new areas of interest. Collaboration among researchers from varying fields to address research questions that a single disciple cannot adequately answer is a key component of Interdisciplinary Research.

One of the many things our Design Team considered when choosing the software and services to create this website was the cost of maintaining our technical resources. Therefore, our team chose a content management system to host our website and a cloud-based mapping solution already supported by our university to minimize costs that may hinder our ability to maintain our website. In our case, this is WordPress and ArcGIS. The services offer free versions outside of the platforms having paid support through our university institution. Choosing services that provide a free tier is essential for accessibility for students, faculty, and the general public should they want to recreate a similar project.

WordPress is an open-source content-management system offering a free tier that can be installed on a web host already in use or as a stand-alone web host service. WordPress is user-friendly compared to other free-tier products, although the free version has some limitations that hinder ease of use. Nevertheless, WordPress is widely used, and numerous free resources are available for users with technical skills ranging from beginner to expert. Free technical manuals and other resources make the platform accessible to students, faculty, and staff.

The limitations of WordPress’s free-tier system allowed students to focus on understanding the key components of Digital Humanities and Web Design. WordPress’s free tier allows for basic website manipulation by creating “Pages” and “Posts.” To learn how to create pages and posts using WordPress, click here.

Digital Buenos Aires 2019 was housed on Omeka, allowing for an interactive map that housed artifacts and data in video and image format. However, the version of Omeka that our design team previously utilized has outdated plugins, so initially, our design team considered using Omeka S. It was important to consider Omeka S because it is a service that faculty and students have prior experience with. Still, Omeka S lacked mapping features similar to Omeka.

The 2022 Digital Buenos Aires design team switched to ArcGIS due to the many changes in Omeka S’ features. ArcGIS Storymaps provides many of the same features as Omeka, in addition to auto-mapping using metadata, map customization, and other site editing tools.ArcGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) software primarily used for managing geographic data, whereas Omeka is a web-based content management system (CMS). ArcGIS utilizes powerful mapping capabilities and provides various spatial analysis, mapping, and visualization tools. The new version of Omeka, Omeka S, does not have mapping capabilities but third-party mapping services can be integrated into Omeka S.