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Student Guide

Welcome to Campus History. Over the next few weeks you will research a building or place on the UNM campus and publish what you learn as an essay on this site. Your work will sit alongside essays by students from earlier semesters, and it will stay here for future readers long after the course ends. That is a real contribution to the history UNM, community building, and you are the person literally making history.

If you have never used GitHub or built a web page before, that is fine. Nearly everyone who has written for this site started in the same place. The tools and process will feel unfamiliar at first, and you will make a few mistakes along the way. Those mistakes are fixable, and the guide walks you through the common ones.

Much of the work is an exercise in carefully following directions. Do not just assume you can figure it out. Work precisely.

Take it one step at a time, check your work as you go, and ask for help with screenshots and the exact step that isn’t going as planned.

How It Works

Publishing here is a bit like writing a paper, with a few extra steps. In outline:

  1. You get your own copy of the site. It lives under your GitHub username, so you can experiment freely without touching the public site.
  2. You start your essay from a starter page that already has all the pieces a finished essay needs, and you give it your own title, name, and header image.
  3. You write. You replace the starter’s placeholder text with your research, add your own images with captions, and build a bibliography. Each time you save, your copy of the site rebuilds so you can see your essay as readers will.
  4. You submit. When your essay is finished, you run through a checklist and send your work to the main site with a pull request. Your instructor reviews it and publishes it.

Your course syllabus covers the assignment itself: the research, the writing, the due dates, and how your work is graded. The guide covers only the site.

The Guide

The guide has three parts, one for each stage of the work. Your instructor will tell you when to start each one.

  1. Setting Up Your Site and Essay — make your own copy of the site, start your essay folder, and add a picture of your topic. This is the first round, and it is due early in the project.
  2. Working on Your Essay — turn the starter into your essay: finish the metadata, write, add images and pull quotes, cite your sources, and check your work after every change.
  3. Submitting Your Essay — go through the checklist and open your pull request.

Start with Part 1 when you are ready. Good luck, and welcome to the project.