"What kind of work did you do to make this besides write the articles?"

Feminiscience is built using the Jekyll framework, with CSS stylings from Bootstrap. It is written in a combination of HTML5, CSS, and jQuery. I used Markdown rendering to write all of the articles.

Jekyll is great, I like it a lot. The way it works is that I write code for a shared layout across all of the pages on my website. So I wrote a header, a sidebar, and a footer. In the layout I specify where the content should go. I then create Markdown or HTML files and specify at the top which layout to use. I used HTML for the front page and hand-wrote the list of articles. I did it that way because I don't plan to keep this updated with more articles than the 6 I've written and so it was easier to just put them on the front page than write a whole script to select what articles to display based on publication date and genre. I used Markdown for writing the articles themselves. Markdown works really nicely with Jekyll and everything written in it tends to be formatted really nicely for the web.

Anyway, once I've written the content, I run Jekyll and it does the tedious work for me of attaching the header to the top of every page and converting the Markdown articles into HTML-formatted files. So while in Markdown I'd write *asterisks around italic phrases* Jekyll will read that and spit out an HTML file with <i>italic tags around phrases</i> which the web browser then reads and renders as italic without the markup. This is really nice because it means if I want to change the menu or side-bar description, I don't have to manually go through all 10 pages and make the change, Jekyll does that for me.

Because my goal in making this website is to make it accessible, I've designed the whole site using ARIA standards. I've modified Bootstrap to use higher contrast ratios, all the images have text encoded so that visually impaired people can have their computer read a description of the image to them. The menu is completely navigable using only the keyboard and there is a secret button that only shows up for people using screen-readers that allows them to turn off the menu which assists in reading the main content. Because my goal in making this website is to make it accessible, I've designed the whole site using ARIA standards. I've modified Bootstrap to use higher contrast ratios, all the images have text encoded so that visually impaired people can have their computer read a description of the image to them. The menu is completely navigable using only the keyboard and there is a secret button that only shows up for people using screen-readers that allows them to turn off the menu which assists in reading the main content. [Note From The Future: When I built this site in May 2015 I was under the impression this was all true. I have since learned that this site is not entirely accessible and at some point I want to return to this project and update it to the same levels of accessibility as Sailing Rough Waters.]

I decided to host the articles I'm citing on the site itself so that readers without university affiliation could access them without going through a paywall. I think the university paywall is one of the most classist parts of academia that really hinders educational growth.

About

Feminiscience takes concepts and information from Feminist Science Studies and makes them accessible and digestible, so you can learn about ways that you can take back and define your own body. Feminiscience is about feeling empowered to argue on behalf of your body. You know your body, you are your body. The shroud of academia sometimes convinces us that others can tell us we are wrong about ourselves. Feminist Sciences say that we actually can and should engage with scientific literature and Feminiscience is an entryway.

Feminiscience by Shel Raphen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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