'Phenomenal Bodies' Website Development Project

Exhibitions that happened in the past month, collections on the other side of the world, are missed opportunities, all too familiar to the audience of art and art history. The good news is, art collections and exhibitions are going online to widen accessibility options. Yet then there are new problems. 404 pages not found, expired images, awkward font size too large to fit into one screen, bottomless scrolls of paragraphs after paragraphs …. Just to name a few annoyances I have faced as an art history student who is chronically online. For me, an art collection or exhibition website seems to be a nuanced balance between academic, technical, and accessibility considerations.

With my digital interest in mind, in 2025, I was involved in Phenomenal Bodies as a StARIS intern. The Phenomenal Bodies involves a collaborative network of displays across Scottish higher education institutions, exploring the representation of physically diverse bodies in historical collections and contributing to a more inclusive lens on disability.  The Phenomenal Bodies website functions as the centralised hub for exhibitions and collections temporal and spatial distances, offering online access to the project for a wider audience. My responsibility was to develop the Phenomenal Bodies website that balances between academic collection and audience engagement, while accounting for future updates from collaborating institutions.

One buzzword for my internship experience was communication. This internship involves a significant amount of communication with project supervisors and school administrators, who also communicate with the network of organisations beyond the university. We discuss the design criteria of the website together and make adjustments to the design when appropriate. For me, this experience of working as a part of a larger initiative was extremely valuable, as it was exciting to gain insight into the organisational and administrative process of realising academic research into exhibitions. On the other side of the coin, there is also the communication between the website and its user. Phenomenal Bodies will feature numerous in-depth discussions of artworks, but a ‘wall of text’ will not work for website users. Therefore, dividing and distributing written content appropriately across the webpage became a major aspect of the project. For example, the project utilises sidebars to communicate information such as related articles and institutions, reducing the scrolling distance to the bottom of the page. Finally, communication is also important in the behind-the-scenes space. Phenomenal Bodies is a long-term project, and the project will be constantly updated. Outside WordPress, I was also involved in writing ‘How to’ guides for future administrators of the site. Overall, the experience of different types of communication in the university and beyond was a highlight of my internship.

Another aspect I must highlight from general communication was designing the Phenomenal Bodies website’s accessibility options. Websites ideally should be easy to use for everyone, especially in Phenomenal Bodies as a body-inclusive initiative. A large part of my research centralises on accessibility design, ranging from deciding on a colour-blind friendly palette to experimenting with dyslexia-friendly fonts in the logo. In particular, I have to mobilise my visual analysis techniques learned from art history to ‘pick out’ the most significant features for the AltText; a picture is a thousand words, but I only have a hundred and fifty. Although this aspect of the project is not strictly art history, I think it is important for me, as a student of art history, to gain insight into the lived experience of interacting with artworks for audiences with different and diverse bodies.

The Phenomenal Bodies website will launch in June alongside the first exhibition of Phenomenal Bodies.