<h2 id="comprehensive-guide-to-obsidian-user-interface-and-features"><a aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" href="#comprehensive-guide-to-obsidian-user-interface-and-features"></a>Comprehensive Guide to Obsidian User Interface and Features</h2>
<h3 id="summary"><a aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" href="#summary"></a>Summary</h3>
This video offers a comprehensive tutorial on the user interface features of Obsidian, with a focus on note creation, organization, and customization. It covers essential functions such as creating journals, using hotkeys, managing plugins, linking notes, exporting to PDF, and customizing themes. I explain how to navigate and manage multiple notes and vaults effectively.
Comprehensive Guide to Obsidian User Interface and Features 
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<h3 id="transcript"><a aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" href="#transcript"></a>Transcript:</h3>
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Hello again there students. So in this video I want to quickly review some of the UI features,
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the user interface features of Obsidian in case some of you have not familiarized yourselves with
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them. So we're going to start off with some just basic buttons here and then kind of go from there
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and what they do. So as you can see in the left sidebar you have your list which I'm assuming that
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once you've set up your Obsidian you've seen this. I hope you've read through the introduction note
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right here and this is where you input your weekly journals. So if you're going to create a new journal
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you either can click and create a new note on this actual folder here or you just do the hotkey
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as I've showed you in the previous video just go control for the week of the journal is control J
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and then that creates your journal note and then remember to rename the journal note of the date
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that your journal is due. So if this is for that week for this coming week it would be
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the 14th I believe so it would be 2025 0914. And that way I know this is the journal for that. You can
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also right here where it says date I don't know why that property type is like that that should be
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changed to a date here and then you can just click the date just like that. So make sure you change that
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there because unfortunately I must have put that in wrong. And then just fill it all. You don't have
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to fill these out right away. We're going to go through properties later on in the semester but for
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now just make sure you have your date in properly and your title. So now here with title you can actually
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type in any note you know my reflection or whatever. It's not that it is that can be customized to what
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you want as long as you have your date up here for your main journal. And then from here you just enter
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your posts any citations any images you want to embed. Okay so that's great. So for all your notes
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let's delete that you have atomic notes, literature notes, and then the consolidation reflections that
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are actually graded. Now up here you have a few controls. This if you click here if you don't want
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to use hotkeys but you want to click here you can use this for a new note. You click here to create a new
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folder. You can order, reveal, and a few other items. Right close, open everything. Over in this far sidebar
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this has some quick access buttons for your plugins. So here's your graph view. Right this is where you
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will see notes being connected. Obviously they're not connected right now in this vault because this is the
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empty vault that I have created. Over here you'll have filters which we'll go through later on.
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You can also create a new canvas and that's a feature we'll talk about later on in the semester.
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It's a great way actually to mind map out projects or notes and you can embed notes and all kinds of
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cool things. You can do a daily note which automatically populates the date. So you could just go over here
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for your weekly journal. Click on daily note. It will populate the date and then hit the hotkey
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shift control J and that will insert the template right into that note. So we could go that route and
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then you just click and drag that note into your weekly journal. Voila it's right there.
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Down here you have you can insert a template. So if you have a new note let's click up here for a new note.
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But now I want to insert a template. I can click here. Oops.
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Oh I didn't configure it. Sorry my bad. So avoid that. Don't worry about that. You don't need it
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anyways. We have hotkeys. You open a command palette. It allows you to scroll through different commands.
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It shows you the hotkeys for those commands. So you'll see for the templater we have insert atomic note,
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insert literature note, all kinds of things. If you type in here I'm going to do something with the
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journal. It automatically populates anything that has the J-O-U automatically.
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Right here. This is a base. Base is basically a way of creating a data spreadsheet in a sense within
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Obsidian. This is something we'll go through later on in the semester when it comes to databases,
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identifiers, and how we label items. And so archaeological materials or any kind of historical
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database that you want to create. This is for publishing your Mixa site. So once you get your
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Mixa site up and running, which will be down in your community plugins here, you will need to go
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through the tutorial that I have provided and you'll need to get your secret token, put it into here.
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You leave this blank and this will create, this will allow your entire vault to be published. Okay.
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So you do not need to fill this in. This will actually publish your entire vault. And then you can
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hit click here to publish once you've done your changes, or as I've noted here, you click here and
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it will publish. But you got to make sure you set that up by going to the Mixa website, getting logged in
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there, getting your secret token and putting it into the plugin. And this is your template button right
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here. You click that and you can select a particular note. So if I want to hit atomic note, I don't have
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an active editor because I don't have a file up, but you just click on that and it will insert it.
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So let's maybe do that now. See if that works. Make sure I'm not lying to everybody.
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Oh, I want an atomic note. Boop. There you go. Okay. Great.
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This gear cog down here brings up all your different settings. You have general editor files,
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appearances, hotkeys. Now, when you go into appearance, you can actually change the theme of
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your vault. Now it's set to the default automatically, but you can click in, go into manage, and there's
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all kinds of themes that you can go in to set your vault as. This is up to you. This is the beauty of
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this. You can customize what you want. So if you want to change the vault theme, you can.
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I personally, I use minimal myself on my other vaults, but it's totally up to you. This is an
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aesthetic thing. And some of them have different features with different types of CSS coding and
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all kinds of things you can do with them.
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Again, your hotkeys. So there's a list of all the functions within Obsidian.
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If you can type in here, you can go, I want to look at base. Basis is that new core plugin for the
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spreadsheet. And I don't have any hotkeys set up yet. So later on in semester, we can set up a hotkey if
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you want. Core plugins are just what comes with the Obsidian software and all the different
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functionalities and what you can do turning on and off. And then you have the community plugins,
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which you should know about by now by going in here.
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Other options here is you can do a search. Now searching through your database
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is can be done multiple ways. You can do it through file paths, file names, tags, which is why I
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encourage using tags as well because tags become very important in distinguishing particular notes,
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properties. And that's the metadata that we'll be discussing later on.
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You can bookmark items. And then over here, if we click on this, what this will do,
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bring back a note, let me pull up this note. This note will tell us if there's any backlinks,
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outgoing links, or tags associated with the note. Okay, so this note has nothing associated with tags.
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Where are we here? So if I put in, let's say, let's try, let's do an outgoing link. Let's link this note to
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consolidation index. Okay, great, done. As you can see, it brought it up here. So if you're in a
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note and you have links kind of embedded everywhere, you will see all the different links going out of
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the note. Now, if there's links pointing to this particular note, let's go into, let's take literature
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note and we'll point the literature note to the journal note.
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Done. Let's go up here. Now, if I go into incoming links, now I can see there's a link coming from
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this journal index. So the basics of linking through wikis is going to be one of the core
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foundations of this particular software that you need to learn. Because this is how the knowledge
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emerges from your research by connecting various atomic notes, literature notes, your journals,
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everything. And this is how you get this kind of network of emergent knowledge that's going to come
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out of the software. So right now what we'll do, we'll look at this outline. Now outlines are meant to
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show you where headers are. So if I put in a header test and see how it pops up here. If I do a secondary
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header or a third level header, go test two, see how the indent happens to show you that this is a
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third level header compared to this level header. So you get to see and then you can navigate down
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to these headers. So if I was up into the test header, it highlights it. What about test three,
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it highlights it. I want to go down to test four. Boom, right there. Okay. Now this is in a read mode.
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And what I mean by a read mode is that I can't edit this right now. Or sorry, right here. Now I'm in
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read mode. So I can't edit this. I can't do anything. I can't delete. And what I can do is I switch from
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read mode to edit mode using command E. So command E is the Mac hotkey. The Windows key would be, I think,
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I want to say alt, but you would have to look it up if you're a Windows user. And that's easy to do
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when you go into that, into your settings. You can go into the hotkeys to find it, which is up here.
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Or you can just click on the button up here. So see how this is current view is editing. I can click
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here and now I'm in reading view. Okay. If you click over to the three dots, there's a lot of things we
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can do with this. You can export to PDF. So when I'm requesting you to export your journals into a PDF format
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or any other assignments into a PDF format. Say for this note, for example, you can come up here,
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click here, go down to export to PDF. If you want to include the file name as a title, you can do that
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letter size, landscape, whatever you prefer, your margins, you can scale up or scale down the size.
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And then you just hit export to PDF. It will populate this where you can see that I want, this is my
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that the title of the note where it's going to save it as the file. I can click save,
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it will create it as a PDF and save that PDF within the vault as well. Done. So there's my PDF.
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Good to go.
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Besides that, you'll see some features down here. This is the vault name itself. If I went into
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this vault, you can see I can manage my vaults. I have a vault that has my coin data from my own
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personal research, my main vault, which we can go to and the vault for our course. And then this is my
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demo vault that I have created for the course. We can manage vaults by clicking on that. And then I can
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go in and open new vaults, access vaults, remove vaults, which are just folders, like I said before.
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Okay. So, um, as you can see, um, there's no need to explain, but I think this people should know that
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this is where your notes populate. If you want to have multiple notes at a time, you can have multiple
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notes going. I can actually close both side windows, which sometimes I prefer for work, or I can just, uh,
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uh, narrow that down. If I want another note open in a tab, I can do that. Click there and,
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or I can just hit command O, um, which will open up a new note. It'll prompt up this field here,
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and then I can go, okay, I want to open up the welcome note and it'll populate it in this window.
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But if I want it in a new tab, I opened the tab, command O, I can go down to journal and then voila.
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The other thing is you can click and drag this over and now I can have both notes operating at
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the same time. I can have it down here if I want, if I prefer an up and a horizontal view of each note.
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And that's about it. You'll see your, um, location of your notes here. So even though this is a welcome
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note, it shows me that it is under the, uh, main folder introduction. So I think that for now,
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that's kind of the basics of the UI, um, just the general interfaces. I hope this helps. If you do
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have any questions again, please, um, ask me why they're in the tech help. You can email me at my
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email address or come to my office hours. I'm here all the time during office hours. Um,
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um, so please use them when you can.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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Welcome

1. Course Description

2. Learning Outcomes

3. Course Schedule

4. Evaluation

5. Course Communications

6. Common Regulations

6. Contact the Professor

how the course tech is built; how the course came to be

7. Colophon

8. Reuse

Orientation and Digital Setup

Week 1

Personal Knowledge Management and Linked Thinking

Week 2

Thinking about the “Craft” of Digital History

Week 3

Crusading into the Digital Age of LLMs

Week 4

Consolidation & Check-In Week

Week 5

Digital Excavation

Week 6

Defining Data, 'Dark' Data, & Identifiers

Week 7

Fall Break

Week 8

Seeing the Past?

Week 9

Week 10

Authority and Positionality in Your Digital Research

Week 11

Publicly Crafting a Historical Argument

Week 12

Open-Access Notebook Workshop

Week 13

Exit Ticket

Week 14

1 Setting up your vault

2 Create your first note

3 Templater Plugiin

4 What Goes into a Note?

5 Properties

Hypothesis

The Simplest Online Memex Worfklow

How To Read An Academic Article

FAQ for Common Tech Issues

Where to Find help

Text Formatting

Introduction to your vault

index note

Atomic Note

Literature Note

Process Note

Weekly Journal

Topic Proposal

Weekly Work & Tasks

Consolidation Reflection

Open Access Notebook/Memex

Benchmarking Your Memex

Exit Ticket/Final Project

1 Welcome to Crafting Digital History Transcript

2 Obsidian User Interface (UI) Guide

3 Templater and Hotkeys Setup

4 How to use PDF++

5 Canvas Core Plugin Introductory Tutorial

6 Hypothes.is and Annotating the Web

7 Omnisearch Plugin for Obsidian

8 How to Use Process Notes for Digital Research Projects in Obsidian

9 Properties, Identifiers and Data Management with Obsidian Core Plugin Bases

1 Welcome to Crafting Digital History

2 Some Logistical Updates

3 Welcome to Week Two

4 What is Digital History?

5 Crusading into the Digital Age of LLMs

6 Week Four Exercise Example

7 Using Obsidian for Digital History Research and Note-Making

8 Reflection Feedback Update and Hypothes.is

9 Week Five Update

10 Consolidation Reflection Submission

11 Module Two Wrangling and Critiquing

12 Week 7 Update

13 Week 9 Welcome Back

14 Consolidation Week Number 2

1. Course Overview

Module 1 Contextualizing

Module 2 Wrangling & Critiquing

Module 3 Arguing & Communicating

2. Schedule

01  memex help

8. Course Files

3. Tutorials

4. Assessment

5. VideoTutorials

Crafting Digital History

News