Question

Does anyone know if it is possible to respond to a comment or comment on a comment?

Ideas on Final Project . . . Continued

A couple of years ago my uncle asked my dad and me to obtain information on the unit that he served with during the Vietnam War, the 41st Civil Affairs Company. He hoped that we could find the company yearbook, which contained photographs and memorabilia, and other documents concerning the group. The National Archives in College Park ended up having much more information than we expected, and after two days of research we sent my uncle several hundred digital reproductions of photographs, after action reports, and logs. He presented this information at the company reunion in 2006 and it was extremely well received, so much so that many of the pictures were added to the company website. When my uncle visited Washington the following year he spent two days at the National Archives looking deeper into the official documentation of his unit. Many of his fellow veterans had expressed interest in obtaining more detailed information about events on specific days, or about specific military actions.

When my uncle conveyed to me his experience presenting this material at the reunion it made me think about the actual reunion experience and its meaning to veterans and their families. My uncle relayed to me that many of his friends attended the reunions because of the sense of community and comraderie they fostered. The veterans would meet for a day or two days and discuss the events that they remembered, the local population, the food, living conditions, a stray dog that had become the mascot for the company. He also noted that many veterans were grateful to be able to link their memories to official photographs and documentation, to be able to “prove” the events that they were talking about.

Keeping this in mind I realized that any website I created would need to also have an interactive element that would allow veterans and their friends and families the add their own comments and remembrances. The website would also have to give equal weight to these personal stories and remembrances as to the ”official” history presented on the site. This could be done through tagging and hypertext. When a site visitor reached a certain point in the narrative, or selected a location, date, or keyword they would be able to see information concerning that date, location, or topic, that had been generated by other visitors.

A scenario could be that a person looks at the site because their father or grandfather had been a serviceman in the Philippines at the time of its invasion, they had heard several stories about the event, but still did not know much about their father/grandfather’s involvement. That person could select a location that their relative had mentioned, Cabanatuan City, and there read historical material about the site, look at photographs and possibly multimedia, and read the entries of visitors whose comments were tagged with the name of the location. The visitor might read about their relatives unit or notice something else that seemed of interest, click on that link, and be lead to an entirely different location, finding connections that that they hadn’t thought of, or visitors with similar memories and stories.

Ideas for Final Project -

After thinking for quite a while about a potential direction for my final project I decided that I wanted to create a website that combined narrative and oral history with documentary evidence and secondary research. The website would tell discuss an event in history, using a narrative to guide the visitor through the event, and hopefully allow them to see the event partially through the eyes of the narrator (I think that the perspective I am hoping for is first person omniscient). The site would be organized in a linear way, by date, but would be capable of being searched by keyword, date, event, and location (I will try to create a mock-up soon of the website for illustrative purposes and post it on this blog).

The historical event that I am going to discuss is the fall of Bataan, PI to the Empire of Japan on April 9, 1942 and the subsequent forced relocation and march of prisoners from the Bataan Peninsula to prison camps located on other parts of the island. The “story” on the website will begin prior to the fall of Bataan and end with the rescue of Japanese held American POWs by allied forces. At any time a visitor will be able to jump to information on a specific location or time period.

My great uncle, Grover Gilbert was an Air Force photographer in Mariveles, PI at the time of the allied surrender, and was one of the oldest survivors of the Bataan Death March. The narrative portion of the website will (hopefully) be primarily based on his remembrances and recollections of the events surrounding the surrender, march, and his imprisonment in a Japanese POW camp. His experience was recorded in a 1966 oral interview, the tapes of which are currently at the Air Force Historical Research Agency (an possibly also at NARA).

The website will also include photographs taken by allied forces and by the Japanese, as well af source documents, and some multimedia and interactive elements.

There are many websites that discuss the topic of the Bataan Death March or Batān Shi no Kōshin. Most are narratives of survivors, or historical accounts of the events using secondary resources. Few provide photographic or documentary evidence of the event, and fewer combine narrative with historical scholarship or give any potential for interaction between users.

One very good looking and informative website was authored by Rick Peterson and discusses the experience of Staff Sergeant Alf Larson, who was in the Bataan Death March. The website is very clean and well organized and presents the veteran’s story in a very readable and engaging manner. The site also includes a map of the march route, and an area where visitors can leave their comments.

Another page on the topic is provided by the History Department at the University of San Diego. The page is very plain and forces visitors to click back to the homepage or click a “next” button to navigate the site. Despite the fact that this is a very primative website and that several of the links do not work, it does have several very good pictures and is overall well written using secondary sources.

These are only a few of the websites that I found, I will post others in the next post. Most of the websites are personal narratives, so it is hard to call any one of them “bad”. Some of the pages are more skillfuly designed, but all are effective in conveying some of the experience of the veteran/author.

Interesting Link – www.patents.com

I just found this link on one of the other (outside of class) blogs that I subscribe to and thought it looked pretty interesting http://www.patents.com/. The site looks pretty extensive and sems to offer much more content and information than google patents. I was even able to find a couple of patents that my grandfather obtained while working for General Motors!

Website Reviews – Community Museum Sites continued . . .

The website for the Manassas Museum System is very different than that of the Sandy Spring Museum. It has been incorporated into the larger governmental website for Manassas City, so the layout is very much dictated by the format of the host site. Because of this the site has a very no-nonsense industrial feel to it; the layout is not very imaginative or visually interesting, but all of the site information is presented to the visitor in a clear and straightforward way.

Much of the material presented on the website is the same as information that can be found at the Manassas City visitors center or at the museum itself. In fact, most of the links simply go to PDF copies of the paper documents and maps that the visitors center hands out. One link, “Manassas Museum Walking and Driving Tours” sends the visitor to a PDF version of the area map posted on the side of the Manassas City VRE station. On the main page for the Museum system are links to the various system historical sites; the Hopkins Candy Factory, Liberia House, and the Manassas Railroad Depot (which is in active use). These individual pages for historical sites provide a small amount of information.

The website seems to be little more than a “calling card” it provides just enough information so that a person can get a general idea of what the museum system is all about along with directions and contact information. The site is clearly intended to pull visitors into the museum and is not meant to provide much information on its own. Although most of the site is fairly bland, one portion of it does have interactive features, Echoes Online, the online museum store.

There are many things that could be added to the Manassas Museum System site that would enhance it’s value and usefulness to visitors. One feature that I found myself hoping for is an interactive map. There is a fairly good paper map of Manassas City provided at the visitors center, and it would be very helpful if a similar map were reproduced online, that allowed users to click on sites of interest. The digital map could then link the visitor to sites for the individual historical sites.

Aesthetically, the page would be greatly improved by the introduction of more pictures or a slideshow similar like the one featured on the homepage for the City of Manassas.

Website Reviews – Community Museum Sites

I decided to review the websites of two community museums; The Sandy Spring Museum in Sandy Spring, MD and the website for the Manassas Museum System. Each takes a very different approach to website design and I really had a fun time analyzing each.

To start off, I will talk a bit about the website for the Sandy Spring Museum. The entry page is pretty spartan, but very attractively designed and provides links, which brighten as the visitor mouses over them, to several online exhibits and other parts of the site. There is also an area at the top of the page that provides information on current news and events. Like others I checked to verify that the site opens well in both IE and FF, which it does. However (and this is pretty minor) the page does not print out correctly and the banner at the top wass cut off when I printed the page out in IE.

Although visually appealing, with well chosen colors and fonts, the homepage is little more than an entryway to the rest of the site, making the visitor click on “about our museum” to get to a place where they can navigate in any useful way. When the visitor selects this link, they are taken to a more traditional looking homepage, which has sidebar links to the other portions of the site. Visually the page is bland, but the sidebar navigation is easy to read and interpret and allows a visitor to quickly get to where they want to go. On most pages the sidebar remains on the left side of the page to easily allow the visitor to navigate. Unfortunately, when a visitor selects a link to an online exibit the site sidebar disappears, forcing the visitor to return to the homepage (the entryway) to continue navigating.

The website is intended to bring visitors into the museum.  There is information about museum events and activities, contact information, information on the museum facilities, and a link for visitors wishing to become museum members. There is also some information provided by the online exibits, but these largely reproduce information that can be found in the museum. It is surprising that the website does not provide any information about the museum library and archives, or the extensive collection of local artifacts. The website also does not go into much detail about current exhibits or collections.

As a “pride piece” the website does very well, it shows off what the museum does for the community and thanks founders and donors. The site is clearly aimed at area visitors and local residents, providing a small level of information that might be useful to younger school aged children. The site itself looks to have been made by a paid ameteur, but the format and some of the content has not been maintained or updated regularly.

Among other changes, a nice addition to the online exhibit sections would have been the inclusion of some participatory element that allowed visitors to add their own recollections of early Sandy Spring. Also, the museum has a great collection of oral history interviews of early residents and newspaper articles that could be easily added to the site to enhance the visitors’ experience of “old Sandy Spring”.

Notes on – Interchange: The Promise of Digital History

Like many others in the class I found this discussion to be extremely helpful, both the sources cited by the participants an the topics and ideas discussed. The discussion helped me to focus some of the thoughts that I have had concerning new media and digital history since beginning my graduate studies.

In thinking about the benefits of new media and computer technology I recalled my first exposure to a large scale research project. Although portions of the project may have been completed without the aid of computers, the ability to manipulate large sets of data and to digitize and access rapidly evidence and data allowed us to look at historical information and to use it in ways that simply would not have been possible 30 years ago.

As an undergraduate I worked with the Center for Population Economics of the University of Chicago. We performed research at the National Archives in Washington, DC, using Civil War pension and service records to extract data concerning veterans. When I began working with the project it had been ongoing for quite some time. The original purpose of the project was to obtain whole life health and mortality data on Civil War veterans (I was told by my supervisor that they were able to use the data to prove that taller soldiers were more likely to be shot in the face than shorter soldiers – common sense, I know). Data extracted from pension files was entered into standard digital forms which were then added to a larger database.

As the project progressed researchers recognized that they could use the data to study a great number of topics. We began to link the date found in the pension and service records with data from census records, and then combining this information with local health and mortality data (rates of small pox infection, cholera, polio, deaths from malnutrition) and public works data (water pipe distribution, Sandbourn Fire Insurance maps). The Center for Population Economics was then able to combine contemporarly maps and data into a GIS format. The website for the center shows just how much information the project has generated. Technology has allowed researchers to make connections and discoveries that previously would have taken They are able to view a much more comprehensive picture of the lives of Civil War veterans than anyone had been able to previously.

In Interchange Professor Cohen notes that, “Digital history and the abundance it tries to address make many historical arguments seem anecdotal rather than comprehensive.” He states later in the discussion that, “Machine-readable texts and metadata present interesting new possibilities for research since the computer can easily scan the entirety of a personal research collection for patterns, words, and other entities.” I see this as one of the greatest benefits of new media, the ability to quickly (relatively) utilize a much larger amount of data than could have been done using only physical resources, and then to be able to organize and manipulate that data in different ways.

Steven Mintz also discusses this, stating that digital dechnology;

has greatly expanded the range of sources – primary and secondary – that I use . . . [and] has significantly improved my ability to retrieve the sources that I have read. Keyword searches allow me to recover, annotate, and cite sources in ways that were extremely difficult in the past

Interesting Post – Arms Race

This post is about a month old, but I just came across it on William J. Turkel’s blog Digital History Hacks. He tlks about some of the perils facing bloggers and the “war on spam”. I think his comments are absulutely true, but also humorous.

The company that I work for is fairly small and I have become the default IT Administrator because I am, “young and must know stuff about computers” (an actual quote from the staff meeting where I was volunteered to take on the job duties). Most of the people in my office are constantly playing a balancing act between blocking spam and allowing legitemate e-mail to pass through the filters.

It is also interesting to note the positive effects and technological innovations that have resulted from efforts to block spam and “tell computers and humans apart”.

Interesting Article

The blog technology mentioned and interesting article found in the New York Times, that discusses the growing use of digital image editing software. The article looks at the ways that the software is becoming easier to use and is enabling individuals to alter the impression of photographs as “as a definitive record of what was”. Here is a link to the article. The article brought to mind several situations that I have encountered where digital manipulation was used to create “impossible shots” or situations.

During a trip to Indianapolis I took the picture below of the Indiana state capital. I attempted to capture the building from several angles, but found that the buildings surrounding the capital are so close that they would not allow me to capture it in a single frame. I eventually took about 8 seperate pictures of diferent portions of the capital, these I then pieced together using a program called Autostitch.

After piecing the pictures together I noticed that he program had adjusted for barrel distortion caused by my camera’s lens and that there were two large pieces of sky missing from the upper left and right sides. To correct this I used several Photoshop tools to “draw” in the missing sky. Obviously the final image is not perfect, but I managed to get the shot that I wanted (If you look closely you will notice that one of the vehicles in the photograph is distorted and missing doors).

Another example of digital manipulation that I encountered was at work. Several months ago my boss burst into my office waving a picture depicting several beached whales with a large U.S. Naval ship clearly looming in the background. My boss wanted me to “find out everything I could” about the picture, because it had been cited as evidence in a lawsuit against the Navy. A judge had allowed an environmental group to present the image as proof that the Navy ship had been present during a whale mass stranding event. I looked at the picture and quickly noticed that it was a (extremely poor) fake, not only were did the shadows of the whales and the ship not match up, but the resolution of the original image was slightly lower than that of the ship, and the ship was awkwardly placed on the horizon.

Unfortunately I can not find a copy of the picture right now, but I will certainly update this post tomorrow morning if I am able to locate it at my office.