Through my examination of Winston Churchill for the Web Review Essay assignment, I discovered that there was a vast void in the online information related to the man. The two most prominent sites that deal exclusively with Churchill -- the Churchill Centre and the Churchill Archives – utilize mostly printed material, such as speeches and letters, but few photographs and no audio to document Churchill’s life. The other notable site, the BBC, which does feature some of Churchill’s speeches in audio form, does so sparingly and has almost no visual component. In short, while these three sites do a fine job at chronicling Churchill’s life in print and text, they fall miserably short in chronicling his life in pictures and through audio. I propose to use new media technology to chronicle Churchill’s war years in visual and audio form, from the period of May 10, 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister, to July 27, 1945 when he was defeated in his re-election bid. I propose a web-site that offers a visual archive of photos arranged year by year, along with audio of many of his war-time speeches.
I believe pictures and sound can play just as important a role in historical research as the written text, and I believe the new media technologies available today lend themselves to this task.