Constructing “Know Your Neighborhood”
May 8th, 2006Since I moved here in September, I have marveled at the oddness of Washington DC. It is just so unlike the northeastern cities I’ve experienced. I had been meaning to look into its history to try to understand what makes it seem so foreign, when a guest speaker from Cultural Tourism DC came to speak to my public history class (Cultural Tourism creates cultural heritage trails—you may have seen the signs on the sidewalk—and works with community partners to help bring tourists off the Mall and into DC’s other neighborhoods). She helped clarify the difference by explaining that most of the attention DC receives is from outsiders who come to view only its national landmarks. This, plus the fact that residents come and go so quickly with politics that they rarely set down roots, helps explain why DC tends to have little sense of its own history.
I wanted, therefore, to make a site that would address local history for local residents. The other sites I saw provided only summaries of each neighborhood without offering something tangible for viewers to relate to. This is why I wanted to rely more heavily on pictures than text. I also wanted to tap into viewers’ spatial thinking by using a map, partly because I wanted them to recognize that places and environments have a past (an important concept in collective memory). As residents, moreover, they most likely would be able to make connections between the past and the present by thinking about the familiar streets they pass down every day. When the map is on satellite view, it is especially effective because one can see contemporary buildings while looking at pictures of what used to be there. The only serious flaw with my topic, I think, is that some residents might have a clearer understanding of their neighborhoods than I do. I might not be attuned to local quirks or traditions, for example. Still, I hope that my site offers a bit of history that residents haven’t seen and that helps them understand the character of their neighborhoods better.
Interestingly, it felt like I was doing two separate projects, or, at least, integrating two totally separate tasks into one project. I conducted the historical research as if I were preparing a paper or regular historical project—collecting images and writing down their source information, tracking down facts about each place, verifying them with a second source, and citing everything. I was meticulous, organized, and as thorough as I felt I needed to be for this purpose. The technical aspect, however, was a total departure from the traditional methods of the independently minded historian. It was a completely different challenge because there were some aspects of the technology (like source code) that there was just no way for me to guess, or even to learn myself. (Where does one find directions for embedding a Google map in a Dreamweaver table cell? Certainly not at the library.) I found myself relying heavily on Ed for advice, since he also used a Google map, or comparing my code to his to find the difference. I also spent a good deal of time in the unscholarly practice of trial and error; I couldn’t just logically think the code into doing what I wanted it to do, so I tried and borrowed and compared and tried again …a very different way of going about a historical project!
One of the advantages of working in digital media for this particular site was the easy manipulation of photos. I could simply surf the Library of Congress’s online photo catalogue and save the images I wanted to use. I also used some images from PDF sources (a brochure published by the DC Historic Preservation Office, for example…though I only used publicly accessible photos!), which I converted to jpegs in Photoshop. Finally, I took pictures of a few images in books (again, publicly accessible ones) with my digital camera. I was able to brighten these and clarify them for the viewer, all without having to leave my house and travel to four or five different libraries spread out over town. Fortunately, our guest lawyer seemed to indicate that, as long as we appropriate information (images in this case) for a sufficiently different public use on the Web, we wouldn’t be breaking copyright law. (I would still like to verify this though, especially in terms of library reproductions policies, if given more time.)
Certainly, the biggest drawback of the project was my limited knowledge of the technology, especially when putting the site together. Making the map in Google maps was wonderfully easy, but it was much harder to integrate it into the site along with the sixteen popup windows I made in Dreamweaver. First it took me a little while to think out how I would use the popup windows provided with the map; I decided to make them only include links since I knew I didn’t have the expertise to format pictures and text within them. Understanding how to register the map, get an API key, and then put the map on the Web in the right place so that it would actually appear was even more challenging.
Otherwise, had I the knowledge, I certainly would have finessed my site to make it look as polished as the version in my head. Ideally, I would have been able to manipulate the layout of images and text within tables better to make each popup page look less tablelike. I also would put some kind of logo banner image across the top, have the map load in satellite view, and make each popup window appear without the whole Firefox/Explorer navigator frame around it. I also liked the suggestion during my presentation of having the popups appear in a frame next to the map rather than in a new window.
There is much more to do for the site, as the home page indicates. (I made it to lay out the scope of the project.) First, I would include links to some of the sources I used, such as the LOC Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue, Cultural Tourism, and the HPO brochure. This way I could better demonstrate the credibility of my site and also encourage viewers to pursue local history further if they wanted to look up more locations on their own. Then I would finish the few points still under construction for Capitol Hill (these proved to be the hardest to research). Finally, I would repeat the whole process for other neighborhoods in DC. I would keep up the theme of neighborhood institutions and try to strike a balance of houses, people, schools, parks, hospitals, transportation, points of industry/employment, and markets or stores.
If given the time and access, I would love to consult with members of each neighborhood in order to learn those particular quirks that I wouldn’t find in a book. I also would like, as I originally intended, to use audio technology to share oral histories about the places on the map; a resident could tell a story or relay memories of a place when a popup window opens, for example. My other idea was to incorporate a message board so that people could share memories. Historians often forget that the public itself is an amazing untapped resource of historical information…perhaps longtime residents have old photos, newspaper clippings, or scrapbooks as well as stories to contribute. I think these aspects, if incorporated, would help viewers recognize the sense of community, founded on a collective past, that is inherent but often overlooked in being the resident of a Washington neighborhood.