calderwood

One of the assignments for this week was to incorporate the object we had digitized (see image below) in a web page.  I expect that, when it comes out in early March, the Streetprint Engine 3.0 will be perfectly suited for creating a website where I can display digitized versions of my grandmother’s pictures.  Since Streetprint 3.0 is not yet available, I used Dreamweaver to create a rather incomplete mock-up of the website I envision.

This website, entitled Betty’s Photographs, currently consists of only two pages.  From the home page, which contains a portrait of my grandmothers, visitors can hit a link that leads to other snapshots she had collected.  The second page, when it achieves its final form, will contain titles for all the images on the page, links to images of the snapshots’ rear sides, and links to more pages full of images.  If I complete this website using Streetprint rather than Dreamweaver, visitors will also be able to browse through images by subject or date.

Since designing these two web pages represents my first time using Dreamweaver, I ran into several problems.  For example, I attempted to embed reminders to myself in the website’s code, but somehow they always ended up being displayed.  Also, I seem to have managed using a template to recreate the background and heading of the homepage on the second page, but I was pretty unsure of doing.  Again, when I resized images in Dreamweaver, I was unsure whether they would appear too small or too large.  Finally, I am not terribly pleased with Dreamweaver’s ability to create aesthetically pleasing pages.  My guess is, if I continue to use Dreamweaver, I should first design the background of my pages and other content using Photoshop or another similar program.   

Reading the second chapter of  Digital History led me to think more about the logistics of designing a website.  Since I’m thinking more seriously about a website that would allow visitors to search through a collection of blues recordings from the 1920s and 30s, I imagine that such a project would require an XML or database program.  The second chapter only briefly discussed the differences between XML and database program, so I’m still unclear on what makes the two programs different and on which one would be more appropriate for my purposes.

Perhaps a more important question is what kind of server I should access.  Starting out, the easiest thing to do might be to gain access to my school’s server.  Since my website might requires an XML or database program, however, I’m not sure the limited space my school would provide me would, even at the outset, be sufficient.

On the other hand, if the server space turned out to be enough at the beginning, my website might eventually grow so much that the space would no longer be sufficient.  This situation could occur either as I add more text (i.e. blues lyrics) or as I supplement the text with audio files.

Aside from the issue of space, access to my school’s server might discontinue once I am no longer affiliated with the school–which is of immediate concern to me since I’ll be graduating this year.

Despite these concerns, I’m definitely inclined toward making use of my school’s server if at all possible.  Currently, American University is my ISP, so I can’t really imagine accessing any other institutional server right away.  Also, I expect that my web site will start small and only gradually grow, which makes investing in dedicated hosting or a domain name seem frivolous at this point.

If anyone has suggestions or more information regarding any of the concerns I’ve raised, I’d greatly appreciate it.

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, a couple dozen snapshots she had taken in the 1940s and 50s came into my possession, mainly because the subjects of these pictures were unfamiliar to my family.  (Of course, I was interested in keeping them for their historical value alone.)  Soon after I acquired them, I made color photocopies on glossy paper for display purposes and buried the originals in a folder in my closet.  Since I know so little about preserving photographs, I often worry about how long the originals will last in my possession.

The digitization assignment provided me with an opportunity to help preserve the originals in an alternate form–as image files.  Earlier this week, I began the preservation process by scanning over a dozen of the originals, using 48-bit color, and saving them as TIFF files.  My choices in depth and file format were dictated by my desire to preserve as much information about these snaphsots as possible.  For the same reason, I chose to scan the pictures’ backsides (many of which had handwritten notes) and refrained from cropping the images.

After an hour or so of making TIFF files, I chose one of my favorites to adapt for display purposes.  This image depicts three women sitting in front of a sign that reads “MEN WANTED.”  For the sake of faster downloading, I saved it as a PDF file.  Since PDF files don’t seem to represent images in 48-bit color (and color is unnecessary for viewing what is essentially a black-and-white image), I saved the PDF file using a 6-bit gray scale.

For the PDF file, I also cropped out several elements that were in the original TIFF file.  I removed the snapshot’s paper border because it does not really add to the image.  I cut out a small letter “S” that appears at the rightmost edge of the sign because it slightly detracts from the “MEN WANTED” message.  Also, “1945″ had been scrawled on the image’s bottom left corner.  Normally, I would want to display such a detail because it helps date the image; however, the back of the snapshot reads “44,” so I decided to eliminate the possibility of any inaccuracies by cropping out the handwriting on the front.

For the sake of preservation and easy access, I’m glad to have this image and its cousins digitized.  After reading about digital preservation, however, I realize that even image files require effort to preserve.  Once I’ve finished scanning all my grandmother’s pictures, I’ll make sure to save them on my hard drive and on a CD.  Even then, I’ll routinely make backups of the images and review my hard drive and CDs for signs of degradation.

In the last week or so, I’ve come up with a few ideas for a possible web site.  Unfortunately, each of these ideas involves its own set of problems, difficulties, and complications, so I’m not sure whether any of them are worth pursuing.

My first idea was to create a web site that would serve as a complement to my master’s thesis.  My thesis involves representations of African Americans in film noir from the 1940s and 1950s, so, ideally, a web site could help illustrate my thesis by including still images/streaming video from particular films in which African Americans appear.  I imagine, though, that such a project would run against copyright issues.  From a legal standpoint, how safe would it be to include small samples from these films?  Even if such a project would not place me in any significant jeopardy, I don’t think I currently have the hardware or expertise to even copy a still image from a movie already on DVD.

Another way a web site could (vaguely) complement my thesis is by collecting other people’s stories.  In this case, my focus would not be African Americans in film noir so much as people’s experiences viewing film noir.  It might be interesting to learn how different people first learned about film noir, what was the first film noir they ever watched, and how they define noir.  Although, as far as I know, no one has bothered to collect people’s stories about film noir, it is already the subject of countless web sites.  This situation might make it difficult for potential visitors to find my site.  I’m sure I could get a few people’s stories through word of mouth, but how would I proceed to collect even more stories?

Leaving aside the subject of film noir, I also though about providing lyrics from blues recordings from the 1920s and 1930s.  I know that many of these lyrics have already made their way into print, and that many of these recordings have been digitized, but I’m not sure whether anyone has bothered to provide, in machine-readable text, the lyrics from a large selection of blues recordings online.  Such a project would allow people to do quick searches for specific words among a large selection of songs, thereby enabling new forms of scholarship.  Assuming that such a project has not already been done and that I went about doing it, then I would run against the problems inherent in transcribing the lyrics of musical recordings: how can I be sure I am hearing the right words?  The fact that these particular recordings are often full of pops and crackles, not to mention that they are often sung in deep Southern accents, makes accuracy even more difficult to achieve.  Besides the difficulty of ensuring accuracy, I would also have to confront the problem of how to register the accent of the singer faithfully while still making the lyrics easy to search.  For example, in one song, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup pronounces “questionaire” as if it were “question-air-ee,” but if I wrote the word that way, then a person looking for “questionaire” would not be able to find this particular song.

If anybody has a response or feedback to any of these ideas and questions, I’d greatly appreciate hearing it. 

William J. Turkel’s blog, “Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape,” introduced several research/data collecting techniques to me for the first time.  I’ve seen SIPs listed on Amazon, but I did not fully realize how SIPs could make book searches more effective.  The other techniques are totally new to me, and I’m interested to learn more about them.

Until I had read Chapter 6 of Digital History, “Collecting History Online,” I had a picture in my mind of a web site that would basically serve as an alternative presentation of my master’s thesis.  Now, of course, I realize that such a web site would not be making full use of the interactive nature of the internet.  If I were to design a web site to accompany my master’s thesis, I would no longer think of it as a relatively static presentation of research.  Instead, the research could serve as a magnet to attract personal accounts, which in turn would fuel further research and contribute to a deeper and broader understanding of the topic.

After looking at several online archives, I have to say that Business Plan Archive was my least favorite.  I don’t think it really encourages curious visitors like me, since you have to register (and state your reason for interest) to see anything.  Because the site seems so off-puting to visitors, I have no idea how they manage to attract contributors.

In terms of design, The Video Store Project was probably my favorite site.  Right at the home page, it gave clear indications of where to go, depending on whether you are a visitor or contributor.  Even further, it set up clear distinctions for the types of potential contributors (video store owner/employee/customer).  As a visitor, I liked that I could arrange the different contributions by date or by state.  (I immediately began to look at the contributions from the cities in California closest to my hometown, including Berkeley, Hayward, and Oakland.)  The amount of questions contributors had to answer surprised me, but I didn’t consider the amount too cumbersome, especially since most of the questions were so simple.

One thing I liked about the Echo site was, when you click on the link to one archive, you get a list of related archives along the left side of the page.  For example, when I looked at the Remembering Hiroshima archive, Echo led me to the Atomic Veterans History Project, which I found even more interesting than Remembering Hiroshima.

From a theoretical standpoint, I found Philip Agre’s article quite interesting.  Although I had difficulty following certain sections of the article, especially “Economic considerations,” I could definitely appreciate his notion that democracy, on a day-to-day level, manifests itself in cognitive communities.  Media, and the genres that media make possible, serve as a way to link the individual members of these communities.  Agre’s ideas, in essence, are similar to Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities”; however, the communities that Agre envisions seem to be much more fluid: indivduals can be members of multiple cognitive communities, and each of these communities can evolve in response to new thought leaders, new media, and new genres.

What impressed me most about the selection from Digital History was the discussion of the variety of genres of on-line history, as well as the variety and the range of quality within each genre.  After reading about the many forms that history takes on-line, I am left with a feeling that I have seen only one iota of what is out there on the internet.

I was also interested in comparing the list of major genres in the JAH Web Review Guidelines with the genres discussed in Digital History.  Where would Gateways and Journals/Webzines fit into the genres discussed in Digital History?  Would Gateways be considered archives, secondary sources, or teaching resources?  Or, are they actually a common form that some archives, second sources, and teaching resources take on?  Also, is it fair to consider Journals/Webzines as a kind of discussion or organization?  Or, are they a hybrid of both genres?

Finally, a few words about the sample web sites.  I liked how Valley of the Shadow and Our Favorite Things featured site maps that resembled musuem maps.  The former contained lots of records, but it was not particularly easy or enjoyable to explore them.  The latter offered little information, other than the images, but it was more enjoyable to explore the site.  I like how French Revolution seemed to represent the on-line equivalent of a symposium.  It featured primary sources, papers written on those sources, and a discussion between the authors of these papers.  Above all, I thought the National Geographic site featured the greatest amount of information, combined with the slickest production values.  It was fun to explore this site, and I actually spent more time exploring it than any of the other sites.