Combining my love of history with my enthusiasm for touring, I hope to create an interactive and historical, map-based website. The website will be a map that will allow potential tourists and other interested persons to explore an area of the District of Columbia and see pictures of the monuments and memorials in that area. Each small thumbnail will link to a larger picture that is on a page with the history and historical significance of the monument or memorial. In addition to that very basic historical blurb, I will also include a section on how each monument relates to other monuments, memorials, or statues in the area or along a common line. For instance, people often point out that there is a line that runs from the Washington Monument, through the Pentagon to the Masonic Temple in Alexandria. I do not know the historical details of their construction, but Dan Brown’s (author of the DaVinci Code) next planned book, The Solomon Key (although as of February 28, 2006 that is no longer the working title) will no doubt inspire many professionals and nonprofessionals alike to investigate the veracity of his claims.
Less conspiratorial yet still fascinating, there are axes upon which monuments are built that reflect the progression of freedom (Armed Freedom on the Capitol dome to Lincoln’s Emancipation statue to Mary Bethune’s statue honoring education advances for African-Americans) or powerful guardians (Lincoln staring at Congress, Jefferson watching the White House). I hope to research all of these connections and find some that are, as of yet, fairly undocumented. No site that I have visited has mentioned axes upon which architects constructed monuments and memorials in the District of Columbia.
A number of websites have done a fine job in mapping and explaining national monuments and memorials. As one would hope and expect, foremost among the websites that do a fantastic job on the Washington, DC sites is the National Park Service’s website. The National Park Service (hereafter NPS) uses a map as the start to a person’s DC exploration; however, this map is very basic and only has five options: Downtown, the National Mall, Capitol Hill/Anacostia, Georgetown/Upper Northwest, and Dupont Circle/Embassy Row. One must choose where he or she is going first, as opposed to choosing where one will go based on what one can see.
After clicking a shaded area on the initial, vague map “to explore Washington’s historic neighborhoods, buildings, & monuments,” the website improves dramatically in content although the maps remain poor. Each region brings up a basic, relatively unmarked street map that has stars indicating the attractions. When one clicks on the star, a page opens that provides pictures of the area of interest as well as a history. The history is clearly written for those who have only passing interest and provides no real depth or links to more in depth information. The NPS has succeeded in compiling a very comprehensive list of all the historic sites in the District, and it would function as a good place to start building my own list of interesting sites.
Other government sites also have made an attempt to attract tourists through their site to the DC area. The White House has a virtual tour that the White House Historical Association maintains. It is very detailed, but some what lackluster in fulfilling its claim as a “virtual tour.” One is restricted to clicking through a slide show of pictures on each room entered. The site, while made with the intention of having a wide audience, is probably only read thoroughly by someone with a particularly vested interest in White House history and more importantly White House cultural history.
The District of Columbia government also has attempted to entice tourists with its 3-D flash map. The map is a great attempt and a good example of what I would like to do, but it is incredibly limited. The map does not extend beyond the National Mall, and the information it displays is pitifully little. If one toured DC using the government’s map they would miss out not only on a number of wonderful sites but also a vast amount of history. My own guess would be that the website was a student’s summer internship project (and a darn fine one at that) but it has never been improved upon.
A number of privately funded sites have also done a magnificent job at helping tourists and interested individuals navigate the District of Columbia and obtain information about monuments and memorials. A number of personal webpages, like Rachel Cooper’s and MetroWeb, capture the beauty of Washington, DC in a photographic tour. Although these websites are more for personal edification than the spread of specific historical knowledge, they do a nice job of given online visitors a taste of the District. For my own purposes, their pictures provide nice examples of angles at and places from which I should take my own digital photographs.
A private site, hot-maps, has a clear and detailed map of Washington, DC on its website. Unfortunately the map contains the names of places and roads but no links to obtain more information about them. In addition the map viewscreen is far too small for anyone to view more than a few blocks at any one time, which makes navigation difficult and frustrating. On a slow computer, the images would load so slowly that one would probably be unable to change views by dragging the map and would have to enter addresses as an alternative means of shifting the map.
By far, the best site out there on the web for exploring the District of Columbia is “Washington DC, the American experience,” self-proclaimed as the Official Tourism Site of Washington, DC. This tourism website targets potential visitors of Washington, DC. Its homepage lists all of the current and upcoming events in the city and its museums. More importantly and, from my experience, hardest to find, the site provides very detailed interactive maps. The maps are for general tourists and do not contain much by the way of historical data, however, one can click on a place of interest and read the popup with pertinent tourist information and usually a link to the NPS site for that attraction. One can easily navigate the map and also choose things to flag on the map (attractions, accommodations, dining, nightlife, etc.). This site raises the bar far above any others that I have yet discovered.
After all of this online searching, using broad searches in Google checking for terms like “history,” “interactive maps,” “Washington, DC,” “tourism,” “photographs,” and “virtual tour,” and combinations of all of them, I found that Washington, DC is one of the best documented cities in the United States. No doubt this is because one can obtain funding from so many government and private organizations. All the sites target tourists to our nation’s capital, but most do not go in to much historical detail in any matter. In addition, I have found no sites that discuss in any detail the statues that often surround famous monuments or stand by themselves as aesthetically pleasing additions to the city. The government sites that one would typically search (dc.gov and the NPS site) yielded some results, but provided nothing more than expected or, in the case of the DC site, less than one would hope.
While the capital of the United States may be well-documented and widely researched on the web, no website combines what I plan to combine. Nor do any websites address the interconnectivity of famous sites in Washington, DC as I will do with my historical research. There certainly remains a small niche in both the historical and digital realm for me to submit my project.