TheLen

For the final project, I’m planning to create a hyperlinked timeline of the Vietnam War — not a particularly exciting project, but if nothing else, it will be useful to me as I write my dissertation. Initially, I simply wanted to create a detailed and informative timeline that would answer basic questions about the war as well as place the various aspects of the war into a larger context. However, after our readings and discussions on collecting and searching, I’m thinking of adding to my basic project. Possibly by creating some sort of a disussion board or even a survey to collect war-related memories. Since my dissertation will explore forms of and reasons for popular support of the Vietnam War, a survey asking the site’s visitors to share their thoughts of the war and how they acted on those opinions could be very useful and interesting. (Fortunately, I have a very large family to seed the site and get things rolling, so hopefully I wouldn’t have to spend too much time advertising and outreach. If anyone has friends or relatives willing to tell their stories about the war years, please let me know.)

I also think it would be interesting to have multiple surveys for the site — one for people who lived through the war asking them how they felt about the conflict during the war and how they expressed those opinions and so on, one for people who learned about the war after the fact discussing how/where they learned about the war and how that experience did or did not shape their opinions about the war, and possibly yet another for either or both groups discussing how additional information/experiences changed their understanding of the war. In an ideal world, such stories would serve as a source for my dissertation and would complement my more traditional sources.