Honestly, I hate admitting I don’t know things. My sister loves to tell me “You don’t know!” — especially when I would respond to anything she told me with “I know.” So, it was interesting for me to be in a class where I had no delusions of knowing and no investment in denying my ignorance. Of course, I still didn’t ask questions every time I didn’t know or didn’t understand something and I certainly didn’t learn everything I need to know to use digital media/technologies as effectively as I know they can be used.
That said, I learned a lot this semester and the final project for this class was possibly one of the most concretely useful assignments I’ve had in my (too, too) many years of school. Building a personal quasi-database from my research was both incredibly challenging and rewarding. Fortunately, someone else did the hard technical part – writing the software that makes a wiki work – and all I had to do was add content.
At least, I thought all I had to do was add content.
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My website is less an actual “website” and more of a research tool. It’s a personal wiki with organized and cross-references notes from my research for my dissertation.
Eventually, I’d like to make this into a truly public site, so any suggestions for organization, clarification, etc. are very much appreciated.
wiki!
(The password is the name of the town I used to live and where my dissertation advisor currently lives — spelled backwards.)
After discovering the exact site I had hoped to create, Vietnam: Yesterday and Today, I have decided not to attempt to recreate the wheel and instead create a website that will directly and usefully complement my dissertation research. My dissertation will explore how and why individuals and organizations (both official and popular) supported the Vietnam War. I am significantly more interested in stated reasons for supporting the war and the specific forms – rallies, counter-protests, articles, advertising, etc. – of this support than in writing a history of the various groups and people who supported the war. However since I have already found 10-15 groups in the Nixon Administration papers alone, it will be incredibly useful to have a quick reference guide to the groups and their interrelationships easily accessible. Therefore, for the final project this semester, I will create a site showcasing the major pro-war groups working to ensure popular support for the Vietnam War.
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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.