My mother made a very clever comment when I called her to complain. “Laura,” she said. “You went to graduate school to learn about new technology, but I guess now, you are learning about the old.” Anyone ever seen one of these in…oh, I don’t know…the last 35 years?
This week, our office launched our latest website, one commemorating the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks through a collection of memories on the event and its aftermath on Capitol Hill. Our oral history team conducted a flurry of interviews throughout the month of June (29 in all), producing more than eighty 2-3 minute clips arranged thematically on the website. In reviewing the site and aiding with closed captioning efforts, I was nearly moved to tears. It is truly an amazing collection of memories.
"Due to the Circumstances of Today": The U.S. House of Representatives Remembers September 11, 2001
Now, I’ve seen some folks in the profession scoff at commemorative history as “light” and one-sided. But, not only does this website serve as a reminder of that tragic day and its aftermath, not only does it aid us in recalling what it is to be American in our time of vulnerability (from the lowliest House page to the most powerful committee chairmen), but it also serves as a window into the development of one of this country’s most precious institutions. Indeed, this opportunity is one of the greatest benefits of our oral history program. The House of Representatives is most notable for what it does: the laws it produces. But, through oral history, we understand how the institution evolved, what happens behind the scenes, and the personalities that left their mark, on both ordinary and extraordinary days, the triumphant and the tragic.
Please take a look over the next week. And never forget.
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Unfortunately, this week’s internship will not yield an illustrated blog post. The photographs depicting the Armed Services Committee in the 1970s that I spent countless hours playing with this week are officially accessioned House committee records…and still closed. So, you’ll have to take my word for it when I explain the lessons learned. Continue Reading »
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I know we are all wrapping up what have proved to be a amazingly varied, creatively conceived batch of final projects. (Funny, as Sasha pointed out, that this seems to involve the last-minute footnote fixes with which we are all so familiar….)
However, I also spent my last week catching up on projects for the Society for History and the Federal Government. I am now SHFG’s YouTube guru (the site will launch when I have converted videos from this year’s conference in hand) and figured I would send out one more pitch. Not only is this a great way to network with historians here in Washington (this is especially good if you plan a career in public history), but also an excellent resource for the various records we have here in DC. There are so many knowledgeable historians and archivists from institutions like NARA and LOC that connect through the society. As well, there is an annual journal always looking for submissions, from public historians, university faculty, and grad students alike.
And I could use a few more people on my side of the digital divide….
I wrote in my self-evaluation that this class breeds a certain camaraderie, one that seems present in the PhD program as a whole (as voiced by Royce). That said, I will keep my blog RSS feed going in the hope that I bump into you all, either in person or virtually, in the future.
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I have a full draft of my final project. Yippee! I went with the Google Maps because I could figure out how to feed in the underlying image. Though I struggled with them (and in the end, they don’t look great), I managed to make my own icons and customized the colors. However, because the icon files are tied to the current URL, I won’t be migrating my website to a more descriptive URL anytime soon. Oh well….
Two things that I need to work on after I take care of some things for my other class (which I have sadly been ignoring):
- I am going to attempt to change the centering and the zoom on the maps at the initial load so that they are focused in on the historic underlays.
- I plan to write long descriptions of my maps and make my site as accessible as possible.
Outside any general critiques, I have one thing for which I would like your specific feedback. The historic map underlays take 15 seconds to load using my wireless DSL Internet connection (in Firefox 4). They are very large files. But, any smaller and they blur out significantly when you zoom in. I think it’s a worthwhile trade off to have them there. What do you think? If I keep them in their large form, any suggestions on cutting down load time? Or how might I warn the user that the load time is a bit long?
And thanks everyone for all the feedback this semester. It’s been a trip!
PS – Thanks Alex for the shapefile. Unfortunately, Geocommons rejected it. Grrr….
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In the words of Dr. Gibbs, I really experienced what it is to be a digital historian this weekend. When we write history, we are constrained by the evidence we are able to provide. When we code, it often means the difference between what we want to say and what we actually can say. We are constrained by technology. The following is my saga. Continue Reading »
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For my design assignment, I found myself entering a brave new world: one of map scripting. And if you heard a strange scream coming from the general direction of Alexandria this weekend, that was me.
At Alex and Dr. Petrik’s suggestion, I purchased Adam Duvander’s Map Scripting 101. I took a course during my senior year in college (fall of 2001) on web design for humanities majors, in which we learned HTML (structured in tables) and some basic JavaScript. So, encountering this latter language in Duvander’s book was not all that scary. I’d seen it before. Yet, little did I know that I would find mistakes in the code. Yup…little old me. (He fails to define his variables, something my college professor harped on so much, that a decade later, I still remember to do so.) So, knowing that others far wiser and more experienced than me also must have discovered these mistakes, I checked out Duvander’s website to see if he had any updates to the code. He does supply examples and an instructional PDF, which is essentially a short version of his book. But these two examples were also structured differently. At this point I had three different versions of the same code. (Ahhh!) Continue Reading »
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In a global sense, this week’s lessons got me thinking about coding for different technologies and additionally, how fast they tend to change.
As I mentioned before, I jumped through hoops of fire (okay… it felt like it for a beginning programmer) to make my portfolio page work on Internet Explorer. I dabbled with conditional CSS (but couldn’t get it to work) to use the “first-line” property in my Text Assignment, which doesn’t work in Firefox (see the comment I left in my CSS code). A mere two years ago, I oversaw the creation of a 10-minute documentary on Florence Kahn, the first Jewish woman to serve in Congress. We did the original in Flash; however, that particular technology seems to be phasing out…already. As well, as we’ve discovered, it is not accessible. Continue Reading »
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Watching both Larry Lessig and Hans Rosling in the videos assigned this week, I was quickly reminded of one of the more dynamic speakers I saw at the GSA Government Web Developer and New Media Conference that I attended a couple of weeks ago. Todd Park, I think, best speaks for himself. This is not the exact talk that I saw, but it’s darned close:
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