I checked out the NEH guidelines and a few things came to mind to make my project a little more “hip” as the kiddies say. Making the site a substitute for actually traveling to Dublin to see Kilmainham Gaol, requires giving the people experiences that they might get if they did in fact fork over the Euro to get there. I want to add a 3-D rendering of objects that are on display in the museum section of Kilmainham allowing the user to rotate the objects to see all sides of them. This would actually give the online visitor a more complete experience than the physical visitor, since the physical visitor can not touch. NO TOUCHING! Also I would like to include 360 degree panoramic views of various rooms in the jail allowing the online visitor to feel as though he or she is there.
I assume the technology for these kinds of things already exist but what are they called? How much do they cost? Does anyone know?
These are some mock ups that I’ve done so far:
This is the landing page:
This is the page that the only link “Explore Kilmainham Gaol” brings you to:
This is the page that “The Building” link brings you to:
These are the different shading effects that happen when you place the mouse over the different words:
Kind of lame, I know, but I’m doing my best.
Aesthetically, do these work?
Functionally, would these work?
Please don’t mock me. (wah wah)
A quick holiday gift tip for you all: think of a person you want to give a gift to. Find out his or her favorite book, or take some of his or her written work, like Dave did, and put it up on wordle. Then, print it out frame it, and there you go, you’ve got a christmas gift for something that is thoughtful and unexpected.
Here is a summary of my three most recent term papers. Yes, three semesters’ worth of research and sleepless nights neatly folded into a 111k picture. I feel both pride at seeing my work rendered so artistically and insignificant at the same time.
I’m kind of a one note guy. Anyway, after some discussion with both myself and Dr. Cohen, I think I’ve figured out what this project is going to be all about. I’ve narrowed it down to a content project based on a historical site. I am going to focus the website towards people who have never been to the place as well as those who will never go there. I think this will work. I think.
As far as the readings this week are concerned, I found them both fairly interesting. It was neat to see how Ayers and Thomas integrated technology into their work. I also am really interested in the API’s that Dr. Cohen discussed in his piece, but unfortunately “Google has deprecated the use of the Google SOAP Search API which [the syllabus finder] uses” so I was unable to play around with it or find more Irish history stuff.
“We are witnessing an explosive expansion in the reproduction and distribution of the public domain sector of our textual heritage”.
“Google and other search engines are not, therefore, merely the future of scholarly discovery: they are its present.”
“One result of the growing ubiquity of the online world that is already widely evident, particularly among our students, is a blindness to the limitations of the internet generally, an often disheartening credulity about the information to be found there, and a reluctance to do the serious work among print and manuscript sources in libraries and archives that remains essential to scholarship.”
*Sigh*
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to work with hard copies. Since beginning my graduate studies I have often found myself wondering why I couldn’t have entered the field 50 years earlier. Back then, all the work was done in the stacks, and a historian could still put out a monograph about battles and “great men”. These days it seems like the only thing that anyone is allowed to do is micro histories, and to be noticed in the field, you have to do something sensational. (See my last post for an example). The above quotes by Patrick Leary, and the article from which they are pulled, show that historians have reached a new age in scholarship. While a great many good advances have come out of this thing we call the internet, Leary also laments the “offline penumbra” that which is quickly being lost: those texts not digitized, and therefore ignored in the course of research. I too lament this advent, and as I have often found myself thinking during this semester, I wonder, why can’t we just stick with hard copy books?
But that is not why Clio Wired exists. We need to learn to use these electronic resources. Such advances allow for faster research and more complete information. As Leary goes on to say “the vast reach of online searching is connecting people, not merely with information, but with one another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways.” I have to say that despite my longing for the good old days of before I graduated high school, the prospects that new media offers are too good to pass up.
So there is an American “amateur historian” who has put out a book recently called England’s Greatest Spy. In it, author John Turi states that Eamon de Valera was a spy for the British government. De Valerawas the founder of the modern Irish political party Fianna Fail, four time Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland, and 13 year president of Ireland. Turi claims de Valera that cut a deal with the British in 1916, just after the Easter Rising, that allowed him to escape the firing squad in return for his cooperation with British authorities.
Luckily for all of us, the historian community has come out against Turi. In a recent article in the London Times, historians refute this claim. The opinions of the eminent Irish Historian Tim Pat Coogan as well as others are expressed in the article and Turi is revealed as a fraud.
Turi’s farce, England’s Greatest Spy is a result of the current state of historical scholarly research. With the constant pressure to release something new, in order to be published scholars have little choice but to put out something fantastical or fanciful. The real reason that de Valera was not executed following the 1916 Easter Rising was that he was born in New York City. Two years into WWI the United States had not yet joined the fight against the Kaiser and the British government did not want to risk upsetting the US by executing one of its citizens.
