I assume the technology for these kinds of things already exist but what are they called? How much do they cost? Does anyone know?

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)

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.

“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.

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.

Well, we’ve all heard of Google Books, at least, it’s been mentioned in class. From the very start, a comparison of Google Books and Open Library shows two rather distinct websites. Google Books (GB) seems to be more user friendly, providing links to genres for both fiction and non, as well as a “random subject” section on the left side of the home page; also colorful, thumbnail links to featured publications. Open Library’s (OL) home page is a much more muted provided few clues as to what it’s all about. It does provide along the bottom, three columns under three headings: “Find Books”, “Build the Library”, and “Develope the Site”. “Build the Library” has a link under it that says “About the Project”, we’ll check that out later. GB does a little less to inform the visitor what they’re all about, providing a link at the veeeeery bottom of the page, and thus requiring much scrolling, that says “About Google Books Beta”. So, assuming, we know what the purpose of GB and OL is, we will continue the comparison…

Wait, we don’t know what they are? Alright. According to the “About Us” page on OL, “Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can’t do it alone! This is an Open project – the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.” So this small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, have built a database with a wiki interface and you can search through the text of over 1 million scanned books. Remember though, they can’t do it alone. GB’s ‘about’ page is a little more succinct, with their main features in bold: “Search”, “Browse books online”, “Learn more — fast”, “Buy the book … or borrow it from the library”, and finally, answering a question that is undoubtedly on everyone’s mind “Where do the books come from?” Well, dear reader, the books come from Partner Program, which allows authors and publishers to their books out there onto the internet, for free by adding them to the GB world. Also the books in GB come from the Library Project, in which Google is “Working with several major libraries to include their collections in Google Books”. Whew.

“Now what about the books themselves?” You may ask. I took the liberty of comparing the same book on both sites to see which site was better for reading books for free without the hassle of going to a real life library. Ick. Well, searching for Harry Potter didn’t exactly yield a free, digitized copy of the book, so I had to go a little older. No, older than that. Ooooooolder. That’s it. Last of the Mohicans! A sure-fire public domain masterpiece that is wholly unreadable, just like everything else he wrote. I’m from Cooperstown, I’m allowed to say that. Also, have you ever tried actually reading some of his stuff? Awful! Let’s go with Mohicans anyway, just ignore what I say and think about the awesomeness of Daniel Day-Lewis.

After searching the title on GB, I click on the first link and am sent immediately to an online copy of the book. There it is, a very simple scanned version, in all of its stultifyingly boring glory. You can scroll down to go to the next page, allowing for easy navigation. Don’t fret, here you go. Now OL is a different story. Well it’s still Last of the Mohicans, but the path to get there is a little different. After clicking on the first link in the search results page, I am sent to an information page, not what I want if I’m in a hurry to be bored to death by the JFC. After a little hunting on the page, I see the “Read Online” button and click on it. And we’re here. An interesting way to show the book. The sensitivity of the scanner may have been set a little high as you can see through the paper and the text on the next page which makes for bad reading. Instead of scrolling you click on a turn-the-page button in the upper right hand corner. This is fine, I guess. I think I prefer the scroll option though. GB also loads the pages of the books faster, so it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

So who wins? I think I’ll go with the mega-group here and choose Google Books. Sorry guys. Here’s a little something to keep you all going this weekend, I’m off to work on my costume.

Anyway, I think the primary copyright issues will be gaining permission to use photos. Since Kilmainham Gaol owns the rights to many photos related to its history, I don’t believe that this will be a problem.

PS Lynn, GREAT cartoon on twitter. I loved it.

“Kilmainham Gaol: Confinement Of Independence” will look at the history of the most infamous penitentiary in Irish history. From its construction in 1796 until its decommission as a penal institution in 1924 the titular institution played host to virtually every significant member of the Irish independence movement. The project will serve as the official website of Kilmainham Gaol, which today is a museum, art gallery, and one of Dublin’s leading tourist attractions.

Why is this project needed?

A cursory Google search yields no results for an official website of the Kilmainham Gaol, which therefore makes this project a vital necessity for anyone visiting the Dublin area. Also, the story of Kilmainham Gaol is an important one, the Irish independence movement is not widely known in America. It is understood by many that there is a tradition of animosity among the Irish people toward the British government, and many adults today remember acts of terrorism perpetrated by Irish organizations in Northern Ireland and London, but the details of this strained relationship goes untold in a land where there are more than thirty six million people of Irish descent. The story is one of a nationalist movement that many Americans can relate to, comparing the acts of the founding fathers of the United States to those of men like Robert Emmet, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Eamon de Valera. By putting this information online, people from all over the world can learn about what happened at Kilmainham Gaol.

Main Features

As well as providing basic visitor services information that would be needed to visit Kilmainham in Dublin, the website will also provide historical content in the form of an online exhibition, tracing the history of the building from its origins to its present day function as a museum. This exhibit will be divided into three sections. The first will focus on the building itself; the design, construction and layout, including the deplorable conditions in which the prisoners (including women and children) were kept. The second section will concentrate on the narratives of prominent prisoners Robert Emmet, Thomas Francis Meagher, Charles Stewart Parnell, and the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, especially Padraig Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, Constance Markiewicz, and Eamon de Valera. The third section will show the life of the building after ceased to be used as a jail; its renovation, the founding of a museum, as well as its popular use as a film location.

Audience

The target audience for this exhibit will naturally be everyone, as stated above, specifically people in the Dublin area who wish to visit the Gaol itself. Visiting the website of a museum before going adds to the overall experience and can help the visitor grasp a lot more than he or she maybe would have otherwise. The content at times may be slightly controversial, as it includes executions, so parental guidance is suggested. Anyone interested in learning about an independence movement in the twentieth century will find “Kilmainham Gaol: Confinement Of Independence” fascinating.

Technology

The main emphasis of this website will be to serve the museum itself in the best way possible. A Google map of Dublin immediately surrounding Kilmainham will be provided as well as links to other attractions in Dublin related to the Gaol. Audio files of speeches given at the trials of the incarcerated, the so called “speech from the dock” was a point of honor for any person that found themselves facing a British judge will be posted for download. Also 360 degree tours of several important spaces of the building will be available. These spaces include a typical jail cell in which low-profile prisoners were kept, the East Wing or “Victorian” Wing of the Gaol, and the courtyard where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed.

User Contributed/Interactive Elements

There will be a comment section, where visitors can leave notes, memories, and other comments. This space will have to be closely monitored, as the subject matter is still somewhat controversial.

Anyway I checked out some highlights of Irish History, including Michael Collins, The Easter Rising, and Kilmainham Gaol. Kilmainham was pretty timid, a very short discussion over whether it should be “JAIL” or “GAOL” (they settled on Gaol). Michael Collins, however was another story. A heated battle raged over the make up of the Irish Free State Army, as well as citation for those facts, two editors were fighting like pretentious high schoolers. It made for some amusing reading. The Easter Rising was by far the longest, with 59 issues in the table of contents ranging from the wording of the intro, to the causes of the event itself. The arguments that ensued were again, very amusing.