Post 4: What are you doing that seems to be successful in the internship? Challenging? How can you address these challenges?
I am most successful on the research end of my project, concerning both the Veterans History Project’s interview archive, and online materials about Story Maps .
Starting with interviews, I’ve listened to approximately two dozen new interviews with Native American veterans since writing my last post, and even added one of my own by interviewing a non-Native family friend who served in Vietnam. The result is a surfeit of evidence for the Story Map I’m creating. In addition, I’ve managed to track down three of the interviewees and appealed to them for photographs that I can use on the site to accompany their stories. Of these, two have already sent digitized, high resolution photos, and another I expect still will. Pictures, as discussed in the last post, are the sin qua non of Story Maps, as Kathy Carroll’s stunning and easily navigable Right to the City site reminds us. I have written a rough draft of my Map’s text, which I’ve done best to keep short, absent the quotations from the interviews I plan to cite. It’s no small task to hunt through an 80-minute interview for a given topic, so I’ve kept track of where the quotes appear, just not what was said specifically. I wrote up six profiles of interview subjects for Megan Harris of VHP, to help her in building their site’s next “Experiencing War” page about interviews on a particular topic–in this case, Native American veterans. And those require a profile blurb, followed by choice quotations, followed by poignant or otherwise noteworthy passages from the interview. Boy did that take a lot of time. So the writing portion is by no means finished. I just plan to keep it purposely short.
Reading up on Story Maps and viewing dozens of exemplary maps online–some more than others–has reminded me that DH apps, including platforms like Story Maps. Nor should they be! If it’s not changing, then whatever you created on it isn’t bound to last. I think Omeka suffers on that account; it looks a bit behind the times. So, as pertains to Story Maps, I’ve looked at many Library of Congress maps that scroll downward in “cascade” format, but which feature none of the horizontal devices used on Carroll’s site, which came out just after Story Maps’ last update. (Vocabulary is one aspect of DH and the wider web that still eludes me. There’s something that the GMU program could provide future students: an illustrated glossary to distinguish widgets from theme builders, and so on.)
The greatest challenge is putting all of the Story Maps features and my photographs and my text into a coherent and visually pleasing and most important of all, up-to-date-looking whole. Again, Carroll succeeded in that. Now, will it look outdated in a year or two? Perhaps. But the site works. It’s big, it’s informative, but the mosaic of visuals combined with the configurations and tools that she uses to present it, whether a slideshow or a map with pop-up images, comprise a full course meal. A meal that the viewer can consume one neighborhood at a time. Essential to this is familiarity with the tools that Story Maps has assembled. As noted, I’ve read up on these such that I know what a slide show looks like, and the variety of map themes I have to choose from. But the pieces of the Map that I’ve built thus far still look a bit primitive. Bringing them up to date, not to mention informative and visually pleasing, is my challenge for the coming weeks.
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