The guiding question for this post is “What new skills are you developing?” My answer is Story Maps, with plenty more to learn. I’ve spent the bulk of my time since Post 2 listening to more Veterans History Project (VHP) interviews with Native American veterans, determining which are best suited to appear on my “Veteran Storytellers” Map, and drafting a storyboard from the ones selected. I began this final stage by breaking the mass of material that I’ve heard into themes rather than discrete wars, narrowed and fused them into four themes, and designated a “lead character” to open each of them, of whom we have access to more than one photograph. The themes are: Motivations to Serve, Combat Stories, Discriminations, and Homecomings. The dearth of photographs in the VHP digitized collections is a shame, considering how many gripping, telling stories would be limited solely to text unless I manage to track the interviewees down to petition them for more documentation. (I’m pleased to note that the head of VHP is very happy that I took this up.) But the material is more than adequate to meet the Project’s standards, and has evolved over regular, productive consultations with my mentor, whose engagement and interest in the project remain outstanding. Preparation and drafting culminated in my presentation of the present board to three of the mentor’s colleagues this past week for their approval and recommendations.
It was during that recent group Skype call, and another that followed two days later, that December’s concern about my lack of a “loc.gov” email address came back to haunt me. Back then, team members had expressed concern that whatever I created would not be able to appear on the Library of Congress’s page of twenty-odd Story Maps (see https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/storymaps.html), and would therefore—in so many words—amount to a lot of time spent with little to show for it, at least for the VHP’s sake. Efforts to smuggle me into the Library’s Story Map account as a “co-editor” failed at the second meeting, leaving me with a private account short of all the tools and accoutrements that an institutional membership affords, not to mention the Library’s “loc.gov” imprimatur. I suggested that we try again to get me certified, a thumbprint-an-background-check process that I’d undergone in October with no luck, allegedly on account of Covid. And we’ll see about that. But at the end of the day, I’m free to do what I set out to do, and no one on the team sees any benefit in stopping me. To the contrary, what matters is that the VHP’s rich archive find another outlet online. Which brings us to a question I have for the folks at RCCHNM. If the Center has a membership to Story Maps, as I assume it does, I wonder whether I might use it in order to have access to the full toolkit mentioned above.
Only in the past two weeks have I begun getting my hands dirty in Story Maps, partly because of my hesitancy to put too much work into something that will have to be scrapped in order to re-build it o the Library’s account. But now that those reservations are gone, or at least diminished, I’d like to learn more quickly than I have to date (see the conclusion to Post 2). Fortunately, I’m happy to say that Story Maps is a simpler platform than I feared it might be. The twenty-odd Maps on the Library of Congress page (see link above) have provided me with a very helpful reference for the variety of forms that Maps can take. The colleagues with whom I spoke twice last week, and who has been designated just recently as the Project’s Story Map authority, shared her opinion that Maps with too little text fall short of their responsibility to the included images and texts, and by extension to the viewer. Without context, she argues, Maps are too easily reduced to photo albums. To which I replied that per my experience, informed partly by prior RRCHNM courses, is that too much text threatens to deter more visitors than it educates. We agreed that the aforementioned dearth of photos for Native American veterans favors the text-heavy approach. My answer to which is to limit context to a bare minimum, facilitated by maps showing where Danang and Kandahar are, relative to the front in a given conflict, and to focus the rest of the site on two media: photographs, and direct, unadulterated citations from interviews, pertinent to the theme in question. Sadly, as I mentioned in Post 2, audio and video are unavailable (despite an archive of filmed interviews!) on account of the VHP’s antiquated software, coupled with a lumbering licensing department. To conclude, this is where I’m grateful to you, Jennifer, for introducing me to Kathy Carroll. Carroll’s Map on Washington D.C. is outstanding, and outshines all but a few of the Library Maps, precisely because of its judicious prioritization of image and maps over text. The maps further engage the viewer by progressing across time and through different map styles, absent the cryptic CSV table data that less seasoned Map-makers like myself present. So there’s much more to learn. And there are many more hours to be logged. I’ll be frank that I’m short of 80 hours by 15 or so now, and am running well short of the 3 hours per day that I budgeted back in early January.
