The big question which comes to mind with this week’s reading is ‘can it be made simpler’?  Granted, this too much after the computer experts explain what all goes into on-line indexing, or the syllibi project.  For techies this is brilliant, for those of us without such grand vision it is eye-crossing.  Still I can see how this could positively affect my own webpage idea.  My topic of 19th century women doctors in the West could be referenced to many other relevant information sources - even separating out each word of the title as it’s own subject.

Personal electronic archiving….hmmm.  This has been a concern of mine ever since signing into my first e-mail account.  I’ve had the privilege of sorting all my grandparents things after their deaths and have grown a huge appreciation even for scraps of paper with small notes that give some flavor of their personalities.  A couple generations later and most of my communication with family members and friends is through e-mail.  My solution to the possible loss problem has been to save most of the conversations.  There are seven folders in my e-mail account labeled ‘family,’ ‘relatives,’ ‘friends’ I spend some time going through the older e-mails and stashing the thread with the complete conversation on it.  Sounds time consuming, but if it were a snail mail conversation I’d do the same thing.  I know no one else in my family does this and am pretty sure none of my friends do.  Years and years of personality, events and life in general would be lost if I didn’t.  Soon as I figure out how to burn CDs on my laptop I’ll get it all onto a disk – and hope to migrate that information to future technology.

1.                  My subject will be 19^th Century Women Doctors in the West.  It is my intent to highlight the forward looking practice of medicine, focusing on the practitioners, as communities grew in the western, particularly intermountain, area of our country. The information contained on this page will be less technical and more anecdotal.  There will be biography and autobiography, some statistics.   

2.   Even today medicine in the west of the United States is considered backward in comparison to its Eastern counterpart.  The reality is that 19^th century pioneers in the west  took medical knowledge with them and community leaders were well aware of the need to remain in touch with the larger picture.  Women composed a greater segment of medical professionals in this time than we would suppose and their voices are present and need a conduit to the limelight.

3.  The site will provide a home page with title, short introduction, navigation bar, subject buttons and photo of women doctors.  Each subject button will lead to a page

1. Title: 19^th Century Women Doctors in the West
2. Introduction: (not written yet)

c.   Subject buttons: 

Geography

The practitioners

Implements and purposes

Patients and diseases

     d.    Photo

e.        Navigation bar:

Search

Contact Us

About Us

Links to related sites

Bulletin Board

4.  My target audience is medical historians, feminist historians, genealogists, hobby historians, descendants of the people mentioned, and perhaps high school teachers and college professors as well.  It’s a relatively small audience, but an intensely interested one.  

1. I intend to preserve a rather book-like, antiquarian feel for this home page to assist the reader/web surfer in jumping 150 years into the past.  A covered wagon photo or realistic drawing with turning wheels and people walking along beside it, and a woman with her doctor bag on horseback in front or behind will be under the title.  Maybe this animation should just be the medicine woman.

A webpage with subject buttons positioned beneath the navigation bar linking the home page to the subject pages.  This page is meant to capture attention, keep it with narrative information and then provide ways for the interested reader to continue in research and therefore the technology will remain simple. 

6.  The home page will only show the “contact us” button as a way for users to communicate.  On that page there will be a field for comments and a sentence or two encouraging those with pertinent material to confer with the webmaster for uploading.

Thanks to mphillie for bringing out my thesis so to speak, and I’m thinking hard about how to present it in the clearest way.  I don’t want to emphasize “backwardness” in the story of these women doctors, my purpose is to champion them, not apologize.  Yes, I intend to focus on Utah, Idaho and Arizona, but that is without researching the West coastal states, which I think have a different story.  Will be commenting more on this later.

Meanwhile, here’s what I have to say on copyrights as applying to my project and the scan comparison:

For 10/27 Copyright cost analysis

As others have mentioned, I’m quite happy to not be dealing with a  tangle of copyright issues applying to my project. 

Factors:  This website will contain documents pertaining to the mid to late 19^th Century.  These documents consist of family papers, archival paper in the public domain and published books, all of which never were or are no longer governed by copyright law.  There will be no secondary sources quoted, and opinions, comments, etc. will go to a discussion page.

With that said, the challenge is to present a concept enabling me to post the documents I choose, encourage those with valuable information or documents to post or upload while keeping a close eye on this material.  Sharing information is a high priority.

Book scan comparison:

Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

Google Books – I have the impression of function beginning with the LOC number as the first screen.  There are also information tabs “About this book” and “Read this book” which are more welcoming than a plain and symmetrical layout.  The ‘Digitized by Google’ on every single page is annoying.  Considering this book is in the public domain I can’t see the reason, beyond commercial ego, to stamping each page instead of just at the beginning, which seems more reasonable.  The scanned image preserved as much as is electronically possible the picture of a book published in 1902 and a bit worn.

For a non techie like myself, the book was easy to find and specific information on the book was just a tab away.  There didn’t appear to be a mountain of choices for formats to download or just view.  This site is geared toward less computer savvy and more literary audience.

Open Content Alliance – So far it’s complicated just getting to the book.  Now I’ve got to make the choice of format and all of them take time to download.  After going through all the formats I find ‘flip book’ to be exactly what I’m looking for.  For the person needing various formats to suit specific purposes, this site has more to offer than Google Book.  This site targets those may have more in mind for the text than just reading it.

Like Google Books, it imitates the turning of pages.  I have the impression conscientious preservation of the book feel with both this sites.

Comments on reading:

Focusing on the article, I think this is a brilliant discussion on the dangers facing the professional world of history, but it comes no closer than many a discussion in the past 20 years to pinpointing how to deal in an effective way.  The example of “Bert” highlighted an excellent point on the value of what we keep.  While not exactly addressing the point made, this thought occured to me, it’s entirely possible in this unstable electronic world that a whole lot of fluff or satire could be kept while documents relating to the fundamental movement of countries could become nonexistant.

Well, here it is one hour before class begins and I would have to say my impression of this week’s readings is pretty fuzzy.  The thesis seems to be that we need to make sure we have our cake and eat it too.  The “free” is great for the user but as I hope to produce on the internet in the future I’m still not sure what the safe guards really are for intellectual property.

9/29/08

Homepage thoughts

I seem to get bogged down in the initial choosing of a subject and finally decided on a family website.  I’m going to focus on my mother’s family.  My mother’s ancestors were the first women doctors in Utah and their story would be of interest to more people that just my family.  I’d like to make the homepage friendly to both family and medical historians.

The title would be at the top in a big font and navigation would be just under that with buttons labeled: search, contact us, events, links, family history, contributions to history

A cool, pale pastel would be the background color with black print.  I’ve found other colored print and heavy backgrounds to be difficult to read on webpages and hope to make mine easier on the eyes.

A picture of my grandparents would go right under the navigation bar with photos of their four daughters offset to the right and left.  In the middle would be a text introduction of two or three sentences.  Clicking on the photos would take you to another page specific to the life and family of each person.

Under the intro could be an old photo of the women doctors.

My intention is to create a design that is gentle and symmetrical enough to guide the eye, but not so completely square that it leaves the observer only with the impression of lines and angles.

Grand Canyon official site:

clear button labels, not too busy, could do with bolder colors, the same navigation buttons are present on just about every page which gives the feeling of being in a never ending loop.  The drop down menus are user friendly and I can find the information I need within two clicks.  Functions for vision impaired.

McCain/Palin home page 

Has moving ads on left, non moving recruiting on right, menu up top and a blank page dead center.  Any speech, etc you click on will appear in the white space.  I was confused by the white space at first trying to figure out why.  Drop down menus were deliberate not spastic.  Politics aside I would say McCain’s home page is easier to use than Obama’s.

It’s about time I got into the swing of blogging. 

*Some comments on the the web site home pages, I chose the History Channel and The History Place.

http://www.history.com/ and http://www.historyplace.com/

History Channel: not too cluttered, has as much to do with media as history (obviously), dramatic in content and use of color – lots of red and black.

Commercial – the ads are almost as big as the features. 

First images that pop up are construction guys, a T-rex and ice trucks – general interest but also a skew to men as audience. 

This history site to me says “somewhat informative and very entertaining”

The History Place: toned down a notch from the History Channel, using red and blue font for a patriotic flare.  Layout not as nice, but more actual history and less design.  A cleaner layout would do more justice for the content.  It doesn’t say “click” me, I’m fascinating.”  It says “this is the history lesson you must learn so click like you should.”

This site had ads more prominent than the historical content.

Some points from the reading:  Roy Rosensweig is sorely missed. 

The essence of scholarly history has not changed.  Research must be done, words written and published.  The biggest difference is scope and access.  The web would appear limitless as a tool to fascilitate the historian’s scholarship.  Scope is complicating in as much as there’s no end or check to the amount of information, well founded or not, that anyone can get hold of.   Access as in publishing and the process by which the historian makes his/her work available is only limited to that person’s ability to use the web publishing software.

Now for last class blog links:

 http://usreligion.blogspot.com/

http://earliestchristianhistory.blogspot.com/

http://musicology.typepad.com/dialm/

Blogging is new for me so it would be great if people left me comments or whatever to let me know this message goes into the atmosphere.

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