The readings this week brought on further anxiety for me about creating a web site. It seems that every week I grow more concerned about where my interests and the “new media” meet. Certainly, it is unlikely to come this week as I am required to use my lack of artistic skills and visual imagination to begin the process of creating a web page.
My research interests seem to be outside of where the internet wants to go. In doing research for a paper during my Masters program, I developed an interest in free persons of color in Virginia during the antebellum era. What intrigued me about the topic is the extent to which Virginia government went to discourage these people from having a family, and the resistance by free blacks to this government intervention into their private lives. I hope to create a site that can explain the issues involved with free blacks and family life in antebellum Virginia with the idea that feedback may give me some leads into other stories of free black family life in that era.
So far I have not found any sites that appear to have the same purpose. But, I am not really surprised given our classroom discussion last Monday. I was interested that most of the sites we reviewed concern events of the recent past. I believe that is because our understanding of a good site requires visuals such as photographs which is primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century and beyond. The two sites that we reviewed from the nineteenth century were fascinating in their contrast. The class was clearly bored with the UNC site and struggled with anything positive to say about it. It reminded everyone of a library, and libraries are usually perceived as exciting places. In contrast, you could see the excitement on the collective faces of the class as the Ox Hill battlefield site was put on the screen. Professor Cohen’s busy fingers could not wait to make the little rectangles move over Fair Oaks Mall and vicinity. People could not wait to talk about the site. All I could think about was what a piece of crap this whole site is, and I am not talking about the characteristics of a good web site. For me this site brought about a visceral reaction from my childhood when I was force-fed the Civil War from the Southern perspective. As we learned about the battles of 1862, little rectangles represented the brave Confederate soldiers who were always positioned to show Southern superiority over the damn Yankees. Of course, our side was defending the Constitutional principle of states’ rights while the Yankees were trying to destroy our genteel lifestyle. What was missing then, as well as now with the web site with little rectangular armies moving over Fair Oaks Mall, was any sense of the brutality or any context about why this brutality was occurring. This takes me back to the boring UNC site. Much of life of common people in the nineteenth century has to be recreated through the painstaking tasks of searching for clues where often there is not much information. It takes many visits to the library or courthouse. It is hardly ever a mouse click away.
This rant brings me to Wikipedia. As Roy Rosenzweig describes, Wikipedia is an electronic encyclopedia. What Rosenzweig did not say (at least as I skimmed the article–it is hard to truly read on a computer screen) is that this encyclopedia is skewed towards the twentieth century. American history is divided in nine periods according to Wikipedia. Four of those periods are before 1918; five periods occur after 1918. Undaunted, I read about Millard Fillmore, our last Whig president. Good ole Millard was president during the compromise of 1850. His biography included listing the major provisions of the compromise two of which were the admission of California as a state and the Fugitive Slave Act. As presented, it was as boring as eighth grade history. There was no context presented and Wikepedia did not offer any explanation of how people may have been affected by the compromise and Fillmore’s support of it. But as stated by Rosenzweig, it appeared to me to be factually correct.
It seems to me that whether we get our crap right (by this I mean good web design principles) is not nearly as important as how we make history come alive for people who are looking at the site. Yes, that requires more innovation than the library approach at the UNC site, but it should never be simplified into moving rectangles over Fair Oaks Mall.
As a last chuckle about last week’s class, our model for a good web site was Steve Barnes’ Soviet Gulag site. I am no expert about Soviet history, but weren’t Gulags used to punish people who did not go along with the twentieth century brave new world of Communism. Now we are in class talking about the twenty-first century brave new world of the new media. I still have a vision of the screen shaking as Professor Cohen emphatically says, “Gulag, Gulag, Gulag.” Repetition is a principle of good web design. Was there a message there for anyone who is not fully on board?
