|
Joshua
Barney and the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla
A Documentary History
Technical
Plan
I will be using a
computer with a Windows 98 operating system, Microsoft Word 2000 for word
processing, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX for web design, an HP scanjet 5470c
to scan, and Adobe Photoshop 7.0 to manipulate images for this Joshua
Barney web site.
As there is a wealth
of information in these documents, I intend on establishing a database
for this site and I will use the open source codes PHP and MySQL to create
this data-driven site. MySQL is a compact database server that can be
run on my Windows 98 machine. PHP is the scripting language that is processed
by the Web server that will return HTML back to the browser. The interaction
that occurs will permit the complex operations required for having a search
function online. See for instance the Webmonkey tutorials
on this subject.
This site contains
nine sections, excluding the site map. The largest grouping is “Documents
& Essays,” composed of 19 introductory essays and 112 documents.
Fortunately, all of this material has been transcribed, but about half
of it will have to be either retyped or scanned because it is not available
on a usable word processing format.
Additionally, there
may be problems with optical character recognition programs (OCR) that
do not accurately convert fonts less than 9-point and underlined text.
We used 8-point for annotations and Joshua Barney had a penchant for underlining
frequently.
In addition, the
material contained in the volume that is currently at the press has been
saved in a PDF format. I will convert this to the web page.
As the Papers of
George Washington project is the main model for my web site, I interviewed
Philander Chase, editor, and Frank Grizzard, associate editor, on November
1, while attending a conference of the Association for Documentary Editing.
Dr. Grizzard outlined for me the technical underpinnings of their web
site, which went online in March 1995. For the first five years, Dr. Grizzard
was the web master, working during his spare time, writing his own HTML
code, and uploading to the University of Virginia’s Unix server.
About 2000 the GW
project purchased Dreamweaver and hired a half-time web master. In addition,
that project employs student help to produce the raw data for the web
master. The site has improved both professionally and aesthetically with
the web master, but his unfamiliarity with editing and the project has
slowed his output. This quality/quantity dilemma confirms the need for
historians/editors to be trained in web design and not leave the job to
the computer technicians.
This web page on
the Chesapeake Bay flotilla is a pilot project for putting more of the
material printed in The Naval War of 1812 series online. Currently
the Naval Historical Center does not employ a full-time web master, but
relies on other staff (librarians, archivists) to post material. The assistance
of student interns may become essential to posting large quantities of
data, but the Center needs to commit to hiring or contracting out a professional
designer who is also a historian.
I learned some technical
pitfalls in web site design from other historians at this year’s
Association for Documentary Editing conference. The most prominent guideline
is to restrict the number and file size of images because many large ones
slow the pace of loading pages. Another helpful hint is to have a link
to one’s main page on every page in the site, otherwise viewers
will get lost.
Finally, the universal
complaint is that getting a site started is very time and labor intensive.
Many editors shy away from extensive web use because they feel it will
draw manpower away from their true mission--the letterpress edition. I
intend on devising the most efficient methods to reduce most of these
pitfalls.
|
