History and New Media:
a Web Portfolio

This portfolio brings together a variety of new media projects prepared by Robert Townsend for the History and New Media program at George Mason University and the American Historical Association. The projects generally fall into one of three categories: content (large archival projects), analysis (assessments of the state of the field), and design (experiments in layout and site construction to support the information being presented).

 

Content

The World Wide Web's primary value lies in its ability to convey vast quantities of information, to a much larger audience than one could reach in print. As such, my efforts tend toward projects that can add to the quantity and quality of history-related materials on the Web. These projects include:

  • Data on the Historical Profession (April 1999)
    This site collects basic facts and information about the historical profession, particularly about historians working in American colleges and universities.
  • Presidential Addresses of the AHA (December 1998).
    This archival site brings together the text of 114 years of speeches and other writings on the field, which allows some measure of the changes in interest, attitude, and approach to the field.
  • Constructing a Postwar World: The G.I. Roundtable Series (May 2002).
    This site makes available a series of pamphlets that the AHA wrote for the War Department between 1943 and 1946, which provide some insight into the culture and concerns of Americans in the war years. The site includes the complete text and images from the 42 pamphlets with related background documents and an analytical essay.
  • Editorials on Secession (under construction)
    When completed, this site will provide an archive of editorials written in U.S. newspapers between September 1860 and June 1861. The editorials provide students of the period with exceptional data on the evolution and hardening of opinions in the critical months between Lincoln's inauguration and the firing on Fort Sumter.

Analysis

These essays represent an effort to analyze the difficulties inherent in putting information online and offer some suggestions for conceptualizing the goals.

Design

These projects represent efforts to create a particular look and feel for a site, in an effor to convey aesthetically the temporal and authorial nature of a site. These are listed chronologically to demonstrate (one hopes) some evolution in design sense.

  • AHA information pages (June 1998).
    This first effort to move beyond simple text pages has often been referred to as the derisively as the “gray bar” design (and deservedly so).
  • AHA Presidential Addresses (May 1999).
    Given the breadth of content on this site, the design for the presidential address site aimed for something simple, streamlined, and easy to print. The original pages for the site included a picture of the speaker in the upper right, but we found this disrupted the page in some older browsers and increased an already excessive page weight. So this was abandoned in favor of the current layout. This also marked our first deployment of linked footnotes on the Web.
  • Clio I: History and New Media home page (September 2001).
    A continuation of the boxed text design style, notable only for the discovery of the horizontal axis.
  • Clio II: Preliminary redesign of G.I. Roundtable project (January 2002).
    The preliminary site design reflects some early efforts with Photoshop, in a haphazard attempt to construct a collage-logo.
  • Clio II: “A Conflict of Cultures” (March 2002).
    This web site, based on an analysis of the 1967 faculty-student strike at Catholic University, represented our first substantive attempt to create a design that captured the “look and feel” of a particular period—in this instance, a post-Vatican II Catholic aesthetic, which reflected the cultural tensions of the moment as more traditional belief and culture came into conflict with new norms and ideals.
  • Clio II: Final implementation of the G.I. Rountable series site (April 2002)
    A further effort at “look and feel” design. This presentation aspired to capture the aesthetic of the World War II propaganda poster, which often seemed to use a very clean, sans serif font, drawn in at an upward angle, as well as the stars on bars of the “V” sign.

     

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This site last updated June 24, 2002