This Digital History 218 online class is more difficult than I anticipated and the final project to get the Primary Source Documents online for the enslaved at Belmont is more challenging than I thought. Although I have the 5 documents that I would like to display digitized and ready to go. There is so much to consider in making a searchable database. How do I want the information displayed? The ease of searching and what data visualization tools to use are my main concerns right now. If you have the most amazing history (which we do), but you fail to display it in a manner that is easy to find and formatted in a way that invites others to continue reading. You will simply loose the reader and be a one hit wonder, where reader hit your site once and never return.
This week, I plan to test out Google Fusion Tables, It seems to be the simplest way to turn my data into easy to read charts and maps, which will help bring to life the the five focus areas of our online data collection for the enslaved at Belmont.
- Wills
- Deeds
- Judgements
- Bill of Sales
- Inventory Lists
Good luck with your documents. Of course the easiest way to get them online is to just put them there (not put them in any kind of database).
ReplyDeleteNow, when you do that, there are ADA issues that you have to consider. 1st, you can't put them online as a doc, because not all users have Word. You can take a high resolution photo of the document and put that online. Sometimes that works well, depending on the size of the document. A PDF can be tricky, because there is a specific step that you have to go through in formatting a PDF to make it ADA compliant. That leaves html as a way to put a text document on line. If you can get your text into Word, then you can export as html. Problem will be formatting.