Week 12: Lots of Writing

My major task this week was composing the webpage text. I started out with a 2-paragraph introduction for the homepage, briefly explaining who Louis Szathmary was, what the recipe pamphlet collection entails, and the scope of the digital collection. This was the easy part. For the "value-added" aspect of the collection, I culled what I considered to be the most relevant information from my research into food history and composed an 8-paragraph essay, which will be on a linked page. It touches on the major factors that influenced the shift in the American diet between 1880 - 1930: advances in agriculture and technology; the emergence of "Food Science" and food purity laws; advertising; and social trends.

There is so much information surrounding this topic, that it's difficult to know where to draw the line. The text needs to give complete and accurate information, while not being so long and detailed that the reader loses interest. Writing the essay is also a challenge because I am by no means an expert on the subject, so I can only hope I'm doing it justice based on the limited amount of research I've had time for. Since I'm doing a fairly broad overview, I think I'll be able to avoid making any obvious errors -- at least, nothing anyone other than a food historian would notice!

Linda gave me a look at the webpage with the first draft of text inserted, and it seemed like it might be a bit too long. I'm working on editing it for brevity and will continue to do revisions in the coming weeks. I will also start drafting a project continuation plan to present to DLS at the end of the semester, outlining steps to be taken to complete the project after I've finished my part. And of course, I will continue with production work.

Week 11: More Of The Same

This week, Linda sent me a link to a preliminary design for the collection homepage. I thought it looked great and was happy to see my ideas manifested on the screen. I won't reveal it until the unveiling of the collection though. I'm sure there will be changes made in the meantime.

One change I'm already considering is to replace the historical timeline with an essay. When I started working on the first draft of the text, it began to seem like an essay would be a better format as it would allow me to better integrate factual information with analysis. I plan to get that to Linda this week so she can incorporate it into the web design. I'm sure I will continue to revise and edit it over the next month, but it will be helpful for this process to be able see how the text fits in with the graphical interface.

Other than that, I did more production work. I think I've uploaded 32 documents now. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll meet my target of 50 after all.

I also spent some time reading about XML and learning how to use the Oxygen editor, since I missed our last seminar and hadn't gotten the in-class tutorial. Knowing basic HTML certainly helps to make sense of XML. I don't claim to have a terribly strong grasp of it yet, but it seems to be a useful tool for data description. Hopefully I will have the opportunity to incorporate it in a future fellowship project, since it is something that I may well need to use someday on the job.

Week 10: Web Design

This week, I split my time between production and web design. As mentioned in my previous post, I had a meeting scheduled with Nicki and the DLS web designer, Linda Roth, for Friday. Up to this point I've only had vague ideas about how I wanted the collection's home page to look, so I browsed other digital libraries to get ideas for finalizing my own design. Some that incorporated especially creative design elements were the New York Public Library, Cornell University, The University of Washington, and The University of California - Berkeley.

Feeling inspired, I sat down to sketch out some possible designs. I made a couple of schematics for pages featuring introductory text, a link to another page with a timeline of food production/marketing from 1880-1930, and "canned" search links for the categories of food, kitchen appliances, and medicines. The main differences are in layout and graphics. One idea I had was to have the collection title display as if it were printed on an actual pamphlet, with an accompanying image from one of the pamphlet covers. Another is to cut an image out of one of the pamphlets to use as the main graphic -- specifically, the Domino Sugar girl. I'm leaning toward the latter. The search links will likely have thumbnail images of pamphlet covers, and each decade on the time line would have an accompanying thumbnail. An alternate idea is to have an image faded-in beneath the text on the time line page.

I was trying to be a little conservative, because while I am a novice at both HTML and Dreamweaver, I don't know much about creating more sophisticated web pages and wasn't sure what sorts of features would actually be feasible for Linda to incorporate. But after showing her my ideas, she said she thought they were all doable. She took my sketches so she could play around with them and come up with some examples before we finalize things. Getting the home page fleshed out feels like a big step in realizing the digital collection, and it's exciting to envision the final product. It's hard to believe I've gotten to this point in just a couple of months.

Next week, I will continue to do production part of the time while working on first drafts for the home page introductory and time line texts. I will also continue to refine my web design ideas in terms of details such as font type, color scheme, and layout.