The Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961 has deeply impacted the U.S. relationship with Cuba over the last fifty one years. Not only was the invasion a failure for the CIA, but the covert action and the initial lies from the Kennedy administration about the details of the invasion caused the American media and the American people to begin to question government’s claims regarding foreign policy. The truth about the invastion trickled out from April 1961 to 1965, when several books and articles were written uncovering the details of the invasion. Since then the internet has created a plethora of videos to portray the Bay of Pigs invasion and its legacy.
My digital project will create a website using Omeka to compile a variety of different links to sites that depict the Bay of Pigs for a comprehensive studyof how the Bay of Pigs is presented via video and pictures. What will be significant is that this website will help users solve the Bay of Pigs puzzle; that is, it will enable the user to unravel the true account of the Bay of Pigs. These websites include videos from You tube, the History Channel, NBC, ABC, PBS, Flikr and others.
Most importantly, the goal of the project will be to compare the different presentations of the same subject, the Bay of Pigs, and discern any differences regarding the facts that are presented. I will compare the different vidoes and pictures and anaylze them. Some of the details I will look for include if there is a political bias in the different presentations, if there are facts about the invasion that are deleted or inaccurate and how credible the presentations are to the user. I will also look at the comments from the general public and comparetheir responses to the different videos and pictures.
This website will target both scholars and researchers, who want to know more about the Bay of Pigs. It will provide a resource for students, who want to want to ferret out the facts of the invasion and enable them to to distingish fact from fiction. After looking at this site, a researcher will also be able to distinguish between the videos and pictures that offer the most substantive account of the Bay of Pigs and the ones that either gloss over the facts, twist the truth or provide information that is unreliable.
Sounds like a solid project idea. To me it sounds like this kind of project would be better built in WordPress than in Omeka. It can be tricky to get things like YouTube videos to embed in Omeka sites and it sounds like most of what you are interested in is analysis and interpretation of a diverse array of materials instead of building out an online collection of content. Omeka is ideal when you have a collection of objects with similar metadata, it is a bit like a cataloging system. Where WordPress is much stronger at easily allowing you to create a attractive website. In short, if your goal isn’t primarily to expose a catalog of primary source objects you’re likely better off with WordPress.
I would be interested to hear a bit more about your intended audience. You mention researchers, but I would be interested to know more about how you think they would make their way to the site and what it is specifically that they would hope to get out of the site. In any event, it seems like an interesting topic and if you went ahead with it I would hazard to guess that you would make a great project.