Similar to my print project, the digital project I am considering pursuing is focused on the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. As an intern at the House of the Temple, the headquarters for the Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction, I have come to learn a great deal about the brotherhood and its ties to Washington, D.C. over the last few months. Like many visitors to the House of the Temple, when I first toured the building I was surprised to hear about how closely connected masons and freemasonry are to many of the popular tourist destinations within the city. It is this initial surprise that inspired me to want to create an online exhibit of masonic related monuments and buildings in the DC area.
My hope is that this digital exhibit will be appealing not only to masons visiting the House of the Temple and D.C. but also to regular individuals who visit the House of the Temple and are interested in seeing more masonic sites in D.C. I would also like it if the histories and stories presented in this exhibit help to spread the amazing history of Freemasonry and dispels some of the conspiracies that have risen lately against the brotherhood.
I am currently planning on using Viewshare to create this digital exhibit. My plan is to use the platform in order to create a map showing the locations of the important sites, to make collections of the images of each site, and to attach some useful information about the masonic history, or even some simply interesting stories, to each site. My hope is that the history and stories will entice individuals to explore some sites that they normally would not consider touring. I am also hoping that the map will be a helpful tool that can be used by people navigating the sites in D.C. or planning a tour of the city.
In order to spread the word about this site, I am hoping to find a way in which it can either be integrated or just simply mentioned on the House of the Temple and the Supreme Council’s main website. Ideally, I would love for the site to be mentioned on the websites of some of the sites I am including in the project (however, this does not seem a likely avenue of marketing).
Overall, I am excited to begin working on this project and I hope that it will be of use to visitors of the House of the Temple.
Great topic and I think it could make for a great Viewshare view.
The first task is to start laying out your spreadsheet. Specifically, it sounds like each row in your spreadsheet is a place. So now the question is, what are each of the columns? I could imagine date created, place, a descriptive paragraph, and if there is an image or something associated with each one that would make them a bit more compelling, further, if you have any links to other sites or resources about the community you might want to include a related link column. A key question is are there other ways to categorize these? This is, of course, all permitting that you can find this data. If these fall into a few different categories then you can use those to set the color of the pins on your map.
For testing purposes, you can use this spreadsheet from the Viewshare site as a template for thinking about what your data might look like.
http://viewshare.org/media/cms_page_media/11/fairfax_postcards.xls
When you have an idea on this, I would suggest that you try and get the spreadsheet working for say 3 or 4 of the places. Then work through uploading the data and try out building the interface. When you have that little bit of work done you will know a bit more about what is going to be the most valuable data and you can go back and fill in the rest.
Oh, and you will probably want to use something like http://www.getlatlon.com/ to get exact lat lon coordinates to put in your spreadsheet. Viewshare can do lookups for you but they won’t really be as precise as what you want.