Month: April 2019

“Welcome, Darlings, to the Gay Movement,” is a reflective timeline of DC’s Gay Liberation Front. The tour uses ArcGIS StoryMaps and content from the Rainbow History Project’s digital archives to offer insight into the brief radical movement with the intention to highlight the similarities with the current young queer community.

The appplication begins by situating GLF-DC within the wider national movement and history of queerness before moving into the spark that initiated the formation of a DC branch. Users are invited to explore the maps and click on pushpins to reveal additional photos and blurbs about the locations frequented by GLF members. The central narration of each event concludes with a series of reflective questions that prompts the user to think about their own experiences within the LGBTQ+ world.

The app concludes by asking how radical queer organizations have contributed to the world today and “how [users] will continue the fight.”

Evaluation

What began as a virtual mapped tour of a queer activist’s “day in the life,” turned into a reflective jaunt through the timeline of the DC Gay Liberation Front. Although this was not exactly what I envisioned, I still believe that the project benefits those interested in queer history by grouping together available archival documents and recordings, pinpointing the places of significance, and linking together queer radicalism with activists of the present.

I used RHP and former GLF member, Brian Miller’s pdf timeline of the GLF-DC movement as a storyboard to draw out main themes of the movement and zero in on various events around the city. Then I created a list of links to photos, oral history clips, addresses, and newspaper clippings. This master list described where I found the material, who was featured, and allowed me to link the content directly through the ArcGIS map. After much trial and error, I created 14 points for users to explore themes of pride, protest, discrimination, mental health, religion, and more.

Once I finished the app, I enlisted the help of several queer friends (EJ, Tabitha, Rachel, and Erin) to beta-test it. I made important changes to the usability and points of narrative using their feedback.

Both EJ and Tabitha are trusted friends hailing from Indiana, and as I thought about their perspective of the app, the more I realized that I could connect with them by asking more open questions about GLF-DC events, such as “Where did you first attend Pride? How has religion affected your life? Have you experienced discrimination within queer spaces?” The questions remain open for each user to answer for themselves.

In the future, I’d love to add more points to the maps and of course, more photographs once the RHP physical archives reopen to the public. Additionally, I’d like to put more research into creating a more interactive component of the app, where users can actually submit answers to the posed questions. Once I embed a commenting feature, I’d like to share it more widely within the queer community.

See attached!

Here is the link to my final project: A digital database of Titanic popular and museum displays, exhibits, exhibitions, etc.

This database, while still very much in a beta format, serves as a research tool for those who wish to easily research displays, exhibits, and exhibitions about the Titanic from 1912 to 2018. This WordPress website is an small scale example of my larger project idea, which was a digital database of exhibit display in the United States over time. As stated in previous posts, there isn’t a comprehensive database that exists which features this kind of content. The Smithsonian offers a database of their own internal displays, but that is nowhere near an exhaustive database, while it is still useless nonetheless. While my physical project is much smaller than my theoretical concept, a larger project would take a lot more time, funding, and buy-in from various institutions from around the country–as they would need to be okay with making this information accessible through an open access database.    

The site offers 5 different pages: home, about, database, contact, and works consulted. The home page serves as a basic landing page for the website. It provides some brief background about the project and myself. The about page features my project proposal and links to other databases I took inspiration from. The database is really the meat and potatoes of the website. It features various blog posts about each display which act as database entries. I used the five displays I found in my own research to fill the database, though going forward the goal would of course be to grow the entries in this section of the website. The contact page is a run of the mill WordPress contact page, where users of the database can contact me. And finally, the works consulted page features my bibliography from my research project. I opted to use the full bibliography rather than just the citations from images so as to cover my bases in terms of any interpretation I may have consciously or subconsciously put into my database entries.

Interpretation was something that I struggled with in this project. As the information for the database entries come from my own research, I obviously had a skewed interpretation of what it all meant, based on the trajectory of my line of argumentation in my paper. While I tried to merely describe the displays in simple language, some of the older ones had far less sources to go off of and so some interpretation was necessary, but I did find I often had difficulty striking a balance. I was constantly worried that this website would become a database of my senior thesis, rather that a research database which could be useful to others.

Another difficulty was creating an effective user interface. Given that I helped lead discussion for our designing digital projects class, and in particular read Dan Brown’s Communicating Design, I was really conscious about my user interface. That being said, I quickly realized how hard that would be given that I was using a free version of WordPress and I don’t have a lot of experience in web design. All of a sudden why Dan Brown’s steps to formulating a project and communicating that project were so detailed and comprehensive became clear. This is not something that is easily done, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience. One problem I ran into was trying to create a drop down menu for my database page so that they would be easy to see and navigate to. I was able to make a menu but the theme I chose for my site only let me put it at the bottom by the search bar, and it wasn’t in a drop down format–making it hardly user intuitive.

That being said, I think using WordPress for this project was overall effective. Given that I have never built something like this before, it was fairly easy to use. I do wish there was more customization and guidance offered for the free version, but the lowest paid version is still somewhat affordable. If I were to continue this project in hopes of growing the database, it would certainly be fairly cost effective to get the basic version of WordPress. That being said, I think a lot of the tools we learned about in class which help historians engage with technology, as well as the various blog posts and books, would be important points of references to continue building this website out to be more extensive and more effective. This project overall has shown both how important a tool like WordPress can be to a historian, as well as how easy it is to put historical content on the internet; something that I have always been a proponent of but never had the know how to carry out.

Also here’s my poster!