lovehistory.net

I am really late in getting this up, and that’s because I greatly underestimated how hard and time consuming my chosen project was going to be. Uploading videos to YouTube is not as simple as they want you to believe, especially when you have the slowest DSL on earth and your computer randomly decides to remove sound from everything so you have to download everything again and your cat wants to play ALL THE TIME and he breaks things when you ignore him.

That being said, here is what I have up so far:

• Civil Defense Cinema: This is the front page for my project. Some of you may recognize it from my design project. Currently only one link works, and that is…
• Watch the Films!: This is the crux of my website. Here users will be able to scroll down a list of links to films and then select the ones they want to watch. I have two films up to show what the design will look like, but only one link works and that is…
• Let’s Face It: This is a model for the kind of page my users will interact with. After clicking the link, the first thing they’ll see is the embedded YouTube video, which they can then watch. As they scroll down they will read a brief summary of the video, and then, as you can see, I have broken the video down into specific subsections. Each screenshot represents a certain important aspect of the civil defense film, which I explain in the accompanying text. If the user clicks the screen shot they will be taken directly to the part of the video that I am discussing in the text. Interactive!

There is still much left to do. As you can see, I’ve continued with my cinema theme at the bottom of the page. All the currently playing links do work, they just go directly to the YouTube pages for the videos and many of them don’t even have descriptive text there. I have more videos to upload, but that is a long, slow slog, and it shuts down my entire internet so I have to work around it.

Other things I need to do:

• The link currently titled “About Us!” will be changed to say “Civil Defense!” Users can visit this page to read a short summary of what civil defense is and learn the meaning of some key terms, themes, and tropes related to the program. Basically, historical background information. I plan to embed an “about me” page in the footer, as David did.
• “Further Reading!” also has to be changed. I’m actually thinking of making it say “More Stuff!” That goes with the campy, movie poster feel of the site, at least. On this page I’m going to put links to other resources, including all the books on civil defense I read for the project, links to all the free archives where I found the videos and images, and links to other wonderful civil defense websites.
• Spell check. Lots and lots of spell check.

Part of what’s taking up so much time, other than struggling with YouTube, is writing all the content. Taking all those screen shots and editing them is easy but incredibly time consuming, as is deciding what I want to focus on in which video. Some of the important subtext is repeated over and over, so I have to decide if I want to highlight it in each individual video or not. I think treating each as an individual piece is best, but that is definitely time consuming.

I plan to keep working on my website all the way up until class time, so hopefully there will be a bit more content by then. I’ve really enjoyed watching the videos, and working with them, and I hope I’ve at least begun to come up with a good way to collect and display them to users, as well as pair them with historical narrative. The design of the site is making me nervous, but in trying to generate and upload content I’ve neglected that side. I guess I won’t know until I get some actual users to comment, so I look forward to tomorrow’s criticism and I’m really glad I have that full two weeks to work on this. I will say, however, that I really like this project a lot. It’s a great way for ME to gather and think about my primary sources, and my audience, and if it works out I can envision myself keeping up with the project after CLIO, or at least transforming it into something else.

Edit: This week I commented on David’s revised final project draft.