SITE PLAN
SiteMap
The home page is the main introductory page for this site. From there the visitors have four main options: view the historical documents, add their own history, view previously entered histories, or use the other resources.
Documents
The first section presents the historical analysis of the data to be gathered on the site. The Documents section provides links to view the database of historical documents (ie. scanned text documents, transcribed journals, official papers, etc.), scholarly articles, papers and other works pertaining to the topic, and a picture gallery of all pictures. It is anticipated that this section will be the primary location for accessing primary and secondary documents other than the personal histories themselves. Viewers will be able to see a list of items in the database, as well as view the actual items as either pdfs, text files, or images. The documents in text format will be fully search-able. The items in the documents database may also tie into the timeline (particularly the historical documents) to show when each document was written or the date of each picture. This section will also contain a bibliography of links where other scholarly works can be found, if they are not available to be put on this site. The images and photos in this section will be within the same program as the photos from the Personal History section. They will simply be accessible from this section as well. The timeline and map will also be available in this section.
Add History
This section will assist the visitor in adding personal histories to the database. There are four types of history that can be added; video, audio, text, image. The video and audio histories can only be collected from those visitors who have a webcam and microphone available on their computer. It will possible to add an audio only history, in this case a microphone is all that is needed. Finally, the visitor may wish to simply upload a text document with their written history, or type their history into the database directly. The visitor will be asked in all cases to fill out a short form consisting of name, date of event, location of event, short text description, contact information (if desired), checkbox to grant permission for their history to be used by others and published to this site. The information gathered will facilitate in searching and displaying the histories. This is also where the visitor can go to add/upload photos and images.
Personal Histories
This section will be a direct link for displaying the personal histories within the database. There will be three ways to view the histories consisting of sorting the items by category, sorting the histories by date on a timeline, and sorting the histories by location on a map. When viewing the actual item, the visitor will have the choice to select the item by type (video, audio, text, image), by name of author, date, location, etc. Basically the list will be a static directory of criteria by which the histories are sorted. There will also be the option to do a keyword search for specific authors, locations, and random words in all of the text histories, which includes the short descriptions connected with audio and video histories. When viewing the the histories by map, the visitor is presented with a map where each of the histories in the database are arranged with a 'pinpoint' marking it's location. This tool will prove valuable for historians making comparisons and observations of the histories based on geography.
Site Resources
The site resources will consist of a site map, either graphical or displayed as a list of pages available on this site. A page with a list of other sites will also be contained here, similar to that in the Documents section, but with links that refer to sites that do not directly deal with historical documents, but may share scholarly insights about religion in the GDR. Finally, the site resources may contain a sampling of lesson plans and other teaching aides. It would most likely contain a list of syllabi from courses taught on religion in East Germany found using the Syllabus Finder at chnm.gmu.edu.
Work Plan
There are basically two sections to this proposal, consisting of a documents collection, and an oral history collection. Many of the programs needed will work for both sections.
Document CollectionThe document collection will simply be a program that allows others to upload documents to a server and stores meta data about each item. There are a plethora of free programs that do mostly what I want, and with minor changes in the code they will integrate nicely into this project. For the storing of images I will probably use Gallery or a similar, less bulky program, with minor changes in the user administration so that it works seamlessly with other programs used by the project.
Personal HistoriesCollecting the audio and video histories will use Macromedia's Flash Communication Server. The potential for live, group or one-on-one interviews is possible using this technology, so that the interviewee is actually interviewed by a person instead of reading questions from a survey or questionnaire. Text surveys will be conducted using a program similar to Survey Builder also available at CHNM. The timeline will be a program built in Macromedia Flash. The dynamic map will be built using the Google Maps API.
Database and CodePHP, HTML, and CSS will be the primary languages used to code the project. MySQL will be the database used.
Potential IssuesThe greatest challenge will be spreading the word about the availability, purpose and hopes of the site sufficiently to provide an acceptable amount of feed back. This will hopefully be done by recruiting involvement through personal contacts with former GDR citizens, German Universities or students interested in this field of study, and possible collaboration with churches in Germany.
Another issue will be in getting the programs to 'talk' well with one another (ie, being able to use the same user administration, getting the timeline and map to pull the information from the database).