The carbon-based caveman is blogging-CLIO II

Ok, my blog is up.   Found the article on attractive things work better fascinating. I don’t know much about the science involved, but it seemed rather intuitively logical.   How people determine a website’s credibility was interesting, but I wonder if it is any different than how people determine the credibility of things offline. If something looks more professional, more money is spent on appearance, it seems to be more credible.  However, this process generally works fairly well for most people, so why not transfer it to things online.  People are generally too busy to do more and if that approach is reasonably successful, they are bound to take the same approach online.

Faux Web Pages

mock-up.doc

Why this website is the greatest thing since Ronald Reagan

This site has a four-fold purpose. It is an archival site, and its main goals are collection and preservation of historical data, namely oral histories of the Great Depression and church records of the Great Depression. Do we need a website that does these things? In fact, we do. Without getting too much into a survey of the literature here, I can say there are some good sites on the Depression. There are sites that have preserved many oral histories. The Federal Writer’s Project, the Babe Ruth of Oral History Collections, is on the web at the Library of Congress’ web site. That fills a pretty strong need but the four-fold purpose of our web site goes further and remains essential. The first purpose is to gather all of the oral histories from where they are scattered. There are many more histories than the FWP, some on the web, some not, many on the web not in the most lasting sites. My goal is to put all of the histories in one site and categorize them for visitors and researchers. The second goal here is to solicit more histories before the opportunity is lost forever. A third goal, and just as paramount is the collecting, recording and preserving of church records in the Depression. Much of these records, which include a wealth of data, are in shoeboxes, attics, old books, in the memory of senior members, etc. and are in danger of being lost forever. My goal is to preserve this data before it is gone, and to collect as much of it as possible. This is extremely important data and there is precious little work being done there. This data is often in small places, not central repositories. While any part of the past is worth preserving for its own sake, you may well ask if this evidence is important enough for such a website, for the time and expense. Actually, it is. This is an underdeveloped area of research. America has always been a very religious nation. There is a general consensus among scholars that America was a Protestant nation, that this defined America but that around the 1920s the landscape changed dramatically as mainstream Protestantism, in an attempt to cope with new scientific ideas such as evolution, declined. There was a rise in fundamentalism at this time as a reaction, but on the whole America changed to a more diverse, more secular nation. However, there is plenty of data that may challenge this notion, and it is a ripe area for further research, not only in that vein, but there are so many possibilities. The contribution of religion to America’s survival of the Depression as the strongest nation on Earth and with her belief in her institutions intact (unlike other parts of the world) is an area that also is ripe for further research. This brings us to the fourth goal. Providing the relevant scholarly work on these subjects in one spot for researchers. So we are preserving oral histories and church records for posterity, and for current research, we are collecting additional data, and we are providing access to visitors of all kinds to have one spot for all of this. The importance of issues, and evidence, may lie in the beholder but I think this data needs to be preserved.

So that was the question

Obviously I didn’t quite grasp the question. I thought it was how to construct our own search engine on our site (which I obviously don’t know how to do). From the blogs, I gather the question is how to climb in Google’s rankings to get search engines to name your site. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do that either. The ideas in the blog seem very sound. I do have my stuff grouped in categories that might provide some decent keywords, and, hopefully, the links to other sites will eventually bring home the bacon.            The name of my site will not help the Google page ranking, but after some thought I think the other considerations for the name outweigh that. Although the name, We Had Our God.info perhaps would help in those instances where people are searching for religious related information and not just New Deal type of searches. Having directories so the URLs are logical and simple should help. Otherwise, our metadata has to speak for itself.  The keywords on our home page are limited and do shout out oral histories and church records so I think that will help some.  And, of course, the site is such a better mousetrap that they will come to us eventually.  If we build it, they will come.  (one of the few sports movies I can’t stand)

You can’t get there from here

How to get from there to here, in my search engine?  Well, once again, the simplicity of my site is the overiding consideration.  There are two things we (not the royal ‘we’, I’m just assuming I’ll have some help) are archiving are oral histories and church data.  Of course, if there was enough scholarship we listed, that would be searchable. At first, I imagine there will be a limited number of books (or titles, if permission not given to make the whole work available) and these will be listed and not really be ’searched’ that often. However, it is conceivable that there will be enough works on there to make a quick scan a pain and people might want to only search those works that reference a particular topic, so forget what I just said, there are three things that are searchable.  But they are very simply searchable. You would be searching the oral histories, I suppose, for categories like location, or topics like church or employment.  The church records are already going to be organized in categories (denomination, attendance, etc.) that make searching mostly superflous.  Thus, I am not sure that much more than the simple old-school Alta Vista method (I just love old-school, I can’t help it; bring back 45s, the board game, the test pattern, uh, pardon me) is all I really need for a reasonably decent search.  I’m not sure how I would do a page rank type of thing, if any one has any ideas let me know.  I think locale, like Michigan or West Virginia, would be of importance to people searching, as would oral histories dealing with type of employment like farming or mining, as might more specific areas (for our customers) such as social and church life. Perhaps family ties, marriage, etc. would be a very searchable commodity. How to weight these to appear when people put in those search times other than putting those histories that mention them most first I do not know.               Now that I have some inkling of how to do an interior search engine I think it will be easy for this site.   The data on our site will be categorized so that visitors can go right to the area they wish to peruse. This does not mean they will not search, however, and a search engine will still be useful.  A visitor might be looking for something very specific, perhaps preachers, or a term too specific for our categories. It should be easy enought to accomodate those situations. It makes sense to utilize location as an important factor. As a full text may mention preacher or farming or any such term many times, it makes sense that a better match is in the metadata The church records will be in tables that the metada will list by denomination and type so if a person is just searching for Baptist, the category on the home page will take care of that. It is in the searches for a particular church or particular are of the country, that the search engine will be most useful. Thus, it seems logical that we give five points for a metadata hit, and one point for a full text hit. The oral histories have no titles, save a person’s name, but the first sentence of a paragraph should carry greater weight than when mentioned anywhere in the text. We will give three points for any hit in the first sentence of a paragraph. Oral histories are one of those rare occasions where randomness may be appropriate. There are so many histories, and visitors may benefit from having a few random to see what they are like.

Budget

Undoubtedly due to my lack of sophistication and imagination on the web, I designed the site (unintentionally) rather simply. With the main goal being preservation as an archive, and the secondary goal gathering new data to preserve, it still seems a simple project for which a large amount of funding would not be necessary.  Unless I am missing something (and I do not doubt I am), the main task would be transcribing and typing oral histories and church data onto the site.  I was thinking I was going to do this myself, although it would take a deal of time.  The podcasts would also need to be recorded, and yours truly was planning on doing that (save for the female biographies) with the help of some volunteers, friends, etc.  It may be that much more could be done with the site, but that is how I see it unfolding.  Hence it seems the $0 funding (the most likely scenario) would have me painstakingly typing in all of the oral stories, all of the church data, sending all of the letters asking for other research, asking for permission, links, etc.  All of those little (and not so little) things that would need to be done, setting up contribution forms, etc.  The $50 K version would at least allow the website to be up, running and useful much sooner, as we could hire some people for that type of thing, to record the podcasts, help find all of the available oral histories, and organize and transcribe the church data on to the site.   This would leave me to take care of the legal aspects of getting permission, drafting letters, etc.  We could also hire at least one more web proficient soul to do proper directories for good URLs, to further our ability to be found by Google, and perfect our own search engine. We could then pay for those few items of data we had to pay for and we worth having. The $500K version would allow me to hire teams of interviewers, to go forth and succesfully accomplish the second goal of the site, acquiring all of the oral histories remaining to be captured.  This would make us The Site for the Great Depression.            As to Becky’s excellent suggestion, I have done a lot of research in the Virginia Rooms, and if I don’t do this topic as my dissertation (in other words, if it’s rejected) then I will still finish the project and ask the Fauq. Hist. Society to publish it for local interests.  I do doubt any such organization would take this on as a website, but you never know.

           I have not done much research on the internet (I know, you are shocked) so I’m not the best person to answer this question. As a lawyer, I subscribe to Lexis/Nexis but I don’t use it much. I have not found it easy to find what I am looking for there. It’s there, but getting to it, with the right searches, has not proven very fruitful. I have no doubt it is me, not Lexis/Nexis.  I still find going to the law library faster and better for most research. The same generally holds true for history research on the net. I have not yet been required to do too much actual research, as historiographies have been a big part of my workload and my few papers were done with research at my fingertips, like the church research in Fauq. being hard data I went to churches for, and other books, etc. I already had.  I have used it occasionally for a quick answer to a question, but not would you call true, exhaustive research.  So it hasn’t changed too many things for me. But I have not been called on to do so, so I will have to wait and see.  This should not be too surprising, since we are talking about a man who has 3 jobs, an agent, manages a men’s baseball team, coaches a men’s basketball team, coaches a youth basketball team, runs a couple of golf tournaments, runs the occasional political campaign, has a ten year old and still does not use a cell phone.

Preservation

I do not think I would be able to find a museum, a school, or an organization that would be dedicated to keeping up the website indefinitely.  The Great Depression just doesn’t have that great organization dedicated to it.  Perhaps a school, or an American history museum, if the website really was able to get most of the Depression stories in existence in one place, but the specificity of the site make that unlikely.  Therefore, I can not think of a really good way that the site would be able to adapt when the time comes that HTML or whatever else I use is no longer read.    In all honesty, the goal might be using the site to collect all of the stories, all of the church data while they and it exists, and then backing it all up on paper, our friend acid-free paper, and thus in generations to come it can again be put out digitally by another site.  Ok, we go XML to make it last a little longer. We record all of our podcasts onto CDs, and then onto whatever new medium replaces CDs, as we should still be around for that and that would not require constant checking, it would require only remembering we want to do that. We print out all of the oral histories for posterity, and print out all of the church records on paper also, and of course on CDs and their progeny.. Along with backing up on hard drives, I think we pretty well have ‘preserved’ the data we want to, and that is a primary function for us, to preserve the church records here instead of shoeboxes.

Licensing

There are three areas of work, I think, that the web site will produce where one has to think of what we’re going to do with licensing or what use others will make of it. One is the narratives themselves, some of which we’ll produce, others just copied from other places.  The recordings will be our product, so to speak.   The second area are the church records we will provide, in which our contribution will be simply to aggregate, etc, the records, and, of course, their digitization.  The third will be the work of scholars posted on the site.   The most obvious one is the posting of the work of other scholars, such as Studs Terkel, for instance.   We will have to get permission for most, if not all of these, anyway, and then probably have to do what the people who allow their material on the site will let us do.  In this instance, unlike our generous, broad-minded, and forward thinking author of Digital History, there are some old-school, Pat Buchanan worshiping capitalists like myself who believe the laborer is worthy of his hire.  Thus, the quandary of allowing access to my or others works without buying them.  In this instance, I think it will either be a bibliography which a short description of each work detailing what the work is about and what it adds to the picture, and allowing researchers to go get those works they feel will be of value or it will be a situation, if the other authors are generally in agreement, where a license (a contractual form which the user must accept with a click) that the work (while posted wholly on the site) can not be reproduced for commercial purposes, that is, copied and sold.    I haven’t decided which is the better approach.  Probably the latter.   The church records don’t pose much of a quandary, they are digitized to be preserved, assuming the churchs’ allowed the copying of the material knowing they were to be on the web, there isn’t any real reason to limit anyone’s use to this material, despite our having copied the work, etc.   Maybe we’ll sell advertising instead.       The same is generally true of the narratives.  Perhaps a license where one again can not copy and sell the oral recordings (not that there is a hot market for a CD of oral stories of the Depression) but that is it.  So I think those two licenses are what we would have, no more. 

As far as what we have to deal with in terms of copyright, etc. I think we have an easy site (this is not a royal ‘we’, I’m figuring there will have to be a lot of people working on this to accomplish it)  where we are not likely to be sued or shut down or hassled.  We would obviously have to get permission to post scholars works.  The churchs’ permission to use their records will be easy, I believe.  And we don’t need permission for much of the narratives, we will have to get permission for some, I am sure.          I do not think it will be that difficult to get permission for those things we need permission for, like church records and oral histories, but, if so, I don’t think we should pay for them because there is just too much we can get without that.          For you free diffusion of knowledge folks, why do  we need copyright?   We probably need ETERNAL copyright because then some idiot director couldn’t make up his own stupid, asinine story and call it Beowulf.  That was a waste of $12. And I wouldn’t have to be subjected to watching Hollywood destroy great literature such as the Lord of the Rings and Beowulf.

Web Site Design

WE HAD OUR GOD!
The Archive of the Great Depression

SEARCH

ORAL HISTORIES
TEXT NARRATION
The Federal Writer’s Project Picture
Other Oral Histories
Stories of church life “times were tough
Stories of employment but we had each
Stories of Community and we had our God…”
relates Gloria Stone

Church Records
Fauquier County, VA
attendance
donations
relief
expenditure
Methodist
LINKS
Baptist
Others

Tough People in Tough Times: The Role of Churches in the Depression in Fauquier County, VA
Other works

To send in your personal story of the Great Depression

Please sign Guestbook

Web site

In the event I can not make Tuesday, I thought I would put my presentation on the blog, for those who read the blog.

This is the design of the website so far. What I am attempting to accomplish (which is obviously not readily ascertainable from my design) is the digital preservation of oral histories of the Depression (all Oral histories but we will also have a special category of stories relating to churchgoing, faith and the Depression). Church records, and some records that are related to church recordsd like tombstones, wills, etc.
The Oral Histories can be accessed on the Left of the page. I hope this be the one-stop clearing house for oral histories, gathering those I take on my research and those that are elsewhere such as in the Federal Writer’s Project, and other web sites and other sources. I hope to narrate (well, not me personally necessarily, I’m no Mel Blanc) these and they can be viewed either textually or listened to. They are split into categories, FWP, Fauquier County, (which is supposed to follow right underneath FWP) and there will be other categories depending on where the source is. I am also going to make it so they can be accessed by subject, not just source, probably right underneath there, for a couple separate groupings like church, community, employment, just a few though, the main ones.
This also hopes to be the clearing house for preserving church records of the time. So they can be accessed on the left as well. They can be accessed by their major sources, one for the data collected in Fauq. Cty, and then other sources such as Methodist headquarters in Richmond, etc. This can be continually added to as more sources such as these are found. They are not exactly equally weighted, nor is their importance or relevance stated anywhere, but it seems a natural fit. Those few who want this info will know what they are looking for.
Additionally, in keeping with the idea of being a central Depression locale, the full text of the work “We had our God: Tough People in Tough Times, the role of churches in the Depression in Fauquier County, VA” will be there. Hopefully, we will add works of other scholars on similar subjects and researchers will be able to go here and visit the important works on the subject, and add any of their own.
I do not have the technology on how to do so figured out yet, but the last line is for people to send in their own personal narratives to add to those on the site. This, along with the research, and constant new data (if it starts to be collected from across the country) will keep the site growing and active.
On the right, the idea was a picture, perhaps the Migrant Women and Child or the cover of Yonondio or a dust bowl Church, some Depression picture, with the caption from one of the oral histories. We also have a search and a guestbook to sign. The goal is to 1) the main goal is to preserve church records which are not digitized 2)to put into one place oral histories of the Depression and collect new ones 3)to have a site dedicated to discovering and searching the role of churches and church life during the Depression. That is why the website has been designed like this so far, that and the fact that I have no idea what I am doing.