The Civil War and the Digital South
Proposal for an R.E. Lee Summer Project, 2003
Hugh Blackmer, Science Librarian
Holt Merchant, Professor of History
Vaughan Stanley, Special Collections Librarian
Extending the Digital South Project
The Digital South project began as part of the effort to support and sustain Geographic Information Systems (GIS) development at Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) institutions. A project funded by ACS in summer 2002 ("The Digital South: A Spatial Data Library") had the specific goal of developing a "plan for a robust digital library of spatial data relevant to Southern states." To broaden the user base for spatial data and raise interest in GIS on ACS campuses, the next steps are identification of a domain of information that is of vital interest and importance to all ACS institutions, construction of a repository for digital resources, and exploration of procedures for management and distribution of content.
This R.E. Lee project will develop a prototype of a digital library application which unites
- a GIS-based Web interface,
- an Access database and contributor-friendly management tools, and
- a substantial body of pedagogically-relevant content.
Two students will work on the project: (1) xxx on programming and interface design, and (2) yyy on identification and preparation of digital library content from W&L collections and resources. The resulting product will be used in Dr. Merchant's courses in 2003-2004, as a part of the process of developing and testing a Web resource for the eventual use of all ACS partners.
The Civil War: a common pedagogical focus
Each of the partners in ACS offers courses on the Civil War, and each has a regional legacy, including local resources (photographs, documents, maps, data) in their collections. While these resources could be digitized and made available for local use in teaching, their value would be greatly enhanced by linkage into a growing mosaic of materials on the southern United States, shared via the Internet. We propose to build a general entry point for online study of the liminal decades between 1850 and 1870, intended as an adjunct to courses on the Civil War. The unique features of this project are (1) an interface enabling users to contribute faculty research, course projects, student papers, and other media to the growing digital archive, and (2) the possibility to locate their material in the spatial and temporal matrix.
The basic organizing structures are
- Temporal: some 7250 days comprise the period 1850-1870. Most of the events, artifacts, processes and actors can be located with some degree of precision in this framework (battles were fought on certain days, railroads were built in specifiable sequences, people rose to prominence in particular years, tons of iron were produced in certain months, etc.). Chronological organization allows a user to follow processes over time, and to ask what was happening simultaneously in different locations.
- Spatial: most of the events of the Civil War can be assigned geographical coordinates (sometimes precise latitude and longitude, sometimes counties or regions), mostly within the boundaries of the present-day US. A great many maps exist which can in principle be digitized and georeferenced, so that the events they illustrate and summarize can be seen in contemporary perspective. The potential to animate spatial events in display spaces controlled by the user adds a powerful visualization dimension.
It is easy to imagine an ArcIMS interface which permits a user to zoom in to specific areas, choose map layers to display, define rectangles within which to query an active map layer, and click on a map symbol to retrieve hyperlinked material (an alpha prototype is available at mapa.wlu.edu/civilwar). Search utilities for browsing and textual interrogation of databases are also easily developed.
The materials linked in the digital library include documents in various media and datasets with well-known formats, most of which can be located within the temporal and spatial framework. Many are locally-held and unpublished, and thus have been available only to visitors to their home institutions. Those that exist in publications are not usually linked together with related documents and texts.
- Text: documents from the personal (such as diaries and letters) to the public (speeches and newspapers, published poetry and prose) and analytical (books and articles on various facets of the War) are readily digitized and linked. Many have spatial and temporal properties; quite a few are unique items, stored in archives and special collections.
- Images: archives of Civil War photographs covering the gamut from portraiture to battle scenes and landscapes are widely available on the Web, but many more are unknown outside the archives which contain them. Local collections can be digitized without great difficulty. Many images have specific location and temporal data associated with them, allowing novel subsets to be created and retrieved.
- Data: statistical and descriptive information is available for many towns, counties, states and other units, and can be displayed as thematic map layers.
- Maps: among the many examples are Library of Congress Civil War Maps and battle maps scanned at W&L.
- Remote Sensing Imagery and aerial photography: many images are available via the American Memory collection and other sources.
- Video: Ken Burns' Civil War series is now available in DVD format, and thus (with appropriate licensing) could be distributed via access-controlled and episode-specific streaming video.
- Timelines: the PBS Civil War timeline could be greatly elaborated with hyperlinks to resources in various media.
Each of these resources has obvious utility in courses, but the possibility of linking them and making them accessible on the Web via spatial and temporal interfaces would add greatly to their value.
Components, Participants, and Schedule
A 2002 R.E. Lee project under Blackmer's direction built Pirarucu, a digital library application based on an Access database, which provides the basic tools and interface for a user to add and manage items, to share materials among collaborators, and to query the accumulated library. The structure of Pirarucu can be adapted to serve as the back end for the Civil War Project. Mapping functionality will be adapted from a variety of ArcIMS prototypes developed during the last 18 months and available at ims1.wlu.edu. The programming task is to build a container into which content can be put by subject experts (historians) who need no knowledge of the technical structure of the database and interface.
This year's effort will link maps with multiple data types, to enable users to interact with digital library contents in novel ways, and to facilitate geographical retrieval from a wealth of material. While the specific content in this project is centered on the Civil War years and on materials from W&L's collections, the structure we build will be easily adaptable to other materials on the American South. We will develop
- an Access database with spatial and temporal dimensions,
- Web-based user interfaces for upload and query, incorporating geographic characteristics and identifiers,
- procedures for selection and metadata creation for a broad range of media, and
- a substantial online collection of material drawn from W&L collections
The prototype developed during the summer will be tested at W&L during the academic year 2003-2004, and the results of use will inform the development of an ACS-wide implementation in the subsequent year. A proposal for ACS implementation is under construction.
The project draws upon faculty, library and computing expertise (Holt Merchant as content expert and alpha tester, Vaughan Stanley and Lisa McCown as content experts, Hugh Blackmer as project designer and GIS coordinator, Skip Williams as database expert, and Peter Jetton as consultant on Web design and implementation). Student participants will learn practical uses of software packages and have a unique opportunity to participate in a cross-disciplinary project which pioneers the integration of GIS (ESRI's ArcGIS and ArcIMS) and database tools (Microsoft's .NET suite) and builds a unique resource.
xxx has a background in History, and will work under the supervision of Holt Merchant and Vaughan Stanley to adapt course syllabi to structure, select illustrative content from W&L collections, digitize resources and enter material into the database, and choose and link remote resources. yyy's background in Computer Science equips him to learn the .NET software environment and adapt existing Pirarucu digital library structures, integrate the database with ArcIMS functionality, and build the containers and the conduits to allow users to manage the Digital South database.
Schedule: in the first week, xxx will work with Merchant and Stanley to identify a broad range of materials to be included in the digital library; in weeks 2-5 (during Stanley's absence on vacation) xxx will digitize materials and create basic metadata for all items; in weeks 6-8 xxx will complete documentation and assist in the testing of the user interfaces for submission and query. In the first three weeks, yyy will work with Williams and Blackmer to adapt the Pirarucu database and construct the user interface for input into the database; in weeks 4-6 yyy will work with ArcGIS and ArcIMS to build the geographic user interface; weeks 7-8 will be devoted to debugging and documentation.