As any new media project is a work in progress, I hope this start will be a "good progress." After reading Manovich and a couple of articles for Learning and Teaching History in a Digital Age, which is another course I am taking this semester, I was inspired to think about the following projects:
a) in line with my dissertation interests with the borderlands of modern Eastern Europe and with Manovich's observation that, with the usage of new media, history is becoming more spatialized, one possible project would be the virtual representation of two border regions or two border towns during the first half of the 20-th century. As a possible model for this type of projects I liked the idea of Hypercities
b) since I spent this summer in the Moldovan archives and I noticed that they don't have any websites or home pages, I decided that a viable project would be to design such a website with the possible extension of creating a database with digitized documents.
In this way, my project proposals are quiet complementary. On the one hand, first project seems to be a bit S(cience)F(iction). On the other hand, the second project looks quiet viable. Although, with the current level of Moldovan bureaucracy, it is not impossible that my evaluation would have the opposite results and the first project will be much more realistic than the second one.
absolute final
13 years ago
4 comments:
Thanks for letting me know about the hypercities project. That was my project idea #5. Looks like it has been done already.
I took a historical cartography course 2 years ago and found that superimposing one map on another was not straight forward. You have to worry about scale, and base coordinates. I also was amazed at how very few artifacts of primary data - i.e. historical maps are to be found. Do they exist in the border lands you are referencing? If they do that would be different than the other hypercity locations which are all large cities.
Coordinating the web site of primary sources with the hypercities seems very daunting but the most interesting.
Great ideas
Thanks! I think there are some historical maps of the places I have written about but I will be aware of this problem. Waiting to talk about this in more details!
Both ideas are interesting. I'd like to hear more about the Moldovian archives option, because I know about this small museum in Hungary with a small collection of documents I'd to digitize.
On maps, I found this post (I hope that link works) that looks at another border. I'm amazed by how much new information we can get from maps and GIS. I bet you'll find a lot of unexpected things by looking at maps.
By the way, have you thought about doing something on the border between Hungary and Romania?
By the way, I would also like to know more about Moldovan archives, partly because they have not digitized anything. (-: Thank you for the link about borders! Concerning the Romanian-Hungarian border, it is also an interesting project but I do not speak Hungarian. In addition, every case in that part of Europe is particularly interesting. So, there is enough work for everybody.
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