Thoughts on Project

Over the long term, I hope to research the rituals surrounding war deaths and commemoration — cemeteries, memorials, that sort of thing.  So I’d like to combine that with something I experienced first hand for my project for the class.

In 2000, I took a trip with a British tour company to European battlefields.  I wanted to see the beaches of Normandy, which I did, and I was as impressed with the cemetery at Omaha Beach as I always am by Arlington Cemetery.  But the tour company also served two other functions — they brought war widows and family to the British national cemeteries in continental Europe or they took instructions on where to leave the crosses with poppies that are so much a symbol of British war grief.  For the British, a trip to a cemetery in an out-of-the-way place on the continent (like Arnhem) is a major, expensive trip.

So I thought about people who bury family members at Arlington Cemetery because that’s important to them for some reason (instead of burying them in a local national cemetery that would be easier to visit) but can’t come visit as often as they like.  They should be able to see the headstone, how it looks at various times of year, where it fits into the section of the cemetery, where it fits into the overall map of Arlington, that sort of thing.

And beyond that, there’s a lot of information on the headstones that might be of use to historians, social scientists, and genealogists.  And there can’t be privacy concerns because that information is all written on the headstones, so it’s what the family chose to give to the general public. 

There’s not a lot of information on the standard headstone — the classic white marble stone that’s so much a part of the look of Arlington and other national cemeteries.  But there are more than just standard headstones at Arlington — in certain sections of the cemetery, there are custom headstones, chosen by the family.

So what can we learn from headstones?  I’ve given this some thought, so here are some initial ideas.  The traditional headstones give the dates of birth and death, usually the service in which the person served, sometimes the conflicts in which the person served, sometimes a little more (like about decorations or medals).  A spouse or two (once, while exploring Arlington I found a man who had outlived three wives) is often buried either in the same plot or nearby.  (I’m always amazed at Arlington how quickly you can find evidence for the traditional view that spouses either die within a brief time of each other or many years apart.)  Sometimes there are children — children who died very young or children who also served and sometimes died before their parents.  There are sets of brothers buried together — there’s at least a group or two of sets of brother admirals or brother generals. 

On the older headstones, there’s even more — inscriptions chosen by the family, occasionally a picture, more information on how and where the person served. 

Not to mention the effects of the current wars on culture — there are a lot of Iraq and Afghanistan graves, all very new and sometimes right next to each other.

There are mass graves from WWII — air crews who couldn’t be distinguished so they’re all buried together.  I’m told that there are some of those from the new wars as well — from armored personnel carriers that were destroyed.

So I think this site could serve a number of different purposes.  The data would tell us about both what people did and what people chose to share about it.  At least one Supreme Court justice buried at Arlington doesn’t list his Court service — just his (fairly low) rank in the military. And his family chose a burial place not up on the hill above Kennedy’s grave where many Supreme Court justices are buried but in a regular place with “commoners.”

The hardest part of the site won’t be the construction, I wouldn’t think, which I’d want to keep fairly straight-forward so that it could be used by people with different levels of technical sophistication. The hardest part would be the data collection — gathering up the information and adding pictures and maps.  I thought it might be interesting as a web-collaborative project — perhaps people interested in these same ideas would be willing to contribute data like headstone transcriptions, photos, and locations.  So I’m going to work at mocking up what it might look like — I think I could make a good start in a fairly short period of time — but with the up-front admission that the whole project would take a long time to complete.

I’m looking forward to getting feedback and seeing what others are coming up with.

-Tracy

From Tracy F — update to Website, Better

I realized overnight that I forgot to go back in time on my website. Turns out that my “like” website — the VA site (http://www.cem.va.gov/) — hasn’t changed all that much. To be fair, government websites don’t tend to, in my experience. One big update about two years ago, that didn’t change much except the background and adding the top menu — so pretty consistent, all things considered. And what got added were the “new” things that were probably then newly in favor — search bar, contact us, about us, etc. The background also went from being pretty funeral parlor mushy to being more government, flags and right angles. I like the new version better, but I can see how they thought the old one was appropriate. Anyway, not much to comment on there, but I really like the archive.org function — I’ll have to play around on that when I’m not spending so much time blogging! =)

Google Search Tips

I use the web for searching more than blogging, and there are some good tips for searching in google in a recent edition of the ABA magazine — maybe they’re old news to you but some were new to me.

See http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/become_a_google_master/

-Tracy

From Tracy — Website, Better

Here’s one I liked better.  http://www.cem.va.gov/

I like the primary colors. 

The menus are across the top and sides (a few too many perhaps, and some below the fold, but nobody’s perfect) and the top ones repeat while the side ones are appropriate to the sub-page.

There’s an “about us” that always makes me feel better, along with a “contact us” (ditto) and a search on the home page where it “belongs” in the upper right hand corner (plus an “advanced search,” which I always like as well, in case you want to refine things).

The main menus on the side also have sub-menus when you linger over them, but you can go to the “main” level if you don’t want to pick a sub-menu.  It bugs me when you don’t know which sub-menu you want to go to, but the site won’t let you pick the general menu topic to start from.

There’s a FAQ front and center on the side menu (like the “about us” and “contact us” links, almost always useful).

There are also good links on the right side for things that people visiting the site might be interested (instead, really) but the buttons are well placed and make sense.

There’s a “what’s new” page that appears to have actually new things (hard to tell — the newest things are from the spring, but they’re reports that might not be issued very frequently). 

With respect to my own project, this site has a lot of good ideas.  The search of gravesites provides basic information on the grave and a map (at least for some sites) – that’s one thing I’d like to incorporate into my project, which is something like this for Arlington National Cemetery.  I’d want to add pictures, but this is a place to start from.  On the other hand, they “stole” some of the design elements I was putting together in my head, but I can forgive them so they’ve been so helpful in other ways.

So generally, while not perfect, I like this site, and I’ll be referring to it going forward with my own project.

-Tracy

From Tracy — Websites, Not Good

This is the link I found that I didn’t like.  http://www.deathreference.com/

Setting aside what I think about the person who created the site and his or her interests, the site is also really problematic. 

Home page

- Didn’t like the background or the color scheme

- Doesn’t provide any information about the site, its purpose, or its creator

- No menus, no references, no way to know what happens when you drill down

Internal sites

- No menus (though it does have a link back to the home page, which is something)

- The articles are really long text on a single page

What’s good about it?  Not much.  It does provide for people to comment, but it’s not clear where the comments go or how to access them. 

So this site is (besides being somewhat scary in a number of ways), is really not doing much of a job of communicating anything. 

Just for the record, in my venture into blog-world (the blogosphere?), I continue to toddle along.  I thought a lot about what we talked about in class and about what bothers me about this process.  I’m a strong believer in the 1st Amendment, the ACLU (though not a member), and the argument that the answer to bad speech is more speech.  I also believe that the community “knows” things that one individual may not — not that polls tell you things but that those sites where many, many vote about what they think is going to happen (like the DoD website predicting terrorist events and wars that was shut down after public reaction was, er, unfavorable) actually turn out useful (not conclusive) results.  So what is it that bugs me about this part of the mass consciousness, or whatever words we want to put on it?  I was interested to hear that some of my preconceived misconceptions (or at least ideas I developed when this process was young — a couple of years ago) are out of date — that people are saying a better mix of positive and negative things and it’s less a forum for the disgruntled.  One thing that still bothers me is the “digital divide” — not sure Dr. Cohen thinks much of it, but I think that there are a lot of people, even the techno-savvy, aren’t part of the blogosphere or blog stream, etc.  This seems to be a forum for the techno-savvy, the young, those with lots of free time (not sure how anyone could have a blog about parenthood — most parents I know just want to sleep in their “off” hours, er, minutes).  Maybe it’s like group counseling or diary-ing — if I tell the world things, I feel like they’re real, that they matter, that someone is listening?  I remain concerned about those who use the internet to replace social contact (I’m not the most social person myself, but I try to talk to real people more, not less, than I might as a result).  So is it that I can’t shake the view that most of the folks in the blog (and its comments) are young people who have time to not only worry about the quality of their dining experiences but write about them to the world?  I don’t know.  Despite the encouragement of my classmates, I’m having a very hard time shaking the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or wherever I picked it up — touch everything only once.  Leave unread blog entries?  Can’t do it.  Okay, so now I’m the person I’m questioning.  Looking forward to hearing more from those better in touch than I . . .

-Tracy

Website #2: ABMC.gov

From Tracy:

http://www.abmc.gov/search/wwii.php

I was going to compare Arlington National Cemetery’s site, but I found that the American Battlefield Monument Commission (ABMC) — the government organization that runs the overseas cemeteries for American war dead like the cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy — provided a better comparison to interment.net.

ABMC’s website kind of shouts “government agency” — very formal, lots of picture and color in the banner, lots of disclaimers at the bottom of the page, etc.  (I didn’t mention that internment.net had absolutely no pictures on the main page — understandable perhaps, but doesn’t really shout out “we’re here to tell you about grave inscriptions.”  Maybe one long, wide-angle shot of a cemetery, just to give people the idea.) ABMC has a nice mix of color photos and menus — a sense of what they are without being too intense (in topic or in design).   There are also a couple of links to videos, but no Flash, so that’s probably better for accessibility too.

The information on the agency is front and center — in fact it’s about all there is on the main page other than the menu in terms of text. It says, “The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) was established by Congress in 1923 to commemorate the service, achievements, and sacrifice of U.S. armed forces where they have served overseas since 1917, and within the U.S. when directed by public law. The ABMC commemorative mission is reflected in 24 overseas military cemeteries that serve as resting places for almost 125,000 American war dead; on Tablets of the Missing that memorialize more than 94,000 U.S. servicemen and women; and through 25 memorials, monuments and markers. We invite you to explore the information and databases available on this web site, and to visit our cemeteries and memorials. ” I’ve quoted it at length because I want to pick on them a little in a minute.

The site doesn’t really tell you what it’s for (other than “we’re the government, so we have to have a a website”).  But it’s clear that the site is meant to provide research tools as well as information about the agency itself. The search function is front and center, though there’s four different selections — WWI, WWII, Korea and Other.  Would it be so hard to have everything consolidated into one database so that if you didn’t know where your casualty died, you could still find information?  With the close timing between WWII and Korea, that’s a real problem for research in that era, I would think.  (As usual, I peeked a couple levels down into the site and Patton is right where he belongs, buried in Luxembourg — insert your own joke (or praise or scathing insult) about the old soldier [here].)

There could be a bit more description on the front page — the menu lists “Cemeteries, Memorials, Services Available, Commemorative Events.” But they could help me out — why are Americans buried overseas? What’s the difference between a cemetery and a memorial (and isn’t a full federal cemetery called a shrine? are these cemeteries still active places for burial and if so, on what grounds?)?  What does ABMC do with respect to these places — oversee them, decide how they operate, decide what memorials to add? What’s a momument? What’s a marker? How are they different from a memorial? I’d guess at first pass that “Services Available” would be about funeral services — is this an example of the funereal practice of making everything sound vague?  But come on — if we’re talking about who might be eligible for these places (like the veterans interred at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl), it’s not a big surprise that they (or their families) are thinking about such things at this point — they’re pretty senior citizens these days. (Couldn’t help myself and looked one level down again – they don’t appear to be active cemeteries but they will provide families with more information about the cemeteries and provide photos of the gravesites.)  

But speaking of age, where’s Vietnam?  I know the answer to that — we repatriated our dead from Vietnam, in part because we never really felt like we wanted to commit to leaving Americans there and in part because who knew where the front lines would be three days from now (something of the same problem arose in Korea, I understand — and a good call in both cases as it turned out).  But not to even mention why the “modern” wars aren’t listed on the home page? 

So they’re not going out of their way to provide you with much more than the basic “we’re the government and we’re here to help” speech — maybe they think that the “.GOV” does that work for them.  And to be clear, I’ve been to a couple of their cemeteries and they appear to do great work in a tough place (imagine running the cemetery at Omaha Beach when the French were outraged about American involvement in the Middle East — but the rumors that the French wanted the American graves emptied and the dead repatriated is apparently apocryphal). Besides all that, the website does appear to have very useful information — I found not only Patton but his serial number, which would be a great thing to have to do more research (although, still peeking, while Teddy Roosevelt (the fourth, if I recall) is where he belongs at Normandy, why not a field to show that it’s obvious from his gravestone that he’s a Medal of Honor winner?  It must be in the records, since his gravestone has the gold embossing that comes with that if requested).

On balance, I would say that they’re doing okay with what they have but they could do more — provide more context up front, let folks know that what they do and why and how.  Provide information about what information they have (and don’t) and where you could go to find other things.  And one thing that’s sorely missing (which interests me because of the topic I’m working up) — pictures.  Given that a lot of folks will never get there, why not more pictures of what the places look like and how they’re laid out?  Not for every grave, perhaps, though that’s what I’d like to tackle, but at least for every cemetery and maybe more than a few.  Maps, too, I suppose, at varying levels of detail.

So a good start and certainly useful, but not perfect.  I’ll strive to tackle some of the challenges in my project (no doubt uncovering more and overlooking still others along the way).

In my path to blogger-hood, I did discover that I can make the little editing window in wordpress bigger — that helps — but I’m still not sure if I trust their spell-checker, so this has been through the Word process and back again.  Baby steps, baby steps.

-Tracy

Website #1: Interment.Net

From Tracy

http://www.interment.net/

Here’s my first site.  It looks like some sort of internet scam at first glance, but it appears to be a web-group project to catalog burial records.  (I’m interested in federal cemeteries, so I peeked a little past the front page and there appears to be a lot of good, if incomplete info — for Arlington National Cemetery, Daniel Chappie James’s data is there but neither Hugo Black nor Earl Warren are represented.)  The goal of the site appears to be to provide some information about as many gravesites as possible, presumably for historical and genealogical research.  The source is only for English speakers, apparently, because the front page says that the site contains “thousands of transcriptions of cemetery records and tombstone inscriptions, from cemeteries in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries,” though it’s not clear if that’s because the funereal traditions of these countries are pretty similar or if it’s because of translation or other issues.  

(It’s probably worth mentioning that the trend toward detailed genealogy in the non-academic (real) world is probably both reinforcing and reinforced by digital history or new media.  The work done by the LDS church on its own genealogical records has apparently been very valuable to historians and other researchers as well as those searching for family members — lots of detailed information about who lived (and died) where and when. A great way to combine the collected memory of a lot of people, not just those who have time to travel to a million libraries and historical societies.)

The front page of the site is a set of links to lower pages of the website — kind of a table of contents for the site.  While there aren’t ads or anything that shouts “scam,” the site could do a better job of instilling confidence in users — at the risk of slipping into the design elements, I think the primary problem is that there’s WAY too much going on on the front page — makes it look like someone’s trying to sell you something in the same way that those ads down the side of your Google search results are trying to sell you something. 

Instead, on further review, there appears to be all the “right” things — good organization, a blog, news and updates, and information about related topics (like World War II photos on the day I visited) that might be of interest to readers.  So I’m not entirely sure what’s put me off the main page other than my instinctive reaction that it looks like the return you get when you type the wrong address into your browser by mistake (“go here to start your own webpage with this name”).  What might make me feel better?  Again resisting the urge to redesign, more of a statement of goals and intents and less the table of contents up front.   The disclaimer that “Access is free – no subscription fees, no money” sounds more like one of the disclaimers that they put on poker sites than a true statement.  Maybe work the “free” part into the mission statement and provide a bit more data about what’s being done, by who, and why right on the front page, and save the news, the blog, the other elements for links that will take users interested in those topics to those pages.

Perhaps the website thinks that having lots of information will draw people in and make them want to poke around.  But unless you convince people that your data and content are quality — quickly — it seems to me that you’re missing the chance to connect with just the sort of people who could help you connect to your mission.  In this case, the site appears to be dependent in part on submissions from users to grow.  They’d want, I think, to persuade people that their information would be in good company if they take the time and effort to provide it.

A few other thoughts . . . There is a search function, but it doesn’t stand out from the rest of the menus, which are across the top of the page.  There’s too much scrolling involved to get to all the information — another reason to keep the main page simple and provide links to lots of topics and other resources. 

So potentially very useful and interesting — and a useful model (and counter-model) for the project I’m thinking about — but hard to overcome that initial reaction of “too much information” and “not serious.”

Just a quick comment on “blogging” since this is my first substantial post.  I’m really struggling with the informality of blogging in general — I think it’s not like formal writing, so I’ve given in to contractions and incomplete sentences, though I’m not sure I’m crazy about that (especially in an academic environment).  I had to copy and paste this post to Word to read it because I’m not comfortable with the little screen — lack of practice perhaps — and I only just resisted printing out the Word version to proofread it (which is my usual practice in writing things for class).  Are the typos and close-but-not-quite words that I initially typed part of the process of typing while thinking?

I also think it’s a very unstructured way to have a conversation — people don’t have any of the usual incentives to be brief, to be on topic, or even to be kind.  I’m not sure if what I don’t like is that there aren’t any of the usual signals for how to judge someone’s veracity and level of analysis (bloggers have no age, no horn-rimmed glasses, no diction, no light in their eyes).  Am I shallow because I want to know who’s opining and more than just their user name?  Or is this process a good thing because it’s stripping away those conventions and letting people be judged on the merit of what they contribute alone (no matter how random, how wrong, how mis-communicating, how rude)? And maybe all that we judge people by are the typos — probably not a good standard, since not everyone is the best typist, particularly while they’re trying to type and think at the same time. I proof papers two or three times — is it different that I can punch one button and my writing is out there for the world to see? Does the failure to see “their” versus “there” because the new standard for who’s “credible” and who’s not?  I’ll be in big trouble, because I’ll flip things around and not see them as backwards no matter how many times I proofread — my brain sees what it expects to see.

And this is all (at first cut) about ego — why should anyone else care what I have to say about any particular topic?  I contribute in class — why?  Because it’s required? To make it clear that I’ve done the readings? To try to advance the discussion? All of the above?  I think I get more out of participating in the dialogue that letting it flow around me, but I’m not sure that magnifying that by a million people makes things better or whether it just drowns out the voices that actually do have useful information (the researchers, the people who work in the area, the students).  But I’m trying to stay open, because it’s clear that this is something that isn’t going away any time soon, so I’ll have to think about it and likely participate it, if not necessarily enjoy it . . .

-Tracy

The good and the bad of blogging

From Tracy F –

I was reading an Economist from a few weeks ago (of course) at the gym and found two articles on blogging.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11622401&CFID=20627211&CFTOKEN=77558224

on how authoritarian governments try to crack down on bloggers and

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11614176

on using blogs (and more importantly, bloggers) to help survey the northern sky — sort of a very big group project.

Still not sure about this blog thing, but it does seem inescapable. Not to mention that I was distracted from my reading at Starbucks yesterday by a guy describing the challenges posed by his web page and what was good about others . .

-Tracy