Mapping Oral History

In digital scholarship, the most misguided projects are generally the ones where a technical advancement is applied to a problem, rather than the reverse. Ideally, a person can be self aware enough to recognize their own difficulties comprehending the subject they are trying to convey to audiences, then finding the most appropriate tool to make that concept more clear to themselves and others.

At the very beginning of this project, while reviewing the metadata for hundreds of scientific projects, I was having a difficult time understanding the physical space of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness area. The space was remote not only physically but conceptually. There wasn’t a full photo of even the station in the almost 2,000 items included in the archive. The reason I can think of why this was the case is classic scientific rationalism: we aren’t studying the research station, so why would we bother to take a picture of it?

To help provide visitors to the collection with ‘a sense of place,’ as one of the interviewees describes it, I began working with Google Earth Studios to animate excerpts of the videos. Though this branch of Google Earth launched six years ago, this was my first encounter with the software. Permission to access the software is granted on an individual basis. Users must be working on nonprofit projects and always use the attribution watermark. The interface very closely resembles Adobe AfterEffects, which I have some experience with, but in addition to the x y axis, there is also the latitude and longitudinal data points and some very impressive time of day controls, which was impactful for one of the stories which took place over the course of four days.

I also needed to adjust the focus, where the original concept was to have the entire work be at a human scale point of view, this was only attainable when the place markings were sufficiently spread out in the interviewee’s dialogue or the speed and number of key frames would have a somewhat nauseating effect.

After many drafts, these videos are embedded at the very top and bottom of the landing page, hopefully providing visitors with an engaging introduction to the landscape they’ll be exploring in different ways throughout the site. That said, there are accessibility issues with any visualizations like these that I am interested in evolving and iterating on in the future.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I’d just like to reiterate that everything in that video, and all of the previous elements I’ve described in this project were created by “analyzing and presenting the pre-existing data of a collection in ways that make it more intuitive, accessible and interactive, while being mindful of user experience.” Being able to identify the unintuitive elements of your collection, extract the right elements from the data set, learn and implement the correct tools to highlight this data and sustainably host this information digitally, can add important and engaging historical context to your research work.

Thank you for your time.