Presentation for the SOLINET Annual Membership Meeting
A
variation on a WebWise 2004 Presentation
May 2004
By Erich Kesse,
I’ve chosen to deviate from my normal presentation, today.
This is how I usually begin.
Kind’a boring isn’t it?
Nonetheless, these are the project’s objectives:
·
To
create an historic atlas of
·
To
link historical resources to that atlas, providing new geo-temporal methods of
discovery;
And,
finally,
·
To
construct learning modules that would acquaint K-12 students with these
methods.
Ephemeral
Cities is a technology project rather than a collection building project.
I would ask you – just for a moment – to close your eyes and
envision “
Some of you, – particularly those of you from southern
And, for some of you, visions of gators are dancing in your
heads.
Still others of you, have formed visions of mermaids! (It
helps to have eaten little and been at the bottle early for this neat trick to
work.)
At least, it works well for many a college student visiting
the
But, most of you have conjured up deep and fading memories
of
We Floridians are confounded daily by visions of
And, with 9 of 10 of us from some place else, the question
arises: “Who are WE?” Just this
past weekend, I was mistaken for a German: “What makes you think I’m German?” I
asked. “Well”, responded the AllTel
clerk, looking at my name, “you’ve got an accent!” Determined not to say a word, at the Latin
market next door, I collected groceries, in silence. So, what do you think the clerk asks? “¿De dónde es usted? ¿Brasil? – she inquired! “Where AM I?” I thought.
The trouble is, most of us don’t know what
We, Floridians like to think ourselves as part of the
But, while
When we looked at
But, we also took note of Kate Nevin’s[i]
observation that AmericanSouth.ORG
was, yet, too much the reservation of southern universities.
When I moved to
In front of each house, he’d shuffle to a stop. “Miss Emma lived here when I was a boy,”
he might say. “She was an upright
woman. ’ would boll-up peas she,
herself, had planted.” He’d
gather-up a breath as if tasting history.
“Don’t ya know, her husband, Jimmie, was a no account …” And, of course, I didn’t know.
The marvel of those walks, night after night traveling the
same blocks, was that the stories were never the same, never repeated. Each night, he would bring the neighborhood’s
characters back to life in a sequence spread like peanut butter over time.
I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t detail the importance of
Miss Emma or No Account Jimmie in the limited time I have available today.
We believe that the common
characters of history may have something to tell us. Think of their stories as street-theater that
– how might a playbill put it – is “A STORY FOR OUR TIME!”
President B enters a grocery store, encounters clerk C. A few short words later – maybe about the
price of milk or barcode scanners – and history has changed, forever. I assume that you all recall the story of the first
President Bush’s campaign foray into a supermarket. The event is recorded in newspapers and even
in books – but, wouldn’t it be interesting to compare, say, the President’s
letters to the First Lady on the day’s events with the clerk’s and the
bag-boy’s diary recollections of the event?
It doesn’t take much research in a University Library to
realize that the history of a place, and of a people in that place requires
searching beyond University collections, and deep searches into the text of
documents. No one cultural institution holds
everything that we might want to reference or know.
In fact, Ephemeral
Cities recognizes that the history it seeks to uncover, in many cases, is
not held by any cultural institution. So,
it lends an ear to the community, and calls out: “Become a part of history !” “Make history, your story !” Or, to borrow a turn of phrase from Monty
Python: “Bring out your dead !” Remember,
the man in the cart is not quite dead yet.
I like to tell the story of Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1868, Mrs. Lincoln’s maid, Elizabeth
Keckley wrote a tell-all tale of life in the Lincoln Whitehouse. Appropriately entitled, Behind the
Scenes, it is virtually the only such published account. By contrast, a contemporary presidency will
generate at least two purportedly intimate accounts. And, recent presidencies have generated far
more than that!
The title – among those digitized by the
Obscure, even today, among the archival collections of
One assumes that the price of milk will remain a constant of
historical price comparisons, a surrogate for the economic health of the
nation. But, who will long remember, much less understand, the importance of a
barcode scanner in presidential politics without museums preserving and
interpreting the artifact.
Ephemeral
Cities postulates that uncovering this hidden history can lead to a
sea-change in our understanding of history.
History, for too long, has been capitalized – rarely
socialized. Politics aside – It really does
“take a village”, as Hillary Rodham Clinton put it, to revive a community’s long
past sense of itself.
More importantly, Ephemeral
Cities suggests that, by bringing together a whole communities’ resources, we
can SEE change. And, if we can see it, we
can understand it.
So, here’s a graphic example. Ephemeral
Cities will repurpose the historic Sanborn® Fire Insurance Maps of Florida,
making use of their wealth of detail and accuracy. Scanned earlier, and digitally restored to
their as published state, we’ve subsequently geo-rectified the maps, so we
could use known earth coordinates, as a means of laying one map atop another.
Here, new uses changed the character of
Graphical indexing – placement of the red dot – associates relatively
precise longitude and latitude with the building. Textual indexing records street location, building
number and name and any other recorded information.
Textual indexing becomes the base of a gazetteer or place-name
authority file that will be augmented subsequently with information from city
directories, land ownership files, and other information sources, all to
facilitate discovery.
So, here’s the concept in action. (N.B. This is still a demonstration,
representative of the web-site still under construction.) The user has zoomed into a location of
interest on a period Sanborn® map : here,
In this case, the user has decided to search “Building Use” for
“Cigar Factories”.
The cigar factory in this block is identified by a red dot. If the user so desired, all of the cigar
factories in
Clicking on a red dot (or, on any building) displays all of
the known information about that building’s use and occupants at that approximate
time in history. Advanced queries will
allow searches of building uses and occupants over time. As we’ve already seen, this information is
extracted from name-rich resources.
When the user clicks on an alternate use – say, Grocery – red dots indicate the
location of other grocers. My favorite proximity
study is that of schools to churches to saloons and their impact on public
morality.
By clicking the red dot of any of these locations, information
about that location is displayed. Clicking
either a use or an occupant’s name launches a query against targeted
collections. Retrieval lists, sorted by holding
institution, display a thumbnail together with brief descriptive information.
A selection invokes a new browser window to display the
selected resource, within the holding library’s web space.
This information collection strategy, by the way, works well
for a small community of targeted web-sites but does not scale-up well. We hope to see our other methods – the
concept of geo-temporal searching, for example, – adopted by what are known as OAI
harvesters, such as AmericanSouth.ORG. A harvester is a tool that, like Google, goes out and collects this
information in advance. But for the
moment, harvesters collect only information about Internet resources. They don’t collect or mirror or duplicate the
actual resource as they would need to, to find information from within document
texts.
Ephemeral
Cities’ partnerships are structured as originally envisioned by PALMM (the
Florida digital cooperative) in hub and spoke fashion. Expensive and highly skilled activity is
centralized; all else is distributed.
The hubs of this pilot project are
The
The
The
The project also draws on the PALMM collections and the contributions of
institutions across the state. We’re
confident of success. And, many of our
partners outside this project have begun digitizing local- and regional histories.
Now, let’s look at variations on the hub and spokes.
This model of imaging is typical of the PALMM program. Small institutions scan; feed to hubs that
manage the images created, which feed to a central archive. This model emphasizes preservation while, at
the same time, moving more complex and more expensive tasks up the line.
This text processing model demonstrates additional
centralization. All page images –
pictures of pages – are sent to the
The query model demonstrates, by far, the most centralization. This model gives the Internet user one-stop-shopping,
as it were. The EpC [Epoc] Server does the labor of searching
multiple sites and returns a unified list of resources to the user.
Quickly, targeted materials include: archives, books and pamphlets,
maps and plans, photographs and postcards.
And, here, I should interject, ORAL HISTORIES as well.
Also targeted, there will be serials, and especially,
newspapers, and, finally, artifacts and specimens. Regarding specimens: You may not know that train
transportation was King in
Having seen the demo, some of you are probably wondering “Isn’t there tons of labor involved?” “How do they do that?” I have the proto-typically
For those of you who recognize the second question: “How do they do that?” from the Britta TV ad featuring children, you
know that there are boat-loads of unemployed mermaids. Specifically, the mermaids known as:
Imaging or
scanning to “capture” the name-rich resources (city directories, property
records, census information, etc.) used to populate the maps.
Text
conversion using higly-accurate software to turn page-images into searchable
text.
Parsing, to
take searchable texts and break them down into types of information: names,
addresses, race, occupation, age, etc.
Name Authority, to ensure that systems and users can
differentiate between Able Smith (1880-1935) and Able Smith (1900-1975).
And, the twins, mark-up and tagging, to hide this differentiating
information within the text, so search systems can use it but human readers
will not be distracted by it.
New methods and programming will arise from the project’s murky
deep and – we hope – will be adopted in other states to build the national map.
Our faith in automation is boundless. We’ve made the following assumptions:
·
Everything
can be fixed in place and time,
and,
·
Semantic
Processes can be applied to automate this work
I should make clear, here, that our users are (anticipated to be) historians, genealogists
and students, … but also naturalists, real estate agents, land developers and
certainly, not last and not least, tourists on
“voyages out of the
ordinary!”
If you would like more information on the technologies we
employ, these links should be helpful. You
can also find an elaborated workflow of some of the text-processing applications
at this location: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/digital/technologies/software/prime/
The
Thank you.