The End is Near...

A semester long of trying to understand the digital world of history will officially end this week with the finished product of an online exhibit on the Charlotte Woman of the Year Awards sponsored by the radio and television station, WBT. These awards started in the 1950s and ended in 1990. The goal was to honor the women who helped to establish Charlotte as an up and coming city. My group and I wanted to provide an overall view of the women and their contributions so we split the winners up by decades and each chose five women from each decade to spotlight in the exhibit. I liked the idea of being able to remind the people of Charlotte of these women, although some may be forgotten their efforts and influences can still be seen today.

The first step was to start digging in the archives and collections where we found photos, press releases, the ceremony’s programs, the actual nominations and applications. Across four decades, expectations of women and their roles in society were changing and by looking at these women it became clear that they were representative of the changes Charlotte was experiencing. We also felt that the exhibit should provide a brief history of WBT, of the awards, and a short summary of what the city of Charlotte was undergoing at that time to offer historical context for each decade. I chose the women from the 1980s because it was at a time when Charlotte was beginning to flourish in the banking business and became home to other large industries and the women of the 1980s reflected that.  Having to choose the women was a difficult problem for me because each woman had something to offer but once we choose our specific women and gathered all the information we could on them, our focus changed to working with Omeka.

  Having never created an exhibit especially one online, this project was a list of new things for me. I have to admit that I was excited to learn more about Omeka and to have a finished product I could be proud of. I also have to be even more honest in admitting that more than once this semester that excitement faded away once I started actually working with Omeka and trying to make it fit what we had envisioned. Omeka felt a little limiting but of course we are using a free version so those setbacks are to be expected. As someone who lacks any knowledge about how technology works, it took me a while to figure out the particular parts of the site. The lingo of Omeka is still a bit of a confusing language for me but I have learned a tremendous amount of it.

 I feel like the layout in general was a common discussion for our group. We felt that it made more sense to have one large exhibit with collections organized within it, which worked best for us when it came to navigating our site. Aside from the research of my decade, I was in charge of the final touches of the site and in making sure the exhibit was cohesive and flowing. I am a well-organized person but making sure that the work of four individual people with four unique writing styles blend without completely losing everyone’s distinct voice is challenging. Luckily, our class has discussed quite a bit on how to write for the internet and that was extremely useful when writing for this exhibit.

As a history student, I am obviously used to analyzing and presenting historical context in a paper but in an online exhibit it’s a completely different approach. Every piece of information you want to include you have to create the perfect place on a page or in the collection to display it. There has to be a level of organization like any academic work but it has a visual aspect that along with the writing needs to blend together.

One thing about this project that I didn’t quite anticipate was its accessibility to the public. I know that seems trivial and obvious but it puts a lot of pressure on us to create a project that can be seen by anyone surfing the web. I want the exhibit to be a positive representation for everyone involved from the members of our group to UNCC and Dr. Cox. The women we are highlighting are being put in the spotlight as well. Normal projects are shown to a class and the professor and then are forgotten but this project is being put on the internet for people to see anytime. With its never ending availability, we will not be able to add to or explain our approach or goal to every viewer but hope that the project will truly speak for itself.

I believe that we have successfully done what we originally set out to do according to our contract’s mission statement:

Using the WBT/WBTV collection in the Atkins Library archives and other supplementary sources, our group will digitize original photographs and documents that concern some of the women who participated in the Woman of the Year contest from 1955 to 1989. We seek to discover what these women’s qualifications and characteristics were and how the award influenced them. We will profile certain women from each decade, offering historical context to discover why they were chosen.

I think we did a great job of working together as a team, especially with our schedules being limited. We contacted each other through email and were able to create a dialogue that worked well for us. When it came to our individual responsibilities I think we all did our part and definitely shared some of the unexpected workload that we stumbled upon through the process. Also, the opportunities to present to the class periodically through the semester really helped to understand how an audience would see our site. Their feedback helped to resolve issues that we ourselves could not decide on.

I hope that the end result will be as educating and enlightening to our audience as it was for us as a group and that we helped to re-honor the women who helped build Charlotte, N.C.