Group Project - War of 1812 Smart Phone App

(Note: I started this blog post on April 24, the day we handed in our final project, as per usual life got in the way, and as a result I have just now finished it!)

This morning, I handed over the final draft of our public history group project.  A good portion of our time this academic year has been devoted to the development of content for a War of 1812 Historical and Commemorative Smart Phone App.  This project has certainly been a learning experience, and not just about local history related to the War of 1812.

A little background about the project:  We partnered with the War of 1812 South Western Ontario Region, Tecumseh Parkway Committee, and Western Corridor Alliance to produce a regional smart phone app.  Our portion was to provide the historical content about Procter's retreat from Fort Amherstburg in the fall of 1813.  This included researching 22 sites from Amherstburg/Windsor area to London relating to this campaign which culminated in the Battle of the Thames where Tecumseh was killed.  To make the project a bit easier to manage, we were divided into four groups of three, and each group was given a selection of geographically close sites.  (My group had all the sites in the Amherstburg/Windsor area.)

Tour of 1812 Sites

We started by taking a bus tour of most of the sites last fall.  We were accompanied by representatives from South West Ontario and Tecumseh Parkway, to give us some background on the area and the 1812 sites (as much of this was new to us.) We learned how after the Battle of Lake Erie, the armaments from Fort Amherstburg (present-day Fort Malden) were used to outfit the HMS Detroit, leaving British General Procter low on supplies and with little choice but to retreat from the approaching Americans lead by General  Harrison and Commodore Perry.  The leaders of the First Nations alliance, most notably the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, did not wish to retreat.  However, retreat they did, up the Thames River, until the two sides met on October 5, 1813 at the Battle of the Thames, just two miles outside of Fairfield.


It was a significant victory for the Americans, seeking revenge for what they considered the River Raisin Massacre.  It was also quite a blow to the First Nations - whose leader Tecumseh was killed during battle - and the British.  General Procter found himself court-martialed the next year as result of the retreat and the battle, effectively ending his military career.  (This has been your cliff-notes version of Procter's Retreat...)

Once the groups were decided and sites assigned, we commenced our secondary source research.  Books such as Glenn Stott's Greater Evils: War of 1812 in Southwestern Ontario, Sandy Antal's A Wampum Denied, and George Sheppard's Plunder, Profit, and Paroles: A Social History of the War of 1812 in Upper Canada were passed around the office, and each small group hunted for resources pertaining to their particular sites.  

We started to visualize what we wanted the app to look like, and how we hoped people would use it.  Grand visions of interactive time-lines, moving maps, and fancy interfaces left many of us feeling overwhelmed and in over our heads at first.  As we started to scale back and just concentrate on our content - developing an interpretive plan, and coming up with a narrative - the project started to seem more manageable.

After turning in our secondary source research report, we had an opportunity to talk with the company we were told would probably be handling the technical side of the app.  We had been contracted for content, they were taking the content and creating the actual app.  Reality set in as restrictions on images, audio, and video became a reality.  But at least now we had a framework we could work in.

Image from Windsor Community Museum

Following the winter break it was time for primary source research.  My group made plans in January for a trip back to Amherstburg and Windsor to spend the day at the Windsor Community Museum, as well as visiting the sites we hadn't had time to stop at on our first tour.  The visit to the museum was extremely helpful in acquiring many of the images that were ultimately used in the app.  We also spent many afternoons going over the resources at Western's Archive and Research Collections Centre, and hours pouring over digitized documents and images from Library and Archives Canada, National Archives and Records Administration, and the Library of Congress.

We turned in our carefully detailed primary source research reports, and it was time to start writing.  Hours of research now had to be summed up into 300 word text boxes with images and audio.  For some of us, keeping it short, sweet, and to the point was not easy.  We had to discuss with others what they were writing as well, to make sure not to waste precious words repeating ourselves.  Along with the 22 sites, we had also decided to address some of the themes we found reoccurring throughout the research, such as farming, transportation, and family participation during the War of 1812.  It was also necessary to provide an introduction, not only to the war, but also to Battle of Lake Erie to put the retreat in to context (as it is all about context...), and have a conclusion to the retreat and the war itself.  

Mock-Screen Shot for First Draft

Once assembled, this first draft needed to be edited.  We were taking content  about 29 different sites and themes, authored by 12 different people, and making it into one cohesive narrative.  That was a very long weekend for the group leaders and editors...


During the time between the first and second drafts were were thrown a curve-ball.  The partners had contracted an entirely different company to create the app.  The technical framework with which we had been working was going to change.  Work temporarily paused, and we knew that new specification from this company could change some of our plans.  How many images would there be per site?  What were the format requirement for the audio and video?  Was there a limit on the number of sites?  These were all important questions we had to address before we could start ordering digital copies of our images, paying for the rights to use them, and record our audio.

After a Skype call between our team, the partners, and Weever (the app company) we were all - for the most part - on the same page, and we kept working toward a final draft.  Weever was eager to start adding content as they were planning on a launch date in May, but we were still waiting for feedback from the partners on our second draft.  I had been serving as a large group facilitator, and I lost track of the number of email sent with images and audio.

Final Draft PowerPoint

Finally, I sent the last of the content to Weever, and gave Professor Mike Dove a hard copy of our final draft, along with a final budget and permissions for all of our images, audio, and video.  It is hard to express the relief that followed.  


There have been a few changes since turning in our final draft.  We were sent a temporary link to the app in progress, which I opened to discover our sites had been combined with dozens more in the south west Ontario region.  It had been decided rather than to do several small regional apps, to just do one large app.  This meant that while our narrative was still there, it was a bit lost among all the other sites.  There were also some edits that needed to be made to the content, and missing captions (which provided information about where we got our content - which was sometimes a condition of permission to use it.)  These issues are being addressed, and I look forward to having a final product I can proudly show to prospective employers when I start interviewing for a job this fall.

Like I said at the beginning, this whole process has been a learning experience.  Those of you who know me, know that I take great pride in my work, and like to have control over the process (that may be what lead me to the role of large group facilitator...) as well as the final product.  I had to keep reminding myself, especially toward the end of the project, that we were just providing the content.  It isn't solely our app, we were contracted to work on it.  

This also became part of one of the biggest lessons I learned about graduate school - it isn't always about the product, sometimes it's about the process.  Is this project what I envisioned it would be when we started? No, not even really close.  Did I learn a lot in the process?  Absolutely.  I researched in archives, made contacts with local historians, sought permission to use images, work on maintaining a project budget, wrote historical text for public consumption, leaned how to be flexible in a contract position, lead group meetings, and with my small group presented our project at a national conference.  So regardless if the end product is what I thought it would be, it was certainly a successful one!


Stay tuned for the Route 1812 app!  As soon as the final app is available I will be sure to let my faithful readers know!

Ladies in Blue

I've always had a tendency to throw myself into a new subject head first - just ask my parents.  I don't know how many summers I spent going back and forth from the library reading everything I could get my hands on about a new topic.  Fortunately, as a professor's daughter, I not only had the small local library at my disposal, but also a university library for satisfying my curiosity.

Whenever a new person (usually a famous historical female) piqued my curiosity, I would pour over biography after biography, totally immersing myself.  Annie Oakley, Eva Peron, Clara Barton (okay, so maybe I had a thing for musicals as well...)  I just couldn't get enough.

I haven't entirely grown out of this.  It's why I still love learning and trying new things.  Only, now it's even easier to find the information that I used to have to scour the library for.  Now I can just turn to the Internet.  When I was younger I was unaware that I should read things critically and check for reliable sources - if it was in a book it must be true!  Older, slightly wiser, and with a history degree under my belt, I know I have to exercise caution with research on the Internet.  It's a great place to start with a new subject you know little about, but knowing how to fact-check is crucial.  Let me show you how I tackle online research.

Let's start with a topic that I know a little about, but I'd love to learn more - women in baseball.  I start where most people start, with Google.  Unless, I'm looking to buy something, I typically ignore the sponsored ads at the top of the results.  I don't begrudge Google trying to make money, they do offer a service, I'm just not going to start there with my research.

I'll begin with the next three results.  The first - the AAGPBL website is informative, but I don't want to focus on that today.  I think A League of Their Own and Diamond Dreams do a great job at promoting that.  I'm looking for something different.  The Wikipedia article about women in baseball is more modern than I'm looking for, but this third page is interesting.

The Girls of Summer takes you through a brief, entertaining history of women in baseball - and not just the AAGPBL.  What catches my eye are the featured female umpires.

I had heard that there have been a few professional female umpires, but I really don't know much about their stories.  I had no I idea that Amanda Clement was umpiring men's baseball games in the early 1900s.
  
I had read about Pam Postema before, but I honestly couldn't remember where.  I am intrigued, and I want to know more.


 This is how it starts.  I get curious and I want to know more. What starts out as an interesting article, balloons into multiple Firefox windows with various tabs, in an order that likely only I understand.  Hopefully I can guide you all through my process without losing too many of you along the way.



As I mentioned earlier, with online resources, I like to check who operates the website to see how reliable my new-found source is.  When I clicked the header on The Girls of Summer exhibit, I am taken to this page:

Project participants include Louisville Slugger and the National Baseball Hall of Fame - awesome, but where do I go from here?  The Baseball Hall of Fame also happens to be the home of the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center, and they have an online database.

The ABNER (American Baseball Network for Electronic Research) Library Catalog (Abner - get, it? no...okay....never mind) lets me search through the library and archive holdings.  

A quick search of Amanda Clement reveals a scrapbook with newspaper clippings, a few cartoons, and advertising handbills along with comments written by the creator.

Unfortunately, even though the Hall of Fame collection is searchable online, you can only view this item in the reading room.  Since I'm in London, Ontario and Cooperstown, New York is over nine hours away - I'll have to settle for further online research.



Now that I'm thinking along the lines of researchers I do a check-in with the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR.)  The SABR website is great, they have a lot of online resources for researchers.

SABR produces several publications including a research journal.  You can search their journal archive from the website. 

You can also open articles from archived publications.

Just to see if I could find anything else online, I checked the notes at the end of the article.  There were quite a few citations from the scrapbook I located at the BHOF, as well as other archival material from the research center.  There was also an article from Sports Illustrated that I manage to find in their vault.

From here, I go where many do when looking for quick info - Wikipedia.  Now,  Wikipedia takes a lot of heat because it is open to editing by anyone.  I'm not recommending you cite it in a paper (I wouldn't recommend you site a regular encyclopedia in a paper either) but it's often a good starting point. 

Unfortunately, this time Wikipedia fails me.  There's a mention of her in the Baseball Umpire article, as the first paid female umpire, but there is no citation.  Usually, I would read through the article and then click on all the "references" links at the bottom.  Then I could assess the reliability of those sources.  Maybe after all this online research some Wikipedia additions and editing is in my future.

This was a quick tour of how I conduct my online research and check sources.  During my research I came across four other professional female umpires and did similar searches on them as well.  It turns out there is a lot more information out there than I expected (and too much to cover in one blog post.)  Perhaps I've found my latest obsession...