Digital Tools For “Roadside Memories”
The project I propose to develop this semester is the culmination of a four year endeavor to create a comprehensive film archive at the University of Central Florida. Last spring I acquired the mp4 files for nearly a decade of donated films on behalf of the Home Movie Archive, and have been charged with developing a project on behalf of RICHES (Regional Initiative for Collecting the History and Stories of Central Florida). The project I have set out to develop incorporates close to six hours of footage within the collection of family vacation home movies at Florida-based roadside attractions and theme parks during the mid-twentieth century. The result is my project proposal for this semester titled, Roadside Memories: A Digital Tour of Florida Attractions, 1945-1980.
Following the end of World War II, the State of Florida experienced one of the most drastic demographic and developmental transformations in American history. In the thirty-five year between 1945 and 1980 the state’s population quadrupled. During the same period, with the revolution in air travel and advent of theme park attractions, Florida emerged as the top tourist destination in the United States. These developments caused a rapid and comprehensive transformation that reverberated through nearly every aspect of the state’s landscape and identity. This period of change also coincides with the popular use of home movies as a means of recording family vacations. These home movies unknowingly captured an important turning point in the history of heritage tourism in the State of Florida. The purpose of Roadside Memories is to incorporate the donations of a number of individual film collections to provide a visual point of reference to better comprehend the impact of this incredible spatial transformation. This is an ongoing project conducted in cooperation with the University of Central Florida’s Film and History Departments, this multimedia project will incorporate a wide variety of sources including but not limited to: digitized film footage, oral histories, photographs, newspaper sources, and oral histories. The poster presentation will offer a series of visual references and brief explanations of each step of the project’s progression, along with a series of QR codes that will allow visitors to instantly assess the various resources this project aims to make available to the public.
The inspiration for the web documentary I intend to create comes from a project financed by the National Film Board Office of Canada called Welcome to Pine Point. The project uses a combination of archival film footage, interviews, photographs, newspapers, and other ephemeral materials to reconstruct the abandoned mining town of Pine Point in Canada’s Northwest Territory. In order to develop a project with a similar methodological frame, I will likely set out to use the following digital tools in some capacity.
Bill Ferester’s Q-Media: A tool that very closely follows my goals to remediate found film footage into different contexts. Q-Media’s use of “images, live maps, interactive visualizations, web-applications, and web-sites resources” represents exactly the type of intersection of media tools I hope to incorporate into my project. What excites me most about this particular tool is the manner in which I can create a built in table of contents and construct a variety of overlapping narratives using the same film footage presented in different contexts.
I also intend to create an online exhibit supplemented by the creation of a finding aid for the RICHES Mosaic Interface. The RICHES MI is a highly user-friendly repository for information stored online. By uploading the mp4 film files in Roadside Memories onto the MI, I am ensuring its contents will be able to reach out to an already developed community of historians and local enthusiasts. The online exhibit I will create in the process will also serve as a useful beta test for the much larger web-documentary series I ultimately hope to create as soon as additional time and funding allows.
History in Motion captured my interest for a variety of different reasons. Aside from my overlapping research interests with the app’s developer Paul Cashman on topics such as Holocaust memory and New York City history, his ability to demonstrate through an interactive map significant changes within a region over time, will be pivotal to the narrative for Roadside Memories. Since my project will address the major demographic shifts in population and changes in tourist trends over the span of a thirty-five year period, a tool that can concisely showcase these transitions through the use of primary source documents and period maps, is exactly in sync with my own project goals.