Dear Professor Einstein: The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in Post-War America
This project uses Omeka to present an illustrated exhibit about the history of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and the Americans who responded to its call, using representative items from the collection and other nuclear history collections held in SCARC. After exploring the cultural milieu in which it was conceived, as well as descriptions of its formation and effort, the exhibit highlights examples of the many types of letters that were sent to the ECAS: letters of criticism, encouragement, advice, proposed solutions, as well as offers to help and interesting contributions in lieu of funds. Finally, the results of the Committee's work (or lack thereof) are presented, and the exhibit briefly discusses their products and their legacy.
Users can browse through the letters in any order, examining item and metadata together via a main index. The Omeka plugin Scripto allows users to transcribe both handwritten and typed letters to enhance the keyword searchability of the letters. A topical tag cloud allows exploration of occupations, amounts, and organizations.
Users can also explore the collection and play with the data using Viewshare, a free service from the Library of Congress that allows for visualizations and data play, providing manipulatable facets, lists, geographic exploration, and charts. Users can also download a dataset and play with the data in RAW, a simple data visualizer app from Density Design that allows users to choose between a number of different graphs and visualizations, to show other combinations of facets. These exploration tools invite users to play with metadata in order to uncover correlations, patterns, and trends.
The project is intended to be readable and usable for the general public, with specific applicability to new and established scholars in multiple disciplines.
Project
Collaboration
Tools used
Omeka
Omeka is a content management system designed for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Omeka falls at a crossroads of Web Content Management, Collections Management, and Archival Digital Collections Systems. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability. Omeka allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with digital objects.
Viewshare
Viewshare is a free web application for creating interfaces and visualizations of cultural heritage collections. It can create interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds, histograms, and image galleries. The intended users of Viewshare are individuals managing and creating access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials. Viewshare is offered as a software as a service (SaaS), email [email protected] to request a free account.
- Import Collection Data: Ingest collections from spreadsheets, JSON, CONTENTdm, XML MODS or OAI records. Upload from your desktop or import them from a URL.
- Generate Views: Generate distinct interactive visual interfaces to your digital collections, including maps and timelines, and sophisticated faceted navigation
- Embed & Share:Copy/Paste to embed your visualization interface in any webpage. Provide your users with novel and intuitive ways to explore your content System Requirements: Viewshare makes every attempt to support the following Web browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer v.7 & 8, Firefox v.3.x and Safari v.3.x. Opera v.9.x, Camino v.1.6.x, Firefox v.4.x, and Chrome v.14.x mostly work but are not as thoroughly tested and not officially supported. Internet Explorer v.6 does not work with some of the software used by Viewshare. Viewshare currently supports the US English (en-US) locale.
RAW
Raw is an open web app to create custom vector-based visualisations utilising the D3.js library through a simple interface. It is an open and customizable project and forkable via GitHub. Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAW allows to export visualizations in vector (SVG) or raster (PNG) format and embed them in your web page.