Marin Escalera

The Fallout Shelters at UNT project is going to be an omeka project with elements of ArcGIS for both an academic and a general public audience who are interested the topic of civil defense during the cold war. This website will contain maps of both the present and the past to allow the audience to interact and see how these fallout shelters have changed over time.

My project is still a work in progress and has recently changed from a storymap format to an omeka project. I will still have elements from it such as my maps from ArcGIS which have the various points and the warped map which allows the user to switch from the 1969 map to the modern day map. This change was due to that the traditional website formatting fit my version of my project better than the storyline formatting of storymaps. I already have some of the maps made though I do plan to go back and fix their formatting so they are easier to navigate and overall edit on my end. I also need to create the warp map that switches between both maps; this will be done through the map warper site we used in class. Other things I already have prepared are the sources and images which I will use in the photos section of my site. Over time I have gathered more images and sources to add to the project. Despite this I still need to write out the “histories” or also understood as the narratives of the project so it isn’t just pictures and maps throughout. As of right now I plan to separate these narratives into separate paragraphs that users can read and chose from specific topics regarding the theme of the project. This would be of the Cold War in the United States, the Cold War in Denton, fallout shelters, creation of fallout shelters in Denton and the UNT campus, and fallout out shelters in the Dallas area. These topics are to give context for the maps which are the main focus of the project and to also provide a bit of context of the environment to make it more accessible for people who are not historians and are not familiar with the Cold War at all. As of right now since I recently changed my project format my next step is to set up the omeka site and to move what I have over. This should not take me long since we already practiced with omeka and metadata in class. Once I have set up the site and moved my things I will pick up where I left off and finish up editing my maps. After that I will write out the narratives to add to my site. I except to have this done within the next week and a half and for the second half of the week spend that time editing things and modifying anything that needs to be changed.

Throughout the semester we have been gradually working on this project by doing different planning assignments to help us put it all together piece by piece. Recently we drew out a wireframe and made a content outline of how our project is envisioned to be laid out. It was a helpful step in figuring out how I want my layout to be for my site and what details I want to put in for each page. I was also able to get great feedback and suggestions that will help me moving forward. Overall this project has been coming along slowly but surely. At my current point in the project I believe it will come together nicely and will show the different elements we learned throughout the semester in its appearance.