Douglas Fix, - Culpepper Grant Associate

Douglas Fix, Professor of History. Reed College

Objectives
In January of this year, Douglas Fix applied for funding from the Culpepper monies to develop a digital library of 19th-century European and North American textual, cartographic, and textual representations of Taiwan. At that time, he listed several of his own (anticipated) expectations:

"to use this digital library in my classes here at Reed . . . as well as encourage colleagues at other institutions to employ this for their own research."
to encourage students and researchers to "analyze these materials in a radically new way with the aid of web-based applications."
"to develop my knowledge (and facility with) the software programs necessary to digitizing, searching, and supplementing these research materials."
"include Reed students at every level of the project to provide opportunities for several students to learn much more from a multifaceted web-based project."
Though the year's funding could not possibly support all the work necessary for each of those goals -- "3," in particular, would demand much more of my time than he had to give -- the technical and monetary support that your office has provided has been instrumental in helping me produce a pilot version of the digital library I originally had in mind.

Accomplishments
The introduction to this digital library, "Formosa: 19th-century images" (http://web.reed.edu/academic/departments/history/formosa/index.html), best describes the contents of this pilot version:

This digital library gathers together a disparate body of (primarily) European and American images of the island of Taiwan -- called "Formosa" by foreign visitors in the 19th Century -- and its various peoples. These woodcuts, maps and textual representations were originally published in European and North American books and journals during the 19th Century but are not easily accessible to those interested in the history of Taiwan. Users are encouraged to examine the woodcuts, etchings and sketches of landscapes, people, architecture, boats and implements by selecting increasing magnifications of those Images included in the library. Full texts of travelogues, reports, and ethnographies can be accessed from the Texts component of the library or selectively analyzed with the Search engine. Geographers will find the regional and island-wide Maps useful for exploring topographical, ethnological, geological or other questions or locating obscure place names. A small sampling of Linguistic Data on the various aboriginal languages may interest the student of Austronesian.

It is the product of a collaborative effort: students, faculty and staff were involved in all components of the library, from design stage to final evaluation. (Please see the "Credits" page of the site for specific information on those who helped me.) Students in my spring 2000 class, "Chinese frontiers," will be the first group of Reed students to use the library, but students in Taiwan and researchers across the world have already begun to employ the texts, maps and images in their research and teaching. I truly learned a great deal about digital library design and now have a beginner's understanding of some of the applications that created (and help manage) this particular site. Several students gained experience (and monetary compensation in some cases, e.g., Christian Buss for his German translation) directly from this project. In those terms, the pilot project was a success.

My major contributions to the digital library were perhaps those related to original design, as well as later revisions to the structure and content of the library. In these areas, I have gained some valuable insights from the pilot project:

a. Conceptual limitations: After using the site myself over the last few weeks, I'm aware of several important limitations of the original design: inappropriate magnifications of the images and maps; no database component to facilitate searching the content of the visual material; limited manipulation of the data beyond linking it together and providing a means to search some of it; and imited reference tools for the beginning user. However, I must note here that I intended to create a library and not a single course exercise. I think it's important to not over-structure the potential outcomes of a digital library.

b. Aesthetic preferences: Student contributions to the original layout and architecture of the site had some interesting long-term consequences. I think they and I have very different preferences when it comes to background color and font choice, or the way in which texts and visual image could be arranged. Perhaps this is merely one of the difficulties of any collaborative project where differences in expertise, as well as subjective standards of beauty, do exist. It also suggests, though, that I need to read much more of the "digital criticism" literature (if such a body of aesthetic criticism exists). I need some theoretical or empirical foundation upon which to base my assessments of these aspects of the site.

c. Technical constraints: What will happen to this site in ten years? That's one of my most important considerations. What kind of database should I create (for images, maps, etc.) so that data can be searched and initially analyzed before anyone actually uses the images, texts or maps in the site? What kind of database will still be around in ten years? How can I speed up the initial loading of the images to avoid user frustration? How can I stabilize the main index page and the placename maps index page? My technical limitations were/are many. Perhaps I can now learn how to manage the site that I helped design.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to your office for the extensive amount of monetary and technical support that you have given me during the year. Without either, the pilot project of this digital library could never have been completed