Princeton Macintosh Users' Group

December 8, 2020: Web Technologies Behind the Hopewell Valley History Project, with Doug Dixon

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We, and our organizations, have a bounty of digital information that would be nice to share online — if there were useful and efficient ways to do so.

For example, the Hopewell Valley History Project is a volunteer effort to collect, digitize, and share the history of the Hopewell Valley in Mercer County, New Jersey. It is currently hosting several hundred historic documents and several thousand historic images. That’s a lot of digital files, and of very different types — documents and images, books and pamphlets, maps and aerials, images and panoramas. So the challenge is not only to organize all this material, but to present it in useful ways depending on its format and content.

In this talk, Doug Dixon will explore the approaches used on the History Project Website to present different types of materials using various Web technologies. While some of these do require custom programming, most use off-the-shelf Web components that could be applied to your own projects.

The meeting will be held online through Zoom — members should check their e-mail for instructions on how to connect and attend. Our friends from the Main Line Mac Users Group will also be with us. We hope you can join us.

About the presenter
Doug Dixon is an independent technology consultant and writer, specializing in Web technology, databases, and digital media. He created and developed the Hopewell Valley History Project, which is assembling digital copies of local historical materials. Previously, he consulted to the Aberdeen Test Center doing large data testing and visualization, and was a product manager and software developer at Intel and Sarnoff. Doug is a board member of the Hopewell Valley Historical Society, and is managing the HVHS Website along with the Hopewell Public Library Website. He has authored four books on digital media, published hundreds of feature articles, and presented over a hundred seminars and talks. Doug provides updates on digital media technology at his Manifest Technology Website.