The first step upon return is to create an online Worksite dedicated to the project in question. VCP's platforms provide a standard set of tools for communication, archiving resources, and collaborative authoring. A worksite provides a central online site where materials can be stored, plans can be maintained and revised, emails to the working group archived, and much more. Contact VCP to request such a worksite be created for your project.

Fieldwork usually involves notes taken in the fields, which are often done in bound notebooks.

Field notes are perhaps best stored in Wikis, where they can be easily privately archived, or even published, but be easily modified by the scholar. If there is no time or desire to enter the data as text in the Wikis, they can also be easily PDFed, and stored in the Resources section of the Worksite and organized by subdirectors as makes sense.

Ultimately, of course, any scholarly project will involve substantial essays that formally address various topics.

Formal essays are best marked up in XML for formal publication. XML is a way of preparing the text for Web publication which enables powerful searching, flexible display, and much else. XML has various ways of being implemented using “DTDs” or “schema” which are essentially toolkits that define the types of things you want to mark up - say a title, or personal names, and so forth. VCP uses the international standard for humanities text, which is called TEI, or Text Encoding Initiative. There is a variety of commercial and free XML Editors.

The problem with XML is workflow, since most scholars do not have XML editors and are only familiar with the use of word processors, such as Microsoft Word. Thus VCP proposes a clumsy but viable system for scholars to use Microsoft word in a particular way to create word processing documents that VCP staff can efficiently transform into XML documents. It basically works by VCP staff having taken TEI markup, and defined “styles” in Word which correspond to individual markup items. Thus the scholar only needs to learn how to apply styles in Word, and then VCP staff use a Visual Basic macro to convert those styles into XML markup.

The actual end presentation of such XML-marked up essays is done through “XSLT stylesheets” which interpret the markup into a visual presentation for the web (i.e. make titles appear bold face, and so forth).

On the horizon, VCP is now working on the dynamic connection of specific terms in the essays to reference resources, such as Place Dictionary, Bibliographies, and more. The basic idea is that wherever, say, a place name occurs, it would be automatically linked to the entry for that place in the Place Dictionary. In addition, we are working on integrating the essay publication system with the media management system so that media with their metadata (captions, dates, etc.) are automatically pulled in for attractive and integrated display within the essay at the point where they are cited. The image, or audio-video, should appear within the essay, whether than the user being pulled away to some other web page devoted to images, while ussers should be able to easily proceed from the image, or audio-video to both consulting the full descriptive data about the media object, and to request that other such media objects (with the same theme, or from the same place, etc.) to shown to them.

Documentation: Essays.

Fieldwork usually involves at least photographic documentation of places, people, and the landscape, and often involves audio and video recordigns. We are currently working on providing an online editorial interface and end user publication system for cataloging and storing images, audio recording, video recordings, immersive objects. This allows also for classifying and indexing the media objects according to place, project, collections, subject, and keywords.

On the horizon, we are also dealing with advanced issues relating to transcription of audio-video and its searching. This starts with transcribing and translating, but also includes time-coding and annotation. On the user end, it involves searching and synchronized play back of media and transcription, as well as automated creation of subtitled movies, and the ability to search the transcripts and then select segments of recordings that you combined together into a new user-composed recording.

Documentation: Audio-Video.

Of course all academic work involves the citation of sources, such as journal articles, books, and web sites. In formal publications, one wants to be able to enter a source once and then repeatedly draw upon that, as well as enable users to consult bibliographies overall as well as cite single sources.

VCP currently has a general bibliographical management system for such resources, including links to the PDFs, etc. of a reprint. It is based on PHP-MYSQL. It allows for detailed cataloging, linking to PDFs, and thematic classification which can then be easily browsed.

Documentation: Bibliographies

A key element of all fieldwork is documenting places, whether drawing maps or creating inventories of features and their interrelationships. Components of this include documenting place names in different forms, locating place names with latitude/longitude, documenting the relationship between features, creating a typology of types of features, and creating various thematic maps.

VCP will develop a complex gazetteer for documenting features, their names, location, characteristics, and relationships. This includes output to a GIS-based interactive map based on their latitude and longitude values. The Gazetteer will be stored and edited online.

GIS Mapping is currently being dealt with using ArcGIS for production and Map Guide for internet publishing.

Documentation: Places & Geography.

Documenting temporal change in communities, and especially broader historical changes, involves documenting events and creating timelines.

Fichoz offers a standalone offline File Maker Pro database as well as an database for documenting events. The database allows for their naming, description, typing, details on the date and the citation of source information.

MIT has offered an excellent tool named Simile for visualizing timelines, which we would like to explore use.

Documentation: Temporal Issues.