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18 05 2012

OK, I think the next thing I’ll be working on for the Resources section is Official Correspondence. This will be from The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 2 (Serial No. 2). I just have to figure out how I’m going to set those pages up so they’re easy to find and use. I guess it would be best to set up pages by individual names, with an index for TO and FROM with dates. Any suggestions?

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Date : May 18, 2012
Tags: Articles, Digital History, Official Correspondence
Categories : Articles, Digital History, Official Correspondence, The Project

2 responses

18 05 2012: Brett S. - The Siege of Petersburg Online (13:02:17) :

Harry,

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m more than a little glad you’ll be getting to the OR Correspondence before me. I’ll have all three books of Reports on the Siege of Petersburg done probably sometime in September or October at the current rate, and then it’s on to the Correspondence for me as well.

Here is the way I am currently leaning (which probably doesn’t work as well for you due to the time differences between First Bull Run and the Siege of Petersburg, but offered up nonetheless in case it sparks an idea or two):

***
The Siege of Petersburg is divided up into 9 books in the ORs, with one book of reports and two of correspondence for each of the following time frames:
-June 12-July 31, 1864
-August 1-Dec 31, 1864
-1865

My idea within each of the six books of correspondence is as follows:
1. Have one web site post per day’s worth of Siege, with the cutoff being any letter sent before midnight belongs to that day, any post sent after is the next day.

2. For each piece of correspondence within a day, come up with a brief shorthand “title” to use with the html code. This “tags” the spot in the post where that specific piece of correspondence lives and allows me to link people directly to it in other articles. Let’s say Hancock sent a message to Grant at 1:15 P.M. on June 18, 1864. My shorthand title would be and would be placed in the HTML code at the start of that piece of correspondence.

3. I haven’t given much thought to how I’d display these other than by post (aka by day) for a given book. Since I’m working with six books, it will probably be necessary to set up some type of search page which would allow someone to find a specific piece of correspondence.
***

Alternative ways to do this might include a way to “tag” each piece of correspondence with the specifics for TO, FROM, DATE AND TIME SENT, which would provide you as the editor to make it easier to search on these items. At times I’ve even thought of just creating a MySQL database to house everything and build pages dynamically using PHP. I don’t know if I’ll go that high tech, however.

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18 05 2012: Brett S. - The Siege of Petersburg Online (13:05:51) :

Oops, part of my comment just tagged itself because you allow HTML code in your comments section. Here’s an updated #2 above so it makes more sense:

2. For each piece of correspondence within a day, come up with a brief shorthand “title” to use with the html “a name=” code. This “tags” the spot in the post where that specific piece of correspondence lives and allows me to link people directly to it in other articles. Let’s say Hancock sent a message to Grant at 1:15 P.M. on June 18, 1864. My shorthand title in the “a name=” code would be “Hancock_Grant_1315_18640618” and would be placed in the HTML code at the start of that piece of correspondence.

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