Create Instructional Websites or Software

Summary of Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project

The "Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History" project is focused on providing high-quality materials to high schools and universities for the teaching of historical methods and Canadian History. This project is a series of twelve websites based on mysteries in Canadian History.

HCMC staff were actively involved in designing and supervising production of the first site, and in consulting on the infrastructure needed to create the remaining sites. For the remaining sites, the HCMC has been acting as technical consultants and providing workspace and stations. Technologies used include: MySQL, PHP, XHTML

More details can be found at the Canadian Mysteries website: http://www.canadianmysteries.ca/indexen.html.

Summary of Victoria's Victoria site

The goal of this site is to host student microhistory projects created as part of a history course. HCMC provided templates for students to use, and designed the overall hosting site and infrastructure to allow for indefinite additions of new projects.

The site is at http://web.uvic.ca/vv/.

Summary of Wheelock Exercises in Latin site

This site is designed to accompany a standard Latin textbook. It consists of hundreds of web page exercises created with Hot Potatoes.

The site is at: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/latin/wheelock/.

Summary of Latin Driller Killer site

As the name suggests, this site is intended to drill Latin vocabulary. It is largely a collection of web page exercises created with the Hot Potatoes program in 2001, and accepts answers with or without length markers.

http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/latin/

Summary of Spanish 100 Practice Tests site

The site consists of a number of practice tests, each implemented as a set of web page exercises created with Hot Potatoes. It also contains a large number of review exercises, also in the form of Hot Potatoes exercises.

For links to both the exams and the exercises, see http://web.uvic.ca/hispanital/hispanic/span100tests/index.htm.

Summary of Italian 100 resources

This site contains a collection of web-based exercises created with Hot Potatoes in 2001 and a practice exam implemented as a set of Hot Potatoes exercises in 2004.

Links to the Italian 100 exercises and practice exams are at: http://web.uvic.ca/hispanital/italian/exams/index.htm.

Summary of Italian 250 exercises site

The site contains a practice exam consisting of web page exercises created with Hot Potatoes in 2003. Though the actual exam is not delivered online, the practice exam gives the students an idea of what to expect, and helps them review material.

Links to both can be found at http://web.uvic.ca/hispanital/italian/exams/250B_2004/index.htm.

Summary of Beginner's Indonesian site

This site is a self-contained introductory course consisting largely of web exercises created with Hot Potatoes, and includes audio clips.

The site is at http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/indonesian.

Summary of the Scraps project

The Scraps project has produced a web-based system to mark up and display multi-level digitized artifacts, such as scrapbooks, albums, etc. The Image Markup Tool is used to mark up the digitized images. The Scraps administration program uses the IMT files and other user-supplied data to create a hierarchical structure that is displayed by the Scraps viewer. Users can drill down through the layers of the hierarchy to view embedded objects.

The site for this project at http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~scraps/demo/ includes a demo page for Scraps and a bit of info and links for demo sites.

The development blog for this project is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=19.

Summary of an online database containing transcripts of the TimesColonist newspaper

The goal of this project is to take a collection of transcripts of new stories from early editions of the Times Colonist and other Victoria newspapers which are currently in text files containing special codes for various bits of information, normalize the records, put them into an SQL database and then write a querying front-end to allow students, researchers and the general public to have access to this information on the history of colonial Vancouver Island.

The development blog for this project is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=24.

Summary of Video Markup project

This project allows an author to add transcript and event timelines to a digital video. The transcript is searchable and each instance of the search word found by a query is presented to the user in the context of the sentence containing it. The user can then click on the instance of the search word to go to the appropriate location in the video. A user may also search across the transcripts of all the lectures in the database. The system allows the author or user to create bookmarks which are saved on the server and can be retrieved later by other users. Our prototype data is taken from two lectures in the Lansdowne Lecture series at the University of Victoria.

The site is at http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~taprlans/.

Summary of FrancoToile Video Project

The purpose of the this project is to allow students to select from a collection of short video clips with transcripts, so that they can gain a sense of the diversity of francophone people worldwide. Catherine Caws of the UVic department of French is the academic researcher. The code is based on work done for the Lansdowne Lecture video markup project and is being extended to address the needs of this project.

The site is at http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~florevid/.

The development documention blog is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=12.

Summary of VIHistory project

The VIHistory project consists of a collection of statistical databases (in postGres) and an interface which allows searching within each and across the entire collection. The main technical issues in this project are: 1) providing a normalized abstraction for the structure of data across various datasets (censuses, business directories, tax records etc.) while maintaining the original structure in each resource; 2) providing a user interface which supports the wide range of audiences (academic scholars through members of the public asking geneological questions); 3) accommodating new datasets containing new fields in the future.

The site is at http://vihistory.uvic.ca.

Summary of London Map project

"The Map of Early Modern London" is a hyperlinked atlas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London based on the "Agas" woodcut map of the 1560s. Over 200 sites and streets are linked to pages that provide a full historical and archaeological survey, quotations from John Stow's Survey of London, and a bibliography of literary references. Over 200 additional sites and streets are identified. For example, you can click on a street and find all the literary references in our database to that street. This site began as a pedagogical tool in 1999. It is in the process of becoming a scholarly tool with fully refereed articles. Technologies used include PHP, eXist, XQuery.

The site is at http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/.

Summary of Nxaʔamxcín (Moses) project

This is a very small sample of an early beta-version of a database of Nxaʔamxcín (known in English as Moses, or Moses-Columbia Salish). Its purposes are:
1) To pull together all the materials on Nxaʔamxcín compiled by two of the linguists who have worked most closely with native speakers of the language in order to make these materials available and easily accessible to the Nxaʔamxcín community, rather than to leave them stored on file cards and in notebooks.
2) To serve as a searchable tool for learners, teachers, speakers, and linguists to encourage more active knowledge of the language.
3) To serve as an important source of material for the future compilation of a comprehensive dictionary of Nxaʔamxcín, an important goal of the Nxaʔamxcín Language Preservation Program.
4) To serve as a base to which additional language material, including audio and visual material, may be added easily.

The site is at http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/moses/.

Summary of Graves project

Graves' diary (1935-39) manuscript includes 1546 pages including 117 enclosures: letters, clippings, photographs, post cards, notes, games, etc. The project's objective is to produce the first scholarly edition in print and electronic form of this unpublished diary. One of the issues in this project was successfully representing abstracts, enclosures and other peculiar features of the composition of the original documents. The HCMC created the database and search interface using XML-based technologies. The raw XML data is available on the search engine site. The site allows you to search by date range or text string. Technologies used include XQuery, eXist, Cocoon, Tomcat.

The home page for the site is at http://gateway.uvic.ca/spcoll/GravesDiaryProject/home.htm, and the search engine is at http://graves.uvic.ca.

Summary of Maclure drawings project

The goal of this project is to create a collection of annotated architectural drawings by Samuel Maclure, and particularly to engage students in their creation and analysis. The scanned images are to be annotated using the Image Markup Tool. The result will be a searchable database of features linked to the images, and of course the image files with popup annotations. In 2007, we intend to have students mark up images as part of a credit course.

More details on this in-development project are at http://tapor.uvic.ca/projects.php#maclurehouse.

Summary of Image Markup and Presentation tool

The Image Markup and Presentation tool (IMaP) allows very large images to be displayed in a web browser. The images can exceed the size of the browser window; the user can pan the image in any direction to see the hidden areas. The user can zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for an overview. The image can be marked up with symbols, shapes and labels, which are displayed as overlays on top of the base image. The markup can also link to extensive annotations, which can be displayed when the user clicks on an image feature. Feature annotations are stored in a database, which can be searched.

More details can be found at http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~taprimap/imapdemo/demo/.

Summary of Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes is an application program which allows authors to create standard exercises (multiple choice, fill in blanks, matching, cloze, crossword, flashcards). The program takes the data entered by the author and combines that with template files to create sophisticated xhtml pages. Over 500,000 users have downloaded the software since its first public release in 1998.

For more details, examples and download, see http://hotpot.uvic.ca.

Summary of Quandary

Quandary is an application program originally written to allow students in an ethics course to create decision trees to make more explicit inconsistencies in their logic. The author fills in blanks in the program and their data is combined with an html template to create a web page. The user makes a series of decisions, where each decision point presented depends on responses to previous decision points.

Full details on Quandary can be found at http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary.php.