Continuing my ongoing collaboration with the local communities surrounding the Jordan Plantation, in the summer of 1997 I began the process of creating, or 'weaving', this web site. I first met with the local planning organisation, the Levi Jordan Plantation Historical Society, to obtain their support and initial input. This organisation is composed of both African-American and European-American descendants as well as other community members. At this point they approved the original web site proposal, and they continue to contribute content for the site and make the final decisions about some of the more 'sensitive' content components. I also met with teachers at the local junior high school who wanted to use the web site in their history and computer literacy classes.
Working with these people and others (including Ken Brown and his students) I began to assemble the various content components - data, texts, images, and so on. By the end of the summer of 1997 we had published a prototype web site, so I then asked my collaborators - community and professional - to comment on this prototype. I spent the spring and summer of 1998 revising the prototype site based on the critiques received, and including more archaeological, anthropological and historical data (as well as content material from members of the various descendant communities). At this point I added on-line interactive elements to the web site, including on-line discussion groups, feedback forms, and a questionnaire. The final evaluation of this project will include qualitative analysis of the process of developing the web site (one stage of which is the focus of this paper), discourse analysis of postings made to discussion groups, and quantitative analysis of questionnaire and log data provided by my Internet service provider.
Go to the Levi Jordan Web Site
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URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue6/mcdavid/process.html
Last updated: Wed Apr 28 1999