In the last month, I have begun putting the innards of my website together. Unsurprisingly it was difficult. But I am happy to report some progress! At this point, I am working towards making a page that whose format I would like to replicate in the other pages. In other happy news, I was able to procure some archival material (thanks to the internet and sagacious archival staff at Cornell University and the National Archives in Atlanta), seminal to my project.
In working out a page format I liked, I first went to a front end platform like Bootstrap. Unfortunately, what I wanted needed too many changes to the template. So I just began working ground-up. As someone new to JavaSript and CSS, I prefer to have everything at one place. It might be a slightly archaic way of working and definitely pedantic, but it’s the one way I am able to work on ‘website stuff’ without having to work again on a separate CSS file etc.
Broadly speaking the website will have five sections: about; ‘Norris: A Utopia’; ‘Understanding Norris’; ‘Photographing Norris’; ‘Company Towns in America’. Each of these sections will further have a drop down menu listing out sub-sections.
The section exploring Norris as a utopia will explore the imaginations that understood Norris as a utopia. It will explore the utopian nature of Norris through newspaper clippings, material generated by the TVA to justify Norris and extoll its virtues, press releases, and essays/commentary by architects and planners of Norris (this is where the Earle Draper papers would feature heavily).
Housing in Norris was based on typologies. The next section, ‘Understanding Norris’ will trace the rationale of the housing typologies, the housing typologies themselves and relating the typologies to plans, elevations and housing types.
As an important infrastructural project the Norris Dam was important for the TVA in many ways. As a project undertaken during the Great Depression, the Norris Dam and the town of Norris were photographed extensively by the Farm and Security Administration (FSA)- Office of War Information[1]. The photographs are available at the Library of Congress website. The next section then will showcase the FSA photographs, in addition to photographs of Norris from newspapers etc.
Lastly, Norris was company town. The last section will examine briefly, a history of company towns in the United States through essays and book sections. This section will also showcase further sources that readers can access on company towns.
On a personal note, I have begun to work in and through GitHub, a platform that has been giving me nightmares for many months now!
The page format I am veering towards is here . I would really appreciate any feedback you might have!
Also, I am really looking for a fun title. I welcome all ideas!!
[1] For more see http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/
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