Other Histories

I’ve been trying to get things together to try and upgrade the OS on my PC, and get the applications I want installed on the new/old domain. In the process, I’ve been uncovering a lot of old history. I’m not sure if I want to reconstruct it or not, but I found the remnants of my first web site from 1998. Sheesh. Six years of playing with this stuff.

One thing that’s been lurking here for a long time, which I’ve dusted off because I might need it as a professional sample, is my Keepsakes website. Though I always hoped that someone would place it on the university server, I’ve kept it on my site since no one seemed to care. I get a few search engine hits for it, and I’m glad—I suspect they come from relatives or residents of the areas discussed.

Keepsakes was a service learning project I worked on from 1999-2000. We collected oral histories at a local retirement home. My experience doing this was challenging to say the least—I had to reconstruct the history of a woman in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. The following semester was more “fun” I suppose— I worked with a woman who wanted to write her own story about dealing with her husband’s senile dementia. The semester after that, I constructed the website of the stories these two classes put together as well as a print publication. Now that I can, I’ve converted the print version to PDF. It is more heavily edited than the online version, due to space constraints.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it since I finished it in 2000, but it’s been lurking here in another directory. I’ve transplanted it now, to visibledarkness.com (where it originally lived). If you’re interested in the stories of some elderly Arkansas citizens, you might have a look.