IS 290-2
Electronic Publishing
October 12, 1998

Katherine Falk, Michael Roberts,
Dan McMahon, Barbara Stone

Comparative Analysis:
Online Historic Walking Tour of Oakland

There are two key types of comparable web projects to examine: these are those that focus on the same geographic area and target market, such as sites outlining Oakland, walking tours of the city, historic information and information for kids. Second, there are walking tours of historic resources in other cities should be looked at for ideas, for a sense of how and why such web tours are done, and sometimes what shouldn't be done.

1. Oakland on the web: what others have done.

This part of the comparison is relatively easy. There is, generally, very little historic information about Oakland on the web of any type, for any audience, especially for a city of this size. Yet the few sites that exist are worth examining, and to an extent offer insight into "what not to do."

A.   Guide to Walking Tours of Historic Oakland
http://www.oaklandnet.com/community/community2.html
By name, this is the closest competing product to our project. This lavishly graphic but essentially information-free site is on Oaklandnet.com ("the official website of the City of Oakland"). Sadly, there is "no there there" at this site, as the information that is present about the tours is limited to a very brief description of the itineraries, and when and where to assemble to take the tour. The tours do sound very interesting, and the reader is left with a "tell me more" feeling, but the site does not progress to that extent. The graphics are well designed, but not really well used, as they add to the impression that there should be some information at this web site. They seem that more time and money went into designing the look of the site than went into developing and organizing its content. Navigation and use of frames are also exceedingly poor throughout the site.

B.   Oakland Museum of California
http://www.museumca.org/
This is a pretty good website which features a Virtual Museum section, although it has only two exhibits at this time. Neither of these exhibits deals with Oakland, but rather they focus on larger, statewide historic issues. Outside of the two "virtual" exhibits, this site is more "about the museum" than a representation "of the museum." There are excellent descriptions of the material one will encounter at the museum, and enticing information on its publications. The site as a whole uses a good navigational layout and well-designed graphics. The virtual museum includes Quicktime VR clilps under the charming title "Maximize Web Visit."

C.   Oaklandca.com's "Oakland History"
http://www.oaklandca.com/html/history.html
This is a "two page" written history of Oakland, and fairly good at that, though brief. There is a single illustration of Jack London. The information is supposedly culled from "the City of Oakland's own site" nothing of the sort was visible at the alleged source. Generally, this is a fair effort for a site that's really focused on commercial information, and actually devotes the most words to Oakland's history of any site I encountered on the web.

The only other sites that were even close for consideration were those of an old restaurant, the history of the Oakland Symphony (since 1988!) and two of the branch libraries, which are starting to assemble information on their neighborhoods. The latter projects promise to be eventually quite good, though limited in scope, and as this search found no site attempting to link these various resources together, this is another possible and easy-to-accomplish function of our project.

After examining this first group of sites, we conclude that there is very little information on the web about Oakland history, in any form, for any audience. Most of what does exist in Oakland's cyberspace is specifically posted for publicity purposes by the creating agencies, and thus the depth, validity and educational nature of the information takes second place to the publicity mission of each web site. The museum's site is an exception, but while this site is promising, it isn't working yet on Oakland itself, and yet it seems as though others are leaving this task to the museum. It's likely that some of the active neighborhood groups (Temescal, Fruitvale, Rockridge, etc.) will be creating historic web sites in the near future, given the pamphlets, books and videos they have produced on their area histories.

2. Walking tours and historic sites for other cities.

Katherine gathered a good list of other walking tour sites from around the Internet (and thus the English-speaking world) for comparison to our proposed effort. These were more instructive than the Oakland sites, and generally more interesting, both whether as good examples or bad.

Generally, the style and layout of other walking tours fell into one of a few groups. Most were very map-driven, with a large image map (literally a map) on the front page, and separate pages for each site covered. Many of the maps were rather ugly and hard to read, and it is apparent that designing a good map interface will be a difficult task. (The best example of bad map design is Virtual Cape Cod, at http://www.virtualcapecod.com/vcapemap.html. This site is also relatively information-free.) Many of the sites had content that was limited to a few photographs, while others had content that was heavily tilted toward long, unbroken passages of text. Some of the sites depended on some rather arcane structures for navigation, with multiple text menus on different pages, arrayed and titled in a very unclear and confusing manner.

The Virtual Ellis Island Tour (http://www.capital.net/~alta/index.html) was interesting for the age group and educational purpose it's targeting. But it does focus on one of four narrative experiences of "virtual immigrants" and makes poor use of the photos the site contains. It also gives what should be an historic resource a very "fiction-like" feel, and has no real sense of connection with the physical Ellis Island of today or the early 1900's. This site earns the label, "designed by adults, for kids, for their own good."

The three best sites we found, for different reasons in each case, were the Black Heritage Trail (of the Museum of African American History in Boston), the McFadden Ward House, and the Alexander Palace. The Black Heritage trail (http://www.afroammuseum.org/trail.htm) uses a good design with nice graphics, keeps a menu bar on the left throughout the site, and is generally interesting. The "tour" part is accessed too deeply into the site however, and should be prominent and accessible from the front page instantly upon loading.

The McFadden Ward House site (http://www.mcfaddin-ward.org/tour.htm) has the best map-based navigation and a wonderfully simple layout. It has perhaps the best text-photo balance of all of the viewed sites, and manages to put three different "streams" of information on each individual web page. This site has a relatively light information load, which makes the superb navigation system possible, but it is an instructive project with which to compare our own efforts.

The site for the Alexander Palace (http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/rooms.html) is graphically stunning, with well-designed panels and a graphic-oriented (rather than text-oriented) layout. While the quality of the graphics is quite nice (if not lavish) and imparts a good feel for the subject (a palace), there were two small problems with this site we'd like to avoid. All of the navigation is done by image maps, and given the lengthy descriptions, and the need to "map out" three levels of the site, these image maps are too wordy, and would be very confusing to young people. (It's a strange mix of a "right-brain" type of design, which relies on heavy "left-brain" kinds of navigational choices.) Second, each specific page (for each room of the palace) has just a single photo at the top, and a lengthy block of text below that. It should be possible to create a slightly better distribution than this with our project, as we hope to have a minimum of three illustrations for each "site" page, and to interleave these with small blocks of text.

Conclusions

  • Our market for Oakland history (for kids or otherwise) is wide open, and additionally there are no sites endeavoring to link the other efforts, even as an afterthought.

  • There are design and organizational features in some of the other virtual tours which we feel that we can use. To an even greater extent, however, we found features that we want to avoid. The "virtual tour" is a genre that is still very much in flux.

  • We were surprised that none of the visited sites uses the kind of non-static page generation that we are hoping to use. The kind of information that these sites track is better managed by a databased-driven system, and by a metadata-based organizational approach.

List of Sites Visited:

Written by Daniel McMahon and Katherine Falk, Oct. 12, 1998.
Return to Kids' Guide to Historic Oakland Project Page.
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