Technologies used for the Antarctica exhibit

Astute viewers of the Antarctica exhibit will note that the HTML version is copywritten by the University of Michigan, not by myself. The reason for this is that I've used a lot of University of Michigan equipment to create the HTML presentation.

Clients and servers

At the most basic level, I've been using a Sun SPARCstation 10 for the SILS HTTP server, which serves the exhibit's information to the Internet. We're using NCSA's httpd server, currently at version 1.0.

To test and view the exhibit, I've used Mosaic 2.1 for X, and Mosaic 1.0.1 for the Macintosh.

Authoring

HTML authoring has been done primarily on the SPARCstation, using the Motif-based ted editor from North Carolina State University. Remote authoring was done using vi or pico (from the University of Washington), or locally on my Powerbook using TeachText.

I don't feel a personal need for fancy HTML editors or style sheets. Then again, I also insisted on manual transmission when buying my car...

Imaging and scanning

Much of the existing material in the Antarctica exhibit was taken (with permission) from the Orient Lines brochures. I used the SILS Media Integration lab to scan and OCR the text and some of the images.

The scanning system consisted of a Quadra 840AV and an HP DeskScan IIc scanner. Images were scanned using the HP DeskScan software, and all text was scanned and OCRed using Omnipage Professional.

During my trip, I plan to use my Powerbook to make journal entries (to avoid transcription). I use FrameMaker for all of my text editing on the Powerbook. I'll also have an Olympus mini tape recorder for recording audio clips.

I'll be taking photos using a basic 35mm camera, and I'll have the film processed to Kodak PhotoCD when I return. I'll then be able to use the digital PhotoCD images for addition to the exhibit. (Examples of this use of PhotoCD images can be seen in the test photos I took of my hometown, Lapee r, Michigan.) The SPARCstation's CD-ROM drive mounts the PhotoCD as a High Sierra filesystem, and I use Hadmut Danisch's hpcdtoppm utility to extract the images from the PhotoCD files.

Image manipulation

To put the images into reasonable formats, perform cropping, scaling, and gamma correction operations, I've used the PBM Plus toolkit, the Utah Raster Toolkit, and the Independent JPEG Group's cjpeg and djpeg utilities, in addition to Hadmut Danisch's hpcdtoppm utility mentioned above. All of these tools run on the SPARCstation. I use John Bradley's xv for most of my viewing needs.

Internet resource discovery

To create the Internet resource guide, I used the Archie and Veronica Internet services. While professional Internet resource discovery also involves sending e-mail and USENET queries, I haven't had the time to carry out that stage of things yet. I also used the University of Michigan's Project DIRECT services (specifically the preprelease ClariView product) for gathering Antarctica-related information from ClariNet newsfeeds, but due to licensing restrictions I can't make any of that information available on the Internet.


Return to the metadocumentation...