Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier

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During the fall 2014 semester, I took a class called LIS 61095: Special Topics: Cultural Heritage Informatics. The final project for this class was to create a website providing various details on an object of our cultural heritage. Because I am interested in genealogy, and had recently at the time. found several ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, I chose for my cultural object the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier in Philadelphia, PA.

For our project we needed to provide metadata for the object in a work record using CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects). We also needed to find at least five images of the object and catalog those as well, linking them to the work record.

The next element was to include some interactive portions to the site. This started with taking the images and add them to the historypin.org which places historical photographs on a map where they do or once existed. This followed by creating a timeline of the tomb’s history using events related to its establishment. Additionally, a couple videos from YouTube were added showing the monument in its location within Washington Square. The second video shows the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Arlington National Cemetery. The tomb I chose is only one of the many tombs to unknown soldiers in the world and this video attempts to connect it to this larger community. Lastly I added a 360 degree view of Washington Square that includes the tomb within it found on Google Maps.

I included a write up about the tomb that gives a bit of its history and how it came to be as well as some descriptions of the tomb itself. This page also includes a concept web of terms and parts of the tomb and how they relate to the website.

For the final piece of the project I included an about page in order to share links to the image creators websites as well as information on the permission whether I obtained permission to display the images or they were public domain or creative commons images.

The website was coded by hand using HTML, CSS, and PHP. The website can be found by following this link.