portfolio: Northwestern University Archival Websites

Details

Role: UX Designer, Visual Designer, IA, PM

An ongoing collaboration with Leigh Bienen, Senior Lecturer, School of Law, began with the discovery of handwritten records of ~13,000 homicides in Chicago from 1870-1930 in the basement of a police precinct, a corresponding Word doc of the descriptions, then a database drawn from attributes of the description—which served as the core of the website, an interactive databse, supported with thousands of documents and photographs. The website has been visited more than 1.5M times.

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Leveraging both the core functionality of Homicide and the availability of high-speed scanning, video production and AWARE JPEG 2000 image servers in Academic Technologies, and the development of our own custom web app, Document Repository, we created a companion website focused on the work of one of the social activists of 1890s Chicago, peer of Jane Addams (of Hull House reknown).

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  • Homicide: Interactive DB: case details page

  • Homicide: Video Grid: custom in-house app

  • Florence: Image Browser (AWARE image server)

  • Florence: Search Utility: custom in-house app

  • Florence: Document Repository: custom in-house app (~50k pages)

 

Documentation

  • wireframe - Homicide results page

    wireframe
    Homicide results page

    view

  • wireframe - Florence Kelley home page

    wireframe
    Florence home page

    view

  • content map - Florence Kelley

    schematic-search,
    content mapping

    view

  • Document repository

    document repository
    Florence Kelley

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  • Document model - presentation to Sidley Austin LLP

    website concept (PPT)
    presentation to Sidley Austin LLP

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