Changing Mapscape: The Story Behind This Site

by Laurie Trask Mann

This Web site has evolved from projects for three unrelated college courses:

A report on the impact on the maps of West Boylston that the construction of the Wachusett Reservoir had for a Geographic Information Systems class.
A report on the evolution of medicine and health care practices since the Revolutionary War in America for an honors class on the History of Medicine and Health Care.
A new Web site for a graduate course on Document Processing.

Having spent my "formative" years in West Boylston, I was always fascinated by the reservoir.

Site Issues/Likely Changes

I didn't use "advanced programming techniques" to the extent that I ought to have. At some point in the not too distant future, I hope to:

Add some sort of checking to the "slide show" such that pages appear quickly for people on the Pitt network. The pages load fine if you're running a 28.8 modem from the outside, but are painfully slow if you view the pages from Pitt.
Figure out why the GIS page crashes if you run Netscape 4.7 (or earlier) but appears fine if you run IE 5.0 or Netscape 6.0.
Understand why the pages look awful when viewed by the HotJava browser - I suspect it has to do with the XHTML validation. All the pages in this set are valid XHTML.
Revise the "Where Am I" interactive graphic so that it's managed by JavaScript or Perl. I haven't been able to get it to work. I also think using Java might help that graphic load more efficiently.