European Resistance Archive (ERA)

On behalf of the Istituto Storico della Resistenza di Reggio Emilia (Reggio Emilia Historical Institute for the Study of the Resistance) the Berlin based company lieblinx GmbH implemented the European Resistance Archive (ERA) website.

ERA is a space in which individual stories of people having resisted against the terror, humiliation and despair fascism brought over Europe are kept alive and visible for everybody.

The main part of the ERA website consists of filmed interviews with women and men, who took part in antifascist resistance in various ways in 6 European countries. All videos are subtitled in English and there is an English transcription that can be downloaded in PDF format. Translations of subtitles and transcriptions in other languages are partially available and can also be contributed by people who wish to participate in expanding the archive.

Moreover there is a map with historical information, there are pictures, documents and scientific essays with specific information about the situations in the respective countries.

Technical Aspects:

Videos are encoded in FLV using the On2 VP6 codec. Interviews consist of multiple clips (chapters) that can be tagged. There is at least an English subtitle file in XML format for each clip. Users can display these subtitles by clicking a select button in the flash player and choose a different language if a translation exists. The subtitles can also be hidden.

All clips of one interview are played back in sequential order. Users can also “jump” to a chapter by clicking on one of the chapter links right to the video player. This functionality is achieved using jQuery and the Actionscript External API so that only the clip and the available subtitles are loaded without a complete page reload.

For all witnesses there is also an image gallery displayed below the video player, which is implemented using the image and thickbox modules and the jQuery plugin jCarousel. Preview images and the corresponding titles and descriptions are loaded dynamically via AJAX requests.

This technique is also used for the glossary. The glossary block lists all glossary terms, that occur in the current interview. The relation between glossary terms and interviews is set up during an indexing phase in which the transcription texts are parsed and linked to the glossary terms. The indexing occurs during cron runs but the database tables are only updated when changes were made since the last cron was executed.

The Drupal core search module is used for searching the whole website. Additionally an advanced video search was developed that allows users to limit results by choosing certain conditions, such as country, time, and type of resistance.

For creating markers displayed on the interactive European flash map we developed a module making use of the Google Maps API that accepts Google Earth Information data (KML) as user input. The Google Maps/Earth coordinates are processed with ActionScript.

Suggestions, critique and questions are welcome

http://www.resistance-archive.org

http://www.lieblinx.net