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The True Story of Lynn Stuart
A woman looks up in fear. Her hand covers her face revealing only her right eye. A braclet dangles from her wrist. An inset image shows a man standing over a woman sitting on the ground in a torn red dress. With his right fist clenched, he forcibly holds her right arm.
About SomePostersApp
The Interstate Poster Collection resides within the Film Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The collection consists of over 3,000 posters, and many have been digitized. The institution stores the images and poster metadata in a database for in-house use. For my project, I developed a database and web application that links specific film and poster metadata to the digital images of individual posters, so users can visually browse and search the collection. The application is an interactive user experience that provides multiple access points to the collection.
The project was completed in four stages. First, using an existing wireframe and available information for each poster in the Harry Ransom Center''s database as well as external sources, I mapped the significant data into a entity-relationship diagram. Second, I developed a relational database with a table structure that integrates individual posters, their images, and descriptive metadata. Third, I cataloged a small sample of the collection and populated the database. Fourth, I used MySQL and PHP to create a web application that allows users to visually browse and search the collection.
This project relied on the ground work established during a group project in Creating and Using Digital Media course in the Spring of 2009, where we created a interactive wireframe that conceptualized how a poster collection, such as the Interstate Poster Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, could organized and presented for users to browse and interact with the digital images. From the wireframe, I determined a simple information architecture around the browsing features proposed in the design. The majority of the site will be a continuous poster gallery, where users can choose sort and approach individual posters from multiple directions, such as genre, color, style, or size. While the wireframe conceptually informed me of the metadata that I would like to utilize in the web application, the existing metadata for individual posters in the OpenCollection database that the HRC used in-house provided me with a list of possible entities and attributes for my database. I browsed the collection and listed all the attributes available for each poster entry, many of which went unused, but on the most part the posters had all the sufficient metadata.