The purpose of the web report assignment is two-fold. First, it provides an opportunity for you to research a disaster of interest to you. Second, it will give you the chance to learn basic HTML and web design.
Select one of the disasters listed below. Collect as much basic information about it as you can from books, popular periodicals, and the Internet. Also, make sure to read at least five papers somehow related to your topic, which appeared in refereed scholarly journals. In your Internet research, be sure to note the URLs of any graphics related to your topic, perhaps maps of the disaster or photographs of the damage or its impact on people. You will be incorporating these URLs to illustrate your web report. I do NOT want you to scan and post imagery from published sources, which will almost certainly create copyright problems for you.
Once you've collected your information and digested it, write up the following items. First, create a timeline of important events, perhaps those leading up to the disaster, the disaster itself, incidents during emergency response, recovery, and reconstruction, and indications of politicians' involvements in the tragedy.
Second, write a narrative explaining the physical dynamics of the event, whether it was an earthquake (the fault that failed or its location in a seismogenic zone or not), flood (the storms that set it off and any unusual characteristics of the storms), fire (pyrogenic vegetation processes), technological disaster (infrastructure failure), or whatever. Write it at the level of an educated layperson.
Third, write another narrative accounting for the human impacts and tragedy involved. Perhaps certain classes of people were somehow set up to be at great risk due to basic economic processes, societal prejudice, or sometimes cultural quirks (e.g., this home with a view business in American culture). Perhaps response and recovery were uneven and unfair.
Fourth, discuss the social response to the disaster, covering early emergency activities, restoration activities, and the success or failure of reconstruction. In this section, draw out the lessons that can be gleaned from this disaster to help mitigate against and prepare for other disasters of the same or similar type.
Last, create a reference list of everything you used to create your web report. If you like, you can create a separate section of useful further readings for the educated layperson.
These four mini-reports and reference list all done, you need to start thinking about web design. You'll need a home page for your disaster, the page people land in from the common web page I'll create as a pointer to your individual reports. This one should be very small, one or two screens, and should include the name of your report in some emphasis. One small graphic is okay here (if it's too big or you have too many of them, the page will take forever to load and surfers will just go on elsewhere). This page is the hook you use to make readers want to learn more about the disaster and surf around your disaster web report.
The home page should link to the rest of your report. This could be a single link that leads to a document that has a link to yet another document, which forces people to read your material in a linear manner. You could, alternatively, give people a menu of links and let them figure out the sequence in which they'd like to view your material. You should include a mail link for readers to contact you, too.
For ideas on designing your disaster page, you could visit the following site on the Messina-Reggio Earthquake of 1908, the deadliest earthquake ever to hit Europe (100,000 people died in the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent fires). This page was designed by an amateur geneologist, who kept coming across references to this quake in his family history, so it has a more personal touch than your web reports are likely to do. The site is http://yang.interaccess.com/~arduinif/tales/tales15a.htm
That chore done, it's time to code your page. I would like you to do your work in your regular word processor, saving your reports as files with the .htm or .html extensions. This will get you familiar with the basic elements of HTML and the requirements of the Web.
The way this works, you go through my brilliant lecture and web lecture on basic HTML. All excited, you put it to work in your word processor. When you think you're happy with your work, save it and then use your Web browser to open the page. If it's all messed up (which it will be the first few tries), you go back to the document in your word processor, save the changes, and reload the page. Repeat this enough times, and you'll eventually be happy with it and can then load your work onto your web account. This is yet another lecture and a web lecture by graduate student, Mr. Adam Henderson.
Once you're familiar with the whole process, you may want to switch to using a Web composer, which tries to interpret regular word processor or desktop publisher documents in HTML. This can speed things up for you. I personally find them really annoying and I work much faster in basic HTML, but, then, I'm kind of a nerd. Whatever. Some examples of Web composers include Netscape Composer, Internet Assistant, Claris Front Page, and a passle of others. Experiment and see what suits your fancy.
If you would like to take up another disaster outside California, speak with me. If I think there is enough information on it, I may let you do the proposed disaster.