The City of a Hundred Spires becomes digital: Bridging the digital divide through the use of new media

Robert Warner

This creative project focuses on providing accurate historical information, in an accessible format, for people to visit and learn about the city of Prague, Czech Republic. Prague is a city that has seen significant historical and cultural developments across the past nearly thousand years, and has a number of monuments that reflect these developments.\nFive separate monuments were chosen for this study: Prague Castle, the Cathedral of Saints Vitus, Wenceslas, and Adalbert, the Church of Saint Nicholas, Charles Bridge, and Wallenstein Palace. The history of each location was researched and documented, to provide the content for the second half of the project, the interactive website.\nThe digital divide, which traditionally refers to the lack of a physical connection to the Internet, is not limited to simply wires. Instead, it involves the presence of credible information. While there are several online resources to provide those seeking a deeper knowledge of Prague with where to shop, where to eat, and what tours to take. However, there are few sources on the open Internet that offer visitors academic information about the city. This project is designed to fill this gap.\nThe website, which is hosted at www.praguespires.com, was created using newly developed technology, which were constructed to streamline the process of creating desktop and mobile viewing experiences. Traditionally, creating mobile-friendly websites required the maintenance of two separate and distinct code bases, which can lead to the absence of consistent content. Recently, there has been a push towards ‘responsive’ sites, or sites that change as the viewport changes in size. Thanks to technology such as Twitter’s Bootstrap, a framework for rapidly building responsive websites, sites like this have become increasinglymore possible.\nI approached this project by creating a base template for the entire site, which could be scaled easily and cleanly, without undue reorganization. The overall design is kept to utmost minimalism:\nthere is only one color used for navigation elements, and all other elements are kept to a minimum. The navigation menu, which runs across the bottom of each page, is designed to cross between both mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and desktops. For mobile users, the navigation menu condenses to compensate for the smaller screens.

The City of a Hundred Spires becomes digital: Bridging the digital divide through the use of new media

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