sreerag-rajan / historythroughmovies

Part of an initiative by a few students of history, this project aims to see if the pedagogy of history can be improved with the use of Visual Media, particularly cinema. This website is intended to show what we have found

History Through Movies

This website is the public arm of the parent project which is purposed to explore whether the visual media, particularly forms of cinema, can be inculcated into the pedagogy of History. Can they be used to enhance one's understanding of a particular theme or event. The primary objective of the project is to find such movies and understand how they portray the incident or event, with how much accuracy and how this can be used to explain the event itself in a teaching setting.

The website is inteded to show our results.

Website Link

We are considering changing the name to History Through Cinema, as that feels a bit more accurate

Features

• Organizing movies based on their theme and allowing the display of it so
  • Showing how a cinema is relevant to a theme
• Organizing movies based on the country it portrays and allowing the navigation of it through a map
• Special Modules that have a focused approach to a particular theme, or curriculam subject. A selection of 5-8 movies which give a holistic story to a particular topic.
• Other resources that can aid the pedagogical cause, such as google earth modules that give nice maps which are great visual tools in understanding events and movements.

Techstack

• Pyhton's Django Framework
• Dependencies can be found within requirements.txt

Getting Started

Install all dependencies from requirements.txt (You can create a virtualenv)

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run Django

Make Migrations:

python manage.py makemigrations

python manage.py migrate

Run Server:

python manage.py runserver

It will run locally on port 8000

Development

While the project has more members, the website responsibility(building and deploying), so far, has been solely mine.