Notes on the Evolution of the Digital Web

Note: There are actually quite a few different ways to look at and evaluate a website, and if you do a web search for "website evaluation," you will see find several options. In regard to evaluation, you can assign different weights to different design criteria. You also must look at information as there is always the issue of the credibility of the site's creator. We will look more closely at some specific web design criteria in unit 5. For now, let's look at some criteria for evaluating websites that I use in my other online history courses. In fact, I think that one of the most important evaluation criteria is the ability to exactly figure out the identity of a site's author and then the credentials/authority of that author. Plus the site has to look good and have an intuitive navigation structure.

Off the top of my head I came up with this list of history projects for this unit. (Actually, I have known the individuals responsible for most of these.) The projects pretty much span the last twenty years or so of what has happened online. I'm sure that I could have come up with a lot more. As you look at these, and then as you continue through the course and look at the later apps that we will be working with, you should be able to see the general shift in online digital projects that has occurred, from simply putting content online to the current focus on tools and interactivity. (I think that I spoke a bit about this in my video for unit 2). Below you will find some rough comments for each site.

• The Avalon Project (Yale University; documents were originally mostly diplomatic but have now expanded; structure has changed slightly over the years, but still simple and relatively easy to use; an enormously very useful site for historians)
• The April 16 Archive (Va Tech shooting, an Omeka archival collection; I am interested in the memory aspect of this type of collection and how collective memory of the event will evolve over the years)
• Oyez (This has been around a long time now; another great, largely text-based resource site; seems to have private funding now; not sure how much material is included here besides the actual case decisions themselves; think that I saw some ads, which I usually don't like)
• The Valley of the Shadow (very old; classic project; always found it difficult to use; site has never really been revised--I'm not sure that it can be; problem with its use of newspaper sources, which are just transcribed)
• Romantic Circles (also a very old site; from the University of Maryland; largely copyright free texts, but also difficult to navigate; not sure how much material has continued to be added to it--same issue with the Dickinson archive below--once the site is up, the creators seem to stop collecting)
• Dickinson Electronic Archive (same with what I just wrote about Romantic Circles)
• Persepolis: A Virtual Reconstruction (this is something relatively new; one of our history adjuncts is involved in the project; it is actually pretty cool; since Persepolis no longer exists, this raises the question of what is real on the web)
• American Memory (this has started out on a relatively small scale by the Library of Congress, but it has since become huge; great because the sites are largely public domain materials)
• Lascaux (has both French and English versions; because it is now best that people don't actually go into these prehistoric caves any more; this may soon be the only way left to experience the caves; really cool site)
• Digital Karnak (Karnak also no longer exists, having been abandoned thousands of years ago)
• Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (really the first large scale Omeka collecting project devoted to documenting the effects of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina on New Orleans; staff now seems to be trying to figure out what to do with it all)
• Hawthorne in Salem (one of the early digital projects that I was associated with; rare that a community college has been able to do anything; modest scale; also note the limitations in that they have not been able to take it in any new directions)
• Amiens Cathedral Project (one of the great early visualization projects, if we can call it that; but again, it has never really been updated; nice video)
• Life Outtacontext, In Our Path and Eye Level by Jeff Gates (In Our Path, with the photos, is a great example of what can be done with a blog--more later in the course; Eye Level is really a PR device for the Smithsonian Institution; took the museum a lot of years to figure out what could be done with social media)

In the unit I also ask you to look more closely at three Civil War sites, all roughly targeting the larger Northern Virginia area.

• The Valley of the Shadow
• Journey through Hallowed Ground (national heritage area)
• Shenandoah at War (national historic district)

In doing so, I wanted to introduce you to

• (a) one of the very first digital history projects (The Valley)
• (b) the concepts of a national heritage area (Journey) and a national historic district (Shenandoah). Those are relatively new concepts developed by the National Park Service.
• (c) different approaches to treating the Civil War. These three websites are very much different in regard to design, content and function (and of course complexity). The Valley site is pretty straight-forward HTML code, the other two are far more complicated and require professional design and a lot of money.

Finally, there are several sites out there that list "great" history websites, for example, Best of History Websites. As you look through the sites, you will see some common features: simplicity, easy navigation, great content, etc.

I guess at some point we might consider just what are digital humanities. What does it mean to say that you are a digital humanist? Check this out: The digital humanities is not about building, it's about sharing. There are some really interesting ideas in this reading.