This reading, as a whole, was a lot of content. I found it very well put together though and it gave me ideas for how I could possibly approach the final project in this class. The easy navigation throughout the digital article made it easy to find my way through the reading. Its very interesting that authors accredit Vannevar Bush’s envision of hypertext as the foothold for their article. Thomas and Ayers offer their piece of digital history as the first step to more types of scholarship. The authors believe that digital scholarship still needs improvement, which it does, and that they can address these four points in order to make digital scholarship of history as useful/reliable as its counterpart of written journals and articles.
- how to present narrative more effectively
- how to represent event and change
- how to analyze language more precisely
- how to create visualizations as compelling and complete as narrative
After reading the article it was easy to see that a lot of work had been put into this digital piece of history. Slavery is, often, a critical issue when addressed. The authors do a great job at producing a thorough analysis of how it affected two communities. For me, the strength of this website definitely came in its simple navigation; however, I believe nothing will ever pass up the simplicity of a paper article just because anyone can turn a page. Not everyone knows how to use and function through digital scholarship. Another strength I found in this website was the access to resources. The site offered links to encyclopedic articles as well as other sources used for the analysis. The utilization of charts and maps was very beneficial in their analysis because this allows for simple comparisons to be made. One chart they used was the following to show statistics of laborers in Augusta and Franklin during the year 1860.
I found this chart to be very informative and simple to understand. The authors did not add anything to complex that would cause difficulty in the understanding such as color or a three-dimensional chart. I believe this method for relaying information will be very useful when it comes to the final project in this class.
Digitization of the past is still a new technology. I believe that much history will be digitized in the future just for storage-sakes; however, it may not always be as engaging as exploring something in person or reading the physical manuscript. Overall, I found this article very useful and will use it as a resource for the final project.