[On August 6, 1991, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced his WWW software for the first time. So for the 30th anniversary of the occasion that brought us all here, this week I’ll highlight just a handful of the many wonderful AmericanStudies websites. Share your favs for a crowd-sourced post, please!]
On a few key
things that we can still learn from a groundbreaking early site.
I’m not sure
exactly when it was, but it couldn’t have been more than a year or two after
that 1991 WWW origin point that my Dad brought me to a presentation by University of Virginia History
Professor Ed Ayers (he has since moved to the University of Richmond, at
which he is now Emeritus, and where he co-created and co-hosted the innovative
and vital radio program BackStory) on a new online project
he was launching. That project, which formally debuted in 1993, was and remains
The
Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. Valley focuses on residents of Augusta
County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, located at opposite
ends of the Shenandoah Valley, using countless historical
documents and sources to frame their individual and collective voices and
experiences between the late 1850s and the era of Reconstruction.
Both the digitization
and presentation of those primary sources are one of the project’s essential
elements from which we can still learn a great deal. I’m not sure
“digitization” was even a concept when Valley
was launched (it probably was within archival conversations, but not in our
broader public ones at least), but I’ve never encountered an online resource
that models both the work and the value of digitizing primary sources (in so
many different
categories, from more obvious ones like letters/diaries and newspapers to complementary
ones like church records and census & tax records) better than this one. And
they’re so navigable and searchable—from the perfect graphic design of the main page to
the multiple, eminently searchable
sub-categories that come up when you click on any one of that page’s
sections. Of course public scholarly websites can do all sorts of important things,
but digitizing and presenting sources (especially harder to find, or at least
gather together, ones) has always been and to my mind will always stay at the
top of the list, and again I don’t know a better model for that goal, process,
and result than Valley.
Any web project,
like any other scholarly project, also features its own interpretative and analytical
lenses on such sources, of course, and in the case of Valley its comparative lens also remains a powerful takeaway. Linking
a Northern and a Southern community might seem obvious in hindsight, but I
would argue that at the time it was anything but—especially because of the
digitization/archive angle, which might have made it seem logical to focus on
working with documents from only one such community. Of course that would have
had value too, and it is possible to work with the site’s materials through a more
singular focus (which is as it should be, as web projects are more interactive
than written/textual ones). But the comparative lens offers such a potent
mechanism for comparison and contrast, within particular categories of sources and
across them, in one of site’s three time periods and across them, for specific
racial and ethnic communities and between them, and so on. That’s a really
meaningful resource for thinking about the Civil War era, and it’s also an
implicit but crucial model for how we think about America, an additive vision
rather than a divided or entirely localized one. Just one more reason to
remember and learn from The Valley of the
Shadow.
Next AMST site
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Favorite websites, past or present, you’d share for the crowd-sourced
post?
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