So far with the Abolition Lab, I’ve spent a good deal of time looking at digital humanities projects. Moving forward, in helping others and creating my own digital projects, I’ve been thinking about audience in a new digital space.
As people in the humanities, we hold a position of power, we’re the ones with the information. In my mind, one of the main goals of using digital platforms to showcase our work is that accessibility increases, and more people are interacting with it! But then, who is our audience?
Two of the sources I’ve been looking at tackle these questions in very different ways. First, the “Freedom on the Move” project is a database of advertisements documenting advertisements from enslavers in North America.
The database has plenty of filters and search terms pre-loaded, but still requires the user to know what they are searching for. A tool like this is incredibly useful for someone studying fugitives from American slavery but could be daunting to browse for someone without much prior knowledge.
Secondly, the “Midwest Time Machine” from Newberry’s Digital Initiatives and Services department, uses StoryMap JS to outline the stories of different individuals in the Midwest. This project invites the user to choose an individual to follow based on a short description of their life and follow them through a series of locations outlining their story.
This is a project that feels very accessible. Nearly all of the information you need to understand the stories are provided to you through the resource, and you are guided through it in a way that is easy to understand. The individual stories also work towards this goal, allowing the audience to engage with small, yet important, pieces of history at a time.
Both of these projects are incredibly valuable and impressive, just to different groups of people. Yet a guided exploration of individual history is very different than a database of advertisements. Primarily, in their distinct audiences.
The value of history varies between every scholar and every audience member. Looking at these has made me ask myself who I am creating history for. The digitization of our scholarship comes with the expectation that more people will be seeing it, academic or otherwise. But how much change is needed to make projects accessible to a wider audience? Of course, there is room for both of these in an ever-evolving digital space, but it is important to be mindful of who will be interacting with our work.
Creating resources for scholars and non-scholars alike is incredibly important, but having a clear goal and method for reaching the desired audience becomes even more important in a space flooded with scholarship.
Explore these resources for yourself!
Freedom on the Move: https://freedomonthemove.org/
The Midwest Time Machine: https://publications.newberry.org/time-machine/
Kyra– I really enjoyed this piece comparing the Freedom on the Move project v. the Midwest Time Machine! As you rightfully identified, these are two very different digital projects designed to fulfill different goals. I think your emphasis on audience is an important observation that shaped the direction of these two projects. To me, the goal of a database is to curate sources with the intent of providing researchers an online environment to conduct research. Of course, this entails some decision-making about the organization of the site and user experience, but I think the general idea is to recreate archival “discovery” in online research (although many might argue that database search functions ruin the “discovery” element by giving you “exactly” what you search for). Alternatively, the Midwest Time Machine offers an entirely different interface that is also accessible to the general public. I could see this being useful for younger students, or anyone interested in midwestern history/biographies. It provides a guided experience and a great use of story mapping, although I am left wondering why the creators of this project chose this medium and why they believed it conveyed these stories effectively (as opposed to other digital tools). Thanks for all your insights on this!