The digital humanities can be a difficult thing to navigate, as either a learner or a creator. And often scholars must concede one thing to employ another.
For example the “Mining the Dispatch” website created by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. This website is easy to navigate, and contains an enormous amount of interesting information on the subjects of slavery, the Civil War, and southern perspectives on both topics at the time of occurrence. It has also been recently updated to make it more accessible currently, and continue to be easily navigated as mediums change. This website is also very text based. Much of the actual analysis and content exists in the written sections of the site. And the so called “topics” analyzed by the modeling program – MALLET – are basically only able to be understood in the abstract. To actually look at every source included would not only take an incredible amount of time, but would lead to very little actually expanded understanding. The creator has been very clear about the intention of this project to help create more accessibility for the information to the greater public. And there are many very positive aspects of the site which certainly help to achieve this goal. The use of graphs while showing general trends for the different “topics,” and including an in depth analysis of what those trends represent is both meaningful and accessible. Unfortunately in trade for the easy understanding and navigation, much of the actual media used to form the project is not emphasized.
On the other hand, we have projects such as the Frederick Douglass virtual museum exhibit. Which is far more focused on the media, the organization is based around the exhibits, which unfortunately does make it a little more difficult to navigate. This resource is also outdated, all of the images/exhibits associated with the “House Tour” section are unavailable without the Adobe Flash player, which has not been available since 2019. The purpose of this site is to make exhibits more “widely accessible” to the general public, and this specific resource is associated with the Museum Management’s Black History Month projects. Unfortunately they seem to fall short of this goal, the site is both overwhelming to the user, and not particularly engaging. The concept for this project is very interesting, and it could be very helpful to be open and accessible to more people, tragically, the site does not live up to this goal.
If you wish to view these resources for yourself:
Virtual museum exhibit: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site: https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/frdo/index.html
Text analysis: Mining the Dispatch: https://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/pages/about
