As a student, we often used digital scholarship in class without even realizing it. These tools were utilized to engage students in new manners of education that widely differed from the memorization and lecturing of prior years. I personally found it highly engaging and beneficial; information being presented in generally novel ways with images to accompany the text that I could move through at my own rate? Count me in. Thus, looking at some of these digital scholarship works in preparation for our own coming works was rather nostalgic and something interesting, or even exciting.
I, in particular, jived really well with Newberry’s Midwest Time Machine. It ticked off all of the boxes in my personal checklist of good digital scholarship, as well as the general identifying traits used to make sure it’s something that disseminates knowledge clearly in interesting manners with verifiable information. I followed the journey of photographer Lenore Raster Aasgaard as she journeyed through the Midwest from 1916-1922, documenting all aspects of her travel–including the transportation, people she met along the way, the vistas/landscapes, everything needed to really put oneself in the narrative. The Time Machine also includes a map that tracks her journey and the photos accompanying it chronologically, illustrating visually her movements and the journeys she took across the Midwest (particularly Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, and Wisconsin). I found the captions informative, the text to media balance was really good and not overwhelming in either direction, and the interactive aspects of the TIme Machine were easy to navigate and functioned well (little to no lagging, it responded when prompted, all the good things). At the bottom of the first page, it also details the funding and where it came from (the Andrew C. Mellon Foundation), how the images/information are available (public domain license, and Newberry’s collections), as well as the editors and developers (Jen Wolfe and Nick White), as well as how to contact the group for further information.
In contrast, however, “The Valley of the Shadow” was a mixed bag of digital scholarship. The majority of this piece of scholarship is linked to charts with data contained in the charts based on what era of the American Civil War is selected, what year specifically is selected, and what type of source is chosen. While the information it contains is very detailed and laid out in a manner cohesive to understanding what it’s conveying, and it has lots of types of sources to choose from, it’s very dense textually and it can get kind of overwhelming or boring (depending on how one feels in relation to large blocks of text). In defense of this piece of digital scholarship, its copyright runs from 1993 to 2007, so with that in mind it is a rather fascinating time capsule of digital scholarship in its infancy, which thus makes the amount of detail, planning, and available documents that much more impressive. In essence, the Valley source definitely contains a wealth of information, it could however have been presented in a slightly more comprehensible manner (if we ignore its conception date and when it stopped being updated).
Overall, digital scholarship is one of the many tools used in academia from early childhood well into adult research and specialized programs. The Newberry Time Machine is a wonderful example of digital scholarship that is engaging, balanced, and informative, while The Valley hosts a variety of interesting and detailed documents that exists but it could definitely be more with the times (if it had proper resources).
