Way Back Machine

Way Back

The site I choose for my analysis of an historical website was the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute located in Birmingham, Alabama. The museum is one of the only museum in the South dedicated to the preservation and promotion of African American History and struggle during the Civil Rights era.  I have toured this museum  in 2002 and 2007.  According to the Wayback Machine the earliest capture data of  Birmingham Civil Rights Institute  website is 2004.   The website design is very static like many of the websites during this time period. The  earth brown color scheme tends to throw me off.  I would have use more lively colors for my homepage design. As person who wears eyeglasses, I find the font to be rather small. I noticed the title of the museum is similar to the font size of  other links within this site.  The cover page and most of the formatting remain the same from 2004-2009.  I was generally surprised to see that. However, in 2010 the site made some radical changes which reflects its current look.

The new site address many of my criticisms  of the  earlier productions of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute  webpage.  Immediately you notice the color scheme is more vibrant and the font is slightly larger.  I think the web designers could make the website  title larger.  Also a noticeable change you will see  is the use of flash technology within the website. The flash technology creates movement within the site which is appealing and captures your attention.  The exhibition section has dramatically improved since 2004. This section now has more of a visual appeal because more emphasis is place own showing  the categorizations of exhibits through images verses a lot of wording which appeared in 2004-2009.

Overall, the improvements  reflect more of what you actually see when you visit the museum. If you like southern history, then  visiting this museum should be on your to do list.

What is Digial History

What is Digital History

The experimentation of the past decades of the emergence of new computer technology and historical information has lead to the creation of digital history. Digital history loosely refers to the digitizing of historical information over communication mediums such as the internet, computer databases, and various computer software applications.  The field is driven by historians, scholars, librarians and  other cyberenthusiast need to express facts and historical information in  new multimedia computer formats.   The new approaches to digital history  is a paradigm shift away from the linear methods of production and presentation (books, papers just to name a few)  of historical information.  As noted in Cohen and Rosenzweig  ground breaking  book entitled Digital History : a Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web states that, “ …ancient discipline of  history has begun to metamorphose. In the past  two decades, new media and new technologies have challenged  historian to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past.”   

Digital History has many beneficial facets such as users accessibility, diversity of information and the ability to hypertext from one source of information to the next in a nonlinear fashion.  According to Cohen and Rosenzweig, accessibility is one of the most important aspect of digital history.  Ordinary people now have access to huge databases of information, which was once regulated to the academicians.  Amateur historians now have more ability to create websites, online articles, and  blogs.   By allowing amateur historians  to have  greater involvement in the production and publishing of history help contributes significantly to historical information reaching a broader audience. In addition, students and scholars have received the benefit of increase access to large corporate data bases (like JSTOR) with the emergence of digital history.

Digital History like any other  field is not without its share of problems.  For example,  even through some amateur historian  web publications may used the best in multimedia design, their content may have some flaws due to their lack of traditional historical training , research methods or  poor scholarship.  The field of digital history is still evolving. The focus of rethinking new ways of presenting historical information and the parameters of this emerging field is still unfolding. Ultimately,  digital history practices and methods should lead to a richer experience for  consumers of history and the proliferation of historical information.