William G. Thomas’ and Edward L. Ayers’ article The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities was a very interesting article. It was focused on the idea of using digital tools to showcase and investigate a historical case, but it also gave a lot of insight into the actual events that were going on before the start of the Civil War. I thought that there was a good balance between showing the technical side of their project while also really getting into the issue that they were researching.
I very much liked the mention of Vannevar Bush’s article because it was something that I’ve read (obviously) so I was able to keep up with the mentions of it in this article, and I agree with the general assessment that the digital age is doing something good for history. The concise way in which the authors illustrated their use of Janet Murray’s four aspect of information in relation to their own project was very helpful as well; I felt that it gave me a good overview of what to expect. From our discussions in class, it was clear to me why they made the choice of using XML as opposed to HTML (basically, that it’s more flexible and extensive). There was also acknowledgement that their digitized article only dealt with relatively few issues, and Thomas and Ayers created a list of things that they were not able to cover, such as:
- how to present narrative more effectively
- how to represent event and change
- how to analyze language more precisely
- how to create visualizations as compelling and complete as narrative
They invited others to build off of their efforts.
I was impressed with the organization of their evidence; searching through it was made easier by the subheadings and the splits by topic and format. Some of the maps were difficult to read because there seemed to be a lot going on in them, but I am not sure if that doesn’t have more to do with my relative inexperience in analyzing things like this. (The map for the Lebanon Sulpher Springs was especially difficult to puzzle out).
Overall, I felt that this was a very comprehensive and informative research project and its authors were clearly eager to use digital media to further examine their topic.
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