header image
 

Alex Lederer, Blog #7

The Difference Slavery Made is a pretty great piece of history.  When linked the first time, I thought it was going to be a paper and I didn’t fully realize the format it was in.  Instead of being a paper, divided by topic points, they used the web medium to help separate and organize the information about these two towns.  I like how they look at the two towns spatially, I don’t hear much about plotting the physical landscape of small towns anywhere except for anthropology (where, the first thing you do in field work is create a sketch of the community in order to have a better understanding of how physical locations could be important relative to other buildings). I really like how using new forms of technology to see a holistic view of these towns has shed light on some stereotypes that are usually pinned down to certain subjects (north being industrialized and urbanized and the south being old fashioned and rural).

I like the start, but I think it needs more work.  I think that each different link should relate back to the point being brought up, and the final conclusion should not feel so isolated.  I also think that with the web medium, the historiography should be more incorporated with the rest of the information.  Since we have the ability to hyperlink and use visual space to show data, the source for these maps should be displayed by the maps and not on a different page.  The website states “we rely on Extensible Markup Language (XML) to connect large amounts of evidence with detailed discussions of the historiography on slavery in the United States” but this could have been improved on.

~ by aledere1 on October 22, 2012 .



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *