I love this project, although I am biased towards liking anything to do with Angkor Wat. The 3D models are absolutely beautiful, the website is modern-looking and well organized, and the teaching modules are well written and informative. I admire the innovation and creativity, not to mention the technical and research skills required to create a project like this one. That being said, I feel that the interactivity of the site is somewhat underwhelming comparing to what is being promised. Visitors to the site have the ability to view a selection of scenes in 360 degrees, but don’t have any further freedom of movement within the virtual model. Each of the scenes also have an awkward ~20 second run time, after which you need to replay the embedded video to continue viewing the scene. Overall I am deeply impressed with this project, and am interested to see where it goes in the future.
This site functions similarly to some of the Omeka sites I reviewed in earlier blog posts- it’s mainly a curated collection of digitized primary sources. However, it’s much more visually appealing and modern-looking than most of those were. While the intro page looked nice, I honestly didn’t like it very much- I felt a little disoriented without access to the menu upon my arrival to the site. The organization into time periods and thematic topics was helpful to make the vast amount of records and information available feel more manageable and to help visitors find exactly what they’re looking for. Speaking of, the sheer amount of sources contained in the archive is extremely impressive, and I imagine the site is very useful to researchers looking into this particular period of American history.
#3 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States
This site is one of the most innovative Digital History projects I’ve looked at so far. Rather than a simple database of historical maps, it combined the primary sources with interactive features to enhance the way site visitors engaged with the historical materials. The interface for using the atlas was not always super intuitive, but the site included a helpful section on how to navigate the interactive maps, as well as a table of contents with hyperlinks to every section, which made finding and accessing certain parts of the atlas easy and fast. Unfortunately, the site didn’t include a search bar, which could cause difficulties in navigating the site. I really enjoyed playing around with this website, and would like to go back and explore more if I get a chance.
From what I’ve seen in my survey of digital history projects so far, important qualities of a site include interactivity and navigability. Each of the projects I’ve looked at were strong in some aspects and had issues in others. Interactive features like the 3D models in Virtual Angkor and the maps in the Atlas are what make digital history projects unique, taking advantage of the things you can do with digital tools that are impossible in tradition print publications. In my own project, I’d like to make use of interactive features as much as possible. In terms of navigability, I liked the organization of pages under subheadings in The Valley of the Shadow, and the table of contents in the Atlas. I’ll also be sure to include a search bar in my project.
I reviewed Valley of the Shadow as well and was also disoriented! The site map helped a little bit, but it still didn’t show the secondary organizations with the Timeline, Sources, ETC. It almost seemed as if there were two different organization systems that just didn’t mesh together.
I did not look at The Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States, but just checked it out after reading your post. The digitization of these old maps is on level with the standards I see at museums! Color me impressed! I will definitely want to explore this site some more!