Looking through each of the digital databases for this week, one of my favorite aspects of these sites is their interactivity. Being able to move through each section of the site helped me gain more interest in what each site was focused on, whether it was basic history or the history of a specific region. The Gilded Age Plains City website has an interactive map for the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, that focuses on the history of murder trials there. The Valley of the Shadow lets you look at newspapers, interviews, and even church documents from Pennsylvania and Virginia during each part of the Civil War. What also surprised me is how old some of these projects and/or organizations that built these archives are. The Valley of the Shadow started in 1991, while the AHA has existed since 1884. This shows how much the advancement of digital tools has aided the pursuit of historical analysis and education.
I think when it comes to the projects we are focused on for this class, creating archives as big as these or just websites is not going to be possible, but we can look at the principles that they followed and the tools they used to give us a framework for what our projects can look like by the end of this semester.