Building the Digital Lincoln

Journal of American History - Building the Digital Lincoln: "This special resources site offers a snapshot of how historians andBlogger: Northwest History - Edit Post "Journal of American History - Building the Digital..." digital humanists have helped to build a new understanding of Abraham Lincoln with a series of innovative and powerful Web-based tools. Their contributions during the decade preceding the Lincoln bicentennial have significantly altered the landscape of Lincoln scholarship by widening and deepening access to a vast array of primary sources. The result has been a more finely detailed portrait of President Lincoln, his relationships, and his career’s most pivotal moments."

This interesting site from the Journal of American History uses the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln as the thread that brings together a variety of approaches to digital history. In fact it is a fine introduction to some aspects of digital history--from word clouds to GIS layers to 3D modeling (using Google Sketchup!) to an interactive online essay to a brief documentary created using Photostory. What I like about the Building the Digital Lincoln site is that it is not all bleeding-edge technology, but uses well-known and widely available software packages. A visitor to the site thinks "Hey that is really cool--and I can do it!"

By the way, I will buy a drink for the first person who can identify the origin of the animated GIF on this page. (Hint: It is not from the JAH!)

Montana: The Magazine of Western History Online

Montana: The Magazine of Western History Articles: Readers of this blog will likely be familiar with this wonderful publication. Published by the Montana Historical Society, Montana does a nice job of bridging the divide between scholarly and popular writing, with well-researched articles written in an accessible style and presented in a lavishly illustrated magazine format. It turns out all of the articles from 1999 to the present are available online at FindArticles.com.

The presentation of the articles leaves much to be desired. They are hosted on a commercial site which is plastered with advertising. The crude search function is useless. Though each article includes a citation to the year and month of publication, but important bibliographic information such as the volume and number, and original pagination, are not included. And there are no illustrations.

Interestingly, however, the MHS itself has a site for the magazine that makes up for some of the faults of the FindArticles site. The MHS site for Montana has a few of the articles online with the original illustrations--though there is no way to find these without clicking through each of the back issues. There is however a searchable index that could be used to identify articles that could then be found at the FindArticles site.

As my mom would say, What do you want for nothing? Nine years of the best popular western history magazine are now available online. Enjoy.