I have used Omeka before in some of my Art History and History classes and I have found it very useful. Some ideas that could be beneficial to this class are the ability to create online exhibitions using items from collections. For my groups project in particular I think if we used Omeka to create an online exhibition of the Civil War dairies it could be very useful for visitors and researches. The archive of items with metadata would provide transcriptions and metadata for researchers. We could use a tool to make the diaries display although the viewer was looking at a book. We could include maps and timelines of the battles that the solider was in. WordPress can also be used as a platform for online exhibitions with page building and including maps as well as timelines.
When exploring the digital history websites I found that most of them were very easy to navigate which I think is very important for a history website. The Valley of the Shadow website was particularly interesting to navigate because the creators made the site map look like a museum building with multiple rooms for the different topics. Although I find that idea very creative it probably would not work for the civil war diaries project. The French Revolution website seemed useful because of the ability to search and browse through the sources which could be useful for the diary project. However, the site would have been better if the list of images had a thumbnail and not just the title and if when you click on an image it would take you to the information on that work. The models on the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project website were very helpful for figuring out what the event looked like. Perhaps we could create models of the battle that the soldier was in for our project. Imaging the past was very easy to navigate with the large subject headings and the brief summaries of the various parts of the site. But I thought that all though the information was very useful it seemed a bit text heavy. The Molasses Flood website was very creative and the way the images came up when you click on a certain word was great. The only problem was when I brought up the images the screen seemed a little crowded.
