For this blog post, I picked to review the websites The Geography of Slavery in Virginia and Freedom On the Move. Both of these websites display where slaves went when they ran away from their masters and plantations, lets focus on The Geography of Slavery in Virginia first.
At first look, The Geography of Slavery in Virginia shows a synopsis of what the website is about and has a few images related to slavery. It also gives a few links to other parts of the website such as”Advertisements”,”Documents”, “Explanatory Essays”, “Personal Profiles”, and “Resources”. The main page is user friendly and easy to navigate, but is a bit boring to look at. When you click on one of the links such as “Advertisements”, it provides information about the advertisements the database provides, but a lot of the page is still blank which makes it seem like the page does not have much information. This blank look appears in each of the links provided on the main page. However, once the viewer gets past this look, this website provides a lot of biographical information, court records, newspapers, and literature from slaves and slaveholders in Virginia. Overall, the website has a large and diverse amount of information, but needs to update the website to make viewers want to explore and learn more.
Moving on to Freedom On the Move, this website immediately provides the viewer with content about the website such as a promotional video, resources for educators, and quick access to the database. Visually, this website provides examples of documents that will be seen in the database which is helpful for users because they will know some of the resources that the database includes and what to look for within the database. Additionally, the main page of the website shows the team that worked on this database which makes the database more enticing because the reader knows who worked on the database, what they look like, their experience, and puts friendly faces behind the intimidating database. The database itself is easy to use if the researcher wants a very specific resource from a certain time or location. However, unlike The Geography of Slavery in Virginia website, this site only includes advertisements, there are no newspapers or other historical data present. In conclusion, this website provides a great amount of visual resources to help its audience to navigate their way through the site and provides a great amount of resources, but should expand its resources to more documents.
These are thoughtful observations thoughts about the two websites. I really like how you focused on the strengths of the database in the first website, despite its lacking aesthetic appeal. The second website is definitely more visually appealing, and (as you pointed out), creates an immersive learning experience for the viewer. Despite this appeal, however, it simply does not have the same amount of information as the Geography of Slavery website. It’s tough to be that website from a data/information standpoint!