Occasionally, I come across certain projects or public archives that really stand out to me in how they utilize digital capabilities to present the information in an organized, clear, and unique way. This week, I felt this way while taking a look at Evan Bissell and Eric Loyer’s Freedom Ring. The project focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” and allows the user to explore this speech through audio, written text, images, and other related media. Not only is the focus interesting, but the way everything presented is very attractive standing alone; the website uses an auto-scroll, presenting drawings, posters, and other images, while playing the audio of King’s speech and giving the option for the written text to be displayed. This project, in my opinion, uses the digital in a captivating way to complement the element of humanities, which is how all digital humanities projects should approach presentation.
Although the interface is not quite the same, I was reminded of the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum while looking at Freedom Ring, mostly because I also really enjoyed the way the museum used the digital for their presentation. The LA Holocaust Museum revolves around storytelling, capturing an endless amount of stories of survivors as well as biographies of famous European-Jewish people alive during and affected by the Holocaust, including Sigmund Freud, Peter Lorre. Since the museum presents so much information for visitors to choose from, they use an interactive interface for easy accessibility and sorting. They also offer iPod Touches and headphones for free to aid this experience. Through the use of the iPods as well as the touch-screen interface of many parts of the exhibit, visitors can go through a wide variety of survival stories, biographies, and descriptions of historical artifacts pertaining to World War II, Judaism, and/or the Holocaust. What really attracted me to the way the museum presents the archives is how visitors can shape their experience, which is through the interactive interface that allows them to choose what they want to learn about. Personally, I listened to a lot of the biographies and stories because I already know quite a bit about the event itself, so I wanted to take advantage of all the new and personal information pertaining to the specific individuals included in the archive; although others’ experience could do nearly the opposite, which the interactive interface allows. The interactivity of the interface would not allow as much variability if the museum neglected digital capabilities.
