The digital humanities project I chose to analyze is London Lives, which is a historical website that digitizes and organizes records and information about the events and lives of Londoners during the 18th century.
http://www.londonlives.org/index.jsp
Sources:
The sources of the site are primarily manuscripts from archives and datasets that the project staff was given access to because of their grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. The manuscripts chosen were all focused on the lives of the common people rather than the royalty in order to assess how regular people influenced social practices of the time.
Processes:
All manuscripts were digitally scanned and transcribed so they could be easily and conveniently referenced as a primary source. Additionally, the project staff evaluated the manuscripts and created comprehensive biographies on several dozen Londoners, with several dozen more in progress. Therefore, they processed the sources both into directly digitized forms of the information and compiled some of them into comprehensive stories of the lives which the manuscripts refer to.
Presentations:
Overall, this project is designed in a way to emphasize interactivity and allows the user to explore many different aspects of the data. There is a search tool for users to easily find any specific document or information they may be looking for. There is the main browse section where all the manuscripts can be found, which are organized by place they were recorded and by date. As mentioned in the processes section, there is also a major component of the site which focuses on biographies of individuals, which has a tool that allows you to click on keywords that the manuscripts referenced and see examples of those occurrences. Within all of these various sections of the site, names and events and tagged and linked so that the user may easily click through to fin more information on whatever aspect they find interesting.
I enjoyed the way this project had several different ways of accessing information so that viewers of different levels of expertise all could find something they were interested in. We can access both the primary sources of the documents and the biographies that the project staff had put together based on their evaluation of the sources. My favorite part was the integration of the keyword search, where all the lives that involved something like murder or theft, could be accessed and read about from the click of a button. Although the layout of the site could have been more smoothly integrated so that it didn’t require so much clicking to different pages, especially in the browse documents section, I think this project was overall very impressive and well done.