The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu Created and maintained by the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. Visited site on 20 September 2004.
This site is a huge archive of information about two communities before, during, and after the Civil War. The site has gathered thousands of pieces of information about Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.
I am very impressed with both the depth and amount of information presented in this site. I can only imagine the hours spent compiling all this data and then presenting it in a useful format for web delivery. The site includes things such as soldiers’ war records, newspaper articles, and diaries. All the different kinds of information are in easy to use formats. I had two concerns about the information presented. One, the letters and diaries were not facsimiles, but rather were transcribed. This assumes that the person transcribing them did it correctly. Also, some information may be lost in transcription, such any information that can be gleamed from the originals such as doodlings in the corners. Second, I found the search functions to be rather clunky.
I am a little confused about who the audience is for this project. Unless I was doing specific research about a person or subject, I think it is a difficult site to navigate. From the picture of the group of friends looking at their computer on the page detailing what the site is all about (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/usingvalley/) it appears like the Virginia Center for Digital History is targeting the average person who has an interest in history. However, the nature of an archive makes this difficult. It is not easy just to browse through the records, as the archive is not really set up that way. There is little context is given with the records themselves so that if I pull up the war record of a soldier named James Mason, what does that information really mean to an average websurfer? I think only a researcher/historian could make a coherent narrative of the information in the current form. But that is the nature of archives. I was glad to see the link to the book written about the website, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America 1859-1863, by Edward Ayers, one of the project coordinators. While I only had time to give this book a cursory glance, I suspect that this would be an easier way for the average reader to get information from the archive.
It is great to have all these original sources available digitally at the touch of a button, however. I am sure I will have to do original research very soon in my career, and I appreciate the efforts of this project to make these records available to people like me who do not have the time or the money to travel to the physical sources.
I liked the way the information was presented, dividing it into three time periods. I was glad that the few years before and the few years after the war were included in the archive. This gives a researcher greater context for the information. The war years can be compared with the years before and after to see what impact it had on people’s lives and what happened in the immediate aftermath. For myself, being the social historian that I am, I found the best part of the site was the journals and letters. I wish that there were more of these, but I was impressed that they were able to find as many as they did.