Clio Wired (History 696)

I examined In Motion: The African American Migration Experience a collection of images, texts, and maps documenting the migration of African Americans, with an emphasis on movement after the slave trade. It's an excellent resource, tying comprehensive material with a well organized, accessible and searchable presentation.

This site presents a number of possibilities for potential research projects. However, in thinking about how this as a digital project facilitates the research process, it seems to pretty consistently come down to two issues: accessibility and searchability.

Accessibility is the first and most obvious advantage of the medium. In bringing together sources from a number of locations, In Motion allows one, without traveling to examine large portions (although not likely complete) of collected materials. The financial and practical benefits of this are apparent.

Ironically, though the other great advantage, searchability, flies in the face of many of the ideas we have proposed about the digital medium. Searchability ultimately benefits one type of document: text. I realized in examining the images and maps on this site, they are only as findable as their description. I feel this differs little from any finding aid a physical archive might offer. The actual content of most images cannot be translated into a searchable format except through the descriptive efforts of others. Even if whatever terms might appear on the document are transcribed, they still might not capture the element of the image, such as an exaggerated rendering of a particular feature, the researcher seeks. As far as images go, while delivery and dissemination are enhanced, digital media does not seem capable of replacing traditional combing for information.

So while I could develop a project comparing how the runaway slaves experienced water travel in movement north with that of refugees from Haiti, the most useful aspect of a digital archive is the facility for not just searching of terms, which in theory a comprehensive index could perform (although such an index is nearly impossible to imagine), but the cross referencing of terms, such as "boat" and "fear." Here digital media opens doors to new interpretations of old sources.