Over the past week we have been looking at the various generations of educational websites produced by CHNM. The first of these comprehensive sites, History Matters, hit the web in 1998, and obviously there have been major technical improvements in content management and design since then. Rather than talk about these developments, I want to discuss the way that the focus of the educational websites has evolved.
There have been some interesting discussions in the last week or so re: maintaining legacy sites and making sure 404 errors aren’t the most common decoration on your site about the history of cats during the French Revolution. The thing is, this problem has been around since…well, since Oregon Trail was the most well-known form of digital history scholarship, and there really isn’t a solution.
This week, our group met with the team behind Digital Humanities Now, an online compendium and journal that searches out and disseminates important scholarship throughout the digital humanities. Although the team has an official editorial staff of three (a number that likely fluctuates with funding), the time required to survey the many thousands of sources can quickly overwhelm even the most efficient team.