This week, we were asked to review four different digital history projects of our choosing. I chose to review Envisioning Seneca Village (2025 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History), The Valley of the Shadow, Digital History, and Petitioning for Freedom (December 2025 feature in Journal of American History).

Envisioning Seneca Visit is a recent website, being developed in 2024-2025. It’s a good example of a website that incorporates links and visuals to other forms of digital media, like GIS and 3D modelling. It is a very simple design that does not have a lot of links or pages, but it succinctly presents the context you need about the project on the home page. Links for additional readings and the team behind it are provided via the home page, providing the chance for people interested in Seneca Village to explore it further without leaving the site. It also includes how to cite the website or the project, which I definitely appreciate as a college student, as formal citation guides might not include a clear way to cite unusual media.

The Valley of the Shadow website is unique to the others, in that it opens to landing page that doesn’t outright present a summary or list of accessible links. Instead, each link leads further into the website to view different eras and sources. At the bottom right corner is a link to the site map where one can see an outline of accessible links and the about page. This design allows visitors to focus on the content, rather than being distracted by other visual noise, like lots of text. At the same time, it is a very aesthetically pleasing, because it doesn’t rely as much on text description to navigate it. It also has subtle background images that are tied to the site subject and are noticeable, without being distracting. I like that the about page links to the previous version. It allows us to really compare just how much sleeker the updated site is, although I do like the visual of the old site’s navigation as chambers of a building. The older site is less user friendly, because you have to go through more links to go back and forth between eras and search functions.

I am actually somewhat familiar with UH’s Digital History site from my Google rabbit holes of history websites in high school. The copyright is from 2021, but it is definitely an older site model with smaller fonts and limited imagery. While its graphics are dated, the site itself is fully functional and well organized. The sections under “Eras” function as a complete digital textbook of American history with summary articles, primary source documents, images, biographies, activities, quizzes, etc. for each section. There are also additional links to view by topic, primary source form, media type, cultural perspectives. There are also links to virtual exhibits on specific topics in modern American history. While there isn’t a search function, the home page has links to virtually every aspect of the site in an organized and non-overwhelming format. My main complaint with it is that could maybe benefit from larger font sizes, for easier reading, but the design isn’t distracting or particular difficult, at least from my perspective. As it is a university-run website, I assume it follows OCR guidelines, but I don’t have confirmation of that.

The Petitioning for Freedom site is another great example of an easy to navigate site. The menu bar is really easy to access and the links for it are actually repeated throughout the different web pages. A potential downside could be how often its repeated, making it a bit messy or distracting, but I’d rather it be easier to navigate and maybe a little messy than have to go searching through pages to get back to a particular one. I also like the different search functions that allow for accessing records for different types of information based on the most likely questions or interests (Who/What/When/Where?). It is a really basic way of dividing information and it’s executed really well. This site makes it incredibly easy to access both the sources and the context behind them to understand them at the fullest.

*Quick notes on possible sites: Living with Machines, (2023 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History) is no longer available; What America Ate (Journal of American History, Volume 112, Issue 3, December 2025, Pages 640–642) is no longer available.