According to the site’s instruction page, this app was created to provide information about the Battle of Atlanta and directions to reach the locations important to the battle. The project was a collaborative venture between the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and Robert W. Woodruff Library. History enthusiast Daniel A. Pollock researched and directed the project with the aid of other scholars and developers such as Allen Tullos and Brian Croxall. Their goal is to provide an interactive and user-friendly guide that leads learners to spots important to the battle and expands on the limited information provided by existing historical markers. The format is simple, consisting of videos, photographs, text providing historical context, and maps that direct the user to the different sites. It works especially well on smart phones, allowing users to travel freely. The project is aimed at the casual learner and “presupposes no specialized knowledge of Atlanta or the Civil War.” The app is simple and easy to use and can reach a variety of users and audiences.
In keeping with Miriam Posner’s field guide of digital humanities projects, the Battle of Atlanta web app uses both mapping and multimedia narrative features. Sources used include photographs, historical research, and videos created by the project director. These sources are then processed by means such as digitization and segmentation by location to provide the overall organization for the project. Finally, the processed sources are presented in multiple ways. The project designers had to make decisions regarding how they wished users to interact with their content. Ultimately, spatial plotting accompanied by brief explanations of the various locations became the means by which the material was presented. It is available on the web, searchable, interactive, and mapped to be as useful and accessible as possible for users. This project uses a variety of technologies to accomplish its purpose. Software engineers at Emory built OpenTourBuilder, “a content management platform for building tours to be presented as mobile optimized websites,” using Django, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery Mobile, and Google Maps APIs. Taking approximately two years to complete, the various elements eventually came together to create a functional and user-friendly site.
This project embraces many of Unsworth’s scholarly primitives. Some of the major ones include discovering, referring, and representing. To begin, the scholars had to do a lot of research into the history of the Battle of Atlanta, delving into archives and already available research. Then, the history referred to images, photographs, video, and maps to make the presentation informative and easy to follow. The representation ties all the components together. Without the links to Google maps, it would make following the trail of the battle and developing a full understanding of the battle nearly impossible. Conversely, using maps to lead users to different sites without providing interesting and detailed information would render the project nearly useless. The additional images and audio coupled with the maps and history help users to get a better idea of what the battle would actually have been like at that time. By embracing these characteristics of scholarly research, the project proves to be a useful tool.
The Battle of Atlanta project has many strengths. First and foremost, it is rather simple and easy to use. Its features are self-explanatory and even the least technologically savvy person could figure out how to use it. Its design is uncluttered and focused primarily and getting the user the information. It is rather text heavy, so it might benefit from even more multimedia elements to make it a little more exciting and interactive. Over all, though, it’s a useful tool that fulfills its goal to help educate people on the Battle of Atlanta.
