My blog writing is based on “Review: North Dakota: People Living on the Land. State Historical Society of North Dakota” that is published in May 2017 in The Public Historian. Jason A. Heppler reviews this as a digital exhibit that illustrates the State’s history and makes resources and materials easily accessible to students and as well as whose people who want to use them for their research purpose.
Heppler provides a brief overview of the website’s structure in his review. It’s divided into four units: Paleozoic to 1200. 1201 to 1860, 1861 to 1920, and each four-unit is divided into four sections such as ‘Changing Landscapes’, ‘Making A Living’,’ Building Communities’, and ‘Alliances And Conflict’. This project looks like it is designed for classroom teaching, especially for eighth-grade students. It is very useful for instructors to get materials from the ‘Course’ section by going through several catalogs like Course Activities, Course Outline, and so on.
I agree with Heppler that this project is user-friendly as it includes interactive components, explanatory notes, and zoomable images of maps, images, and documents. In addition to that, the ‘Preferences’ option allows users to adjust the font size, style, and paragraph spacing according to their needs. So these features of the website look very appealing to me.
But some website features are repetitive and confusing. The design repeats navigation cues for readers. Across the top of a section, readers can see which unit, lesson, and topic they are viewing, but this same content is repeated in large header font just below this information. I have noticed some issues regarding the large font size on the section name. As he points out that it discusses twentieth-century issues around relocation and termination policies, the Indian Reorganization Act, and modern tribal governments, but there is a missing part on nineteenth-century Native history. Most of the history discussion is on the Cold War and the history of the 1980s, but no discussion on the experience of war. In Unit 3, the use of the word ‘our’ to describe European cultural heritage little bit sarcastically. I have also noticed this kind of issue with using language.
Apart from these issues, the overall website is a lot of informative and easily accessible to users to get historical stories of the State. I think this website is a little addition to North Dakota’s history resources.
