Edward's Project Review
DC’s National Mall is a site that has implicitly been at the center of countless historical processes, yet at the same time unintentionally and even unconsciously written off as a historical vacuum to the more famous landmarks it connects. Rare is a tourist’s photo that features the Mall front and center rather than a backdrop to the monuments it contains, except for the brief flowering of its cherry trees each spring. Therefore, Histories of the National Mall is a very welcome digital exhibit, focusing on the mall front and center while placing it in a richer context. Winner of the 2015 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History, the website is a good example of the fact that digital humanities projects do not necessarily have to be extremely complex to be extremely useful.
Histories of the National Mall fits in as a one-stop curiosity shop for multiple layers of the area’s history, from the 1790s to the present; the pluralizing of “history” in the title is no accident. Discussions of the role of the Mall as protest grounds in the 20th century are sandwiched between engineering discussions of the Washington Canal in the 19th century and natural disasters of the 21st. The site is divided into four main viewing sectors that are quite intuitive by themselves: maps, people, past events, and explorations. An impressive, but not overwhelming, amount of information is included in each, allowing for specialists in one particular area or another to find what is most relevant to them. As just a sampling of the metrics, there are 89 people, 96 events, 42 explorations, and 345 map data points included.
Nevertheless, the site is geared to be thoroughly entry-level too: one of the pages even explains to the audience what the term “mall” means in this context, much to the disappointment of confused shopaholics. Bright colors, an orderly grid-like collection of datasets, and a mobile-friendly platform ensure a pleasant user-experience. Underlying the four viewing sectors are two main information pages, “item” pages that are shared between the maps, past events, and people sectors and the more involved “explorations” pages that are unique to that division. I appreciated that some of the content focuses not only on the historical structures of the Mall, but also the history of the unbuilt: items such as sketches of the finalist from the Washington Monument design contest. It is encouraging to see attention given to such historical contingencies, one of the few times it is permissible to ask “what might have been” as a historian.
The approximately 541 “item” pages feature standard citations, concise details, and links to related pages within and without the website. By contrast, the “explorations” pages are slightly longer, more informal and narrative-based, and lack citations. Their titles are composed of Jeopardy-style questions that have a way of whetting the viewer’s curiosity. In future versions of this website it would be helpful to add more links between these two content divisions. More could also have been done to cross-link items from other sites, such as the National Park Service and Atlas Obscura’s coverage of the Mall (Such as this page: www.atlasobscura.com/places/washington-mini-monument).
Three outlier pages provide meta-info about the site itself: mallhistory.org/about, /project, and /guide. The third link especially includes valuable info about the rationale used throughout the process. The developers decided against walking tours, for instance, after realizing that visitors’ paths are often non-linear and start and stop at different points. While off-the-shelf technology such as Omeka and Google Maps were used extensively for the project, the application thereof was nonetheless very original. The website is supported by George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and was boosted by a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities during production.
Despite visiting the Mall in spring 2016, I had never heard of this website previously or during my visit, and as with many digital humanities projects the effective publicity of it seems to have been the hardest part. This dilemma was touched on and explained by the developers in the guide: “The project was supported from historians at the National Park Service (NPS), but the team was unable to place signs or visibly promote mallhistory.org on the Mall itself. Signage is tightly regulated by the NPS, for good reason. Negotiating among NPS’s different units proved difficult, as we could never get in touch with the right person to discuss how we could get brochures available in the most popular Park Service visitor centers. Site visitation numbers are in the tens of thousands and growing, which is reasonable, but demonstrate that we are not reaching as many Mall visitors as we would like.” Adding to the dilemma is that the project consciously set out to interpret the Mall in a way the developers felt that the NPS had not: they declare that “On-site interpretation of parks, memorials and monuments, and federal lands often glaze over, or omit, debates, disagreements, and unpleasant histories.”
Overall, Histories of the National Mall does a tremendous job of adding a layer of digital commons to this most American of commons. It is easy to see why the site is a hit, and digital humanities scholars of all subjects would do well to learn from its successes.
Edward Harthorn
Arkansas State University