In this digital project created by Leslie C., she focuses on suffrage activism in Nebraska and how it spreads. She starts off by explaining the background of women suffrage in the west, specifically Nebraska, and mentions how the West was a place where women’s civil rights were expanded by the local and state government. The purpose of this project is to show the importance of women’s history to a broad audience while also showing individuals how to create a site with tools that are easy to manage and learn. Leslie she breaks the information up into 4 main sections: The Campaign, Visualizations, The Project, and The Source. Each group has its subset of topics except the project. The Project tab is an overview of how this project began and how she collected data and sorted it out while using tools to make it understandable. The Campaign section is the first one presented when entering the site, this section and all the other subsections along with it explain the history of women’s suffrage in Nebraska and the west, citing many different people at the time that made a difference. In Visualization she puts all the information about the tools and maps she used to help her with this project. Lastly, The Sources show a brief tool review with the different techniques she used, and an archive of all the documents used for her research. This site was easy to understand but lacks creativity and engagement. It’s interactive map that’s provided can be hard to find as there’s no specific tab for it and you have to search through all the information to find the hyperlink. The information can be a lot to understand and it’s difficult to navigate. The font size, as insignificant as it sounds, is small, making the information all clumped up and hard to read. Like mentioned previously, she has a tab for the sources which do provide information to where she got her research, that itself is very easy to understand and they all have hyperlinks making it easier for the audience to click on the recourses she used. It’s apparent that this project hasn’t been updated in some time because some of the hyperlinks and maps don’t work. Another problem I ran into was once I went to the interactive map, and tried to go back to the homepage, the whole site crashed. The project does play a role in providing history for those studying women’s history and specifically the suffrage movement. It provides suitable information and provides outside sources that may be of use when trying to gather information from multiple people. Although the website may lack creativity and the information can be hard to navigate, it does a good job of providing accurate information with many different sources to back up their research. It brings women suffrage in the West and Nebraska come to light providing stories that may not have been known without this website putting them in one place for easy access to the public.
https://railroads.unl.edu/student_projects/lworking/history.html
