The mobile public history site that I tested was a project by the Arlington Historical Society called Images of Arlington County 1920. The project was created to mark the centenary of the renaming of the county in 2020. It features 119 images of buildings that would have existed in 1920 when Arlington County got its present name. As the project introduction states, “They are the sights those newly renamed Arlingtonians would see during, say, an early-morning walk, or a ride on a horse, car or trolley.” In putting together this project, the Arlington Historical Society wanted to give users an idea of some of the sights that individuals living in Arlington County in 1920 would have seen.
The project consists of a map of Arlington County in 1920 with the location of the buildings in the 119 photographs marked. Each photo is given a number to represent its location on the map. The user is able to click on either the photo of the building or the number on the map to bring up more information about the location in the photo. I found the project to be exciting in that it was able to show what buildings existed in 1920 that are still here today and what buildings used to be found in certain locations.
I did find some limits to the format of this project as I was navigating through it. First, there was not much background information about the buildings that each photo depicted. Most of the photos just gave the name of the building, the date of the photo, and when it was built. This definitely a missed opportunity to provide much more in depth information about the history of Arlington County. I found myself wanting to know a lot more about the history of the buildings found in each photo.
The other major problem I found with the project was in the way that the map was done. When zoomed out, the map shows the major roads of Arlington County in 1920 with their current names in parenthesize. To see the modern street plan of Arlington County the user has to zoom in on the map and even when you zoom in none of the streets are labeled. Even as someone who lives in Arlington County, I found it difficult to determine the location of some of the photos without street names.
Overall, I found this project to be an interesting insight into the history of Arlington County and what the county looked like in 1920. However, I wish the project would have done a better job at providing more historical background on the buildings in the photos and provided a map that was easier to navigate.
