HistoryForge

Abstract

Reviewed by: HistoryForge Maeve Kane (bio) The History Center, Ithaca, Tompkins County, NY. Bob Kibbee, project manager; Eve Snyder, PhD, project coordinator; David Furber, PhD, software developer; Ben Sandberg, Director, and the staff and volunteers of the History Center in Tompkins County Digital exhibit, https://www.historyforge.net/, May 1, 2021. HistoryForge is a model local history project, with vast potential as a public history research resource, teaching tool, and open source platform for use by other local history projects. First begun in 2016 and still under development, the current site offers an overview the people and buildings of Ithaca, NY, from roughly 1890 to 1940 with a goal of creating a platform for use by other communities. The site offers several different modes of exploration, including a Google Maps style top down map of specific places with data (https://www.historyforge.net/forge), a search of building addresses with filters for building type, year built or demolished, architect, and many other features (https://www.historyforge.net/buildings), and a search of people with filters for race, occupation, place of birth, and other census information (https://www.historyforge.net/census/1940). The data for the site currently comprises US census data from 1900 to 1940 and several layers of historic zoning, insurance, and arial maps. Beyond the search interface, the site gives users the ability to see specific places within broader community context, view the history of a specific building (see, for example, the history of 419 Clinton Street https://www.historyforge.net/buildings/1058, where the author of this review lived for several years in grad school), and details about specific individuals taken from census records. The sheer scope of data available with a few clicks makes this project a significant resource. At the time of writing, however, there is little synthetic or summary information available on the site. The explanatory sections on buildings and people offer some suggestions for exploratory searches for industries or ethnic groups, but there is currently no way to see summaries of, for example, change over time in immigrant populations or visualize the distribution of specific occupations or groups. This makes the site an incredibly rich [End Page 452] tool for detailed research, because it leaves the user to draw their own conclusions, but student users may benefit from guided exploration if used in a teaching context. There does not appear to be a way to track the movement of an individual across census years except by name search (for example, the record for Henrietta Compton in 1930 is not linked to Henrietta Compton in 1940). This is a complex and difficult problem to solve at large scale, so the absence of these links is not surprising, but worth noting for researchers who may be interested in tracking individuals. The fact that the site is still under development and the scope of data work already completed means that there is also a very strong foundation for the addition of analytic or visualization components in the future. The real potential of this project lies in its interoperability and the promised release of a platform for use by other communities. HistoryForge offers csv downloads of both complete and filtered census data, making the valuable work of the project's volunteers freely available for analysis in other programs (for example, using the free program Tableau in a digital humanities course, or for a historic site to give contextual overview of its neighborhood). The work of the project administrators and volunteers in transcribing census records, georectifying maps, and building a database of specific building footprints is vast and offers a wealth of detailed microdata for extension in other projects. The project also welcomes new volunteers for transcription, building database work, and mapping (https://www.historyforge.net/volunteer). HistoryForge is not currently available as a plug-and-play website builder, but the creators encourage contact by email from interested parties and have technical setup instructions available on the project's GitHub (https://github.com/historyforge/historyforge). The technical instructions are clear and easy to follow, but do require significantly more expertise than installing Wordpress, Omeka, or similar consumer web software. As a platform, HistoryForge's closest parallels are the...