I chose to write about the Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia from 1788-1930. This project is an interactive map of massacre sites of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander people, colonizers, and more. While the project generally aims to raise awareness and provide information of Australia’s muddled and overlooked history, it also has four specific objectives as well. They aim to identify record sites of massacres, provide a well-structured map of the data, inform public debate about colonial frontier violence, and provide open access knowledge to the public. I was able to speculate these objectives before even reading the project’s review because of the specific title and the details listed on the map’s data points.
The project was created by a number of project directors with academic backgrounds at universities in Australia. These scholars specialize in a spectrum of studies, including history, humanities, mental health, and more. The project’s map is historical in nature, as the source of the data is massacre sites that occurred in the past. The map itself enables viewers to select data points geographically spread across Australia and view site names, victims, attackers, data range, and language groups. Viewers can also adjust a timeline slider to display different sites based on time period. The map likely uses Google Earth as a software indicated by the user interface features I have seen before. Finally, I think the website design is clear and concise. The homepage allows viewers to dive straight into the map visualization and a small link can be clicked to view the introduction to the project. The data visualization itself is also well done. The map provides a timeline slider, an autoplay feature that chronologically displays site occurrences, and a legend that distinguishes differences between each massacre. These affordances make the viewing experience easy and informative to use.
Citations:
https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/review-process
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
