How To Use This Site
Digital Windham has many components and presents historical information in several different formats, allowing you to explore the history of the town according to your interests. It is an ongoing project, so new items and exhibits will be added over time.
Use the tabs at the top of the page to choose a particular aspect of the site. To summarize each tab:
Exhibits
You can explore the end results of student research in their exhibits. These exhibits will grow over time, and include a broad range of topics. In our first phase, students have focused on the stories of important people, places and events of Willimantic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You can also browse the exhibits by tag, using the Browse by Tag option, which will provide a word cloud of tags used. Tags include type of exhibit (person, place, event), location (only Willimantic so far), as well as decade of focus.
Items
If you are interested in individual items within the collection database, you can explore them in the Browse Items tab. These items are sometimes highlighted in the exhibits or timelines, but many are not. They therefore provide free-standing information about discrete aspects of the town's past, in case you might be interested in doing your own research. Item types include: bibliographic citations on the history of Windham, including links to other websites, as well as finding aids for Eastern's Center of Connecticut Studies (to assist further research); biographical entries of notable people; information on historical businesses and organizations; summaries of historical events; as well as individual documents, photographs, and physical artifacts relevant to the town's history. You can search for particular items or filter items by their metadata, such as dates. For scholarly purposes, items are provided with reference citations.
Timeline
For chronologies that illustrate key events in the history of the town, you can explore the timelines. These events can also be found individually in Items.
Neatline
Neatline exhibits visualize Willimantic's history as a combination of interactive map and timeline, or possibly even a visual analysis of an image or single document. Still under construction!
1910 Willimantic
1910 Willimantic is a meta-exhibit exploring the history of Willimantic circa 1910. There are dozens of pages, focusing on the people, places, and various infrastructures in town around the year 1910.
We hope these views of Digital Windham will help you learn more about the town, and encourage you to further explore its past.
Technical Details
If you ever receive an error message on one of the pages, try reloading the page in your browser. If it persists, contact Dr. Ostwald.
Some of the map pages do not work well in the Safari browser, so, if you have problems, we suggest a browser such as Firefox or Chrome.
This site was created in Omeka Classic, using the Berlin theme. The timelines were created using KnightLab's TimelineJS website.