Living in the Valley of the Shadow: The Creation of a Web-Based, Role-Playing Simulation on the Civil War

FAIN: HD-50194-07

Hope College (Holland, MI 49423-3663)
Christian Spielvogel (Project Director: April 2007 to January 2009)

Development of a web-based simulation based on the online Valley of the Shadow archive.

I propose to develop open source software and content for a web-based role-playing simulation on the Civil War based on the award-winning digital archive "The Valley of the Shadow." The simulation will require that students, interacting anonymously online as characters in one of two groups or communities (Union or Confederacy), use an integrated set of collaborative software tools to chronologically engage and debate the war's most important issues, events, and ideas as featured in the Valley archive. "Living in the Valley of the Shadow" promises to be the first web-based simulation developed around the contents of a digital archive, and will promote deep inquiry into the Civil War and its primary documents precisely because it capitalizes on and transforms the interactive dimensions of open source collaborative software.