Methods

In addition to being a study of how games represent history, this site is also an experiment in method. The goal was to see how a digital tool like Omeka could be used as a means of scholarly publishing. The form of this site owes much to the underlying structures instituted by Omeka. As such, my efforts in this project have been nearly as much about the construction of the site, if not more so, than the content it is filled with. As a result, what you will be reading throughout this site is almost entirely a work-in-progress.

Another consequence of using Omeka has been a change in how I write and think. Much of the analyses of game components suffer from needing to be detailed and exacting in order to be of scholarly worth, yet also needing to be extremely brief and to-the-point to accommodate the reading habits engendered by the Web. The non-linear nature and the obscure subject matter have also lead to much redundancy: background information and game descriptions are repeated frequently because there is no guaranteed path a reader might take through the site. In other words, any given item cannot assume any other given item has been read by the user.

Lastly, the content and goals of this site have evolved and shrunk as more time was put into the construction. You may have noted that the site is ostensibly about train games and the Baltimore & Ohio generally, yet as of December 2012 all of the items are related to Francis Tresham's 1830: Railways and Robber Barons. This scaling-down was a result of various constraints, but on the other hand has afforded a more in-depth analyses of a game that has been incredibly influential in board games yet almost entirely unknown to game studies.