There are lots of advantages to to create digital artifacts from archival documents. For example, physical documents are fragile, and are at risk at being destroyed and therefore the information they possess is lost. Documents from hundreds of years ago allow us to see what the world was like in the past, but these old documents are usually worn down and sometimes illegible when they are found. By transcribing these documents into a digital archive, it preserves the information. Digital archives also allow historical information to be easily accessible to the average person. The physical documents are held in an archive, and demands one to travel to the archive and for some important documents you must meet certain credentials to be able to see it. Digital archives can be accessed in the convenience of one’s home as long as they have a computer. While there are many advantages, creating a digital archive there are also disadvantages. In order to transcribe archival documents into digital artifacts, a great amount of time is needed. Creating a digital archive also means that people need to be able to create and maintain the website, and also demands committed people that are willing to transcribe documents accurately.
The Moravian Lives project shared similarities with lots of other large-scale DH projects. The Moravian Lives project looks to preserve first hand accounts of Moravian people that moved from Germany to Pennsylvania. The Moravian people kept journals that they used to write about their daily lives, and also sent letters describing their lives. These documents contain valuable information about what the world was like back then. History is dominated by the male point of view, since usually they were the ones that would write and were more educated but the Moravian Lives project has valuable first hand accounts from women as well. This is rare, as women and other minority groups do not have a big voice in history. Archive projects like “Old Weather” and “Database of Indigenous Peoples in North America” have a similar mission as the Moravian Lives project. All three look to keep information about the past and preserve it, and make it accessible to people. They all three also involve transcribing documents that were written hundreds of years ago. The Moravian Lives project is also similar to “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project. The “Mapping the Republic of Letters” projects maps out where letters were sent from people like Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, to illustrate how far their letters traveled. The Moravian Lives project site also has a similar feature which shows where letters are from and where they traveled to.
With the current state of technology, I think society is more inclined to use screens for textual material instead of the physical printed version of books. This also means that when studying or doing research, physically going to the library is starting to become more rare. This is why digital archives are important. Digital versions of the text can either be a direct picture of the document and also just be the text on the document. Actually being able to see the original document over the computer in picture form can be more revealing for someone compared to if they were just reading a new version of the document. 
Jacob Hubbard is a sophomore at Bucknell University, and is from San Francisco, CA.
