Hunt/Censer - Images of the French Revolution
The home page was slow to load on a dial-up connection due to images, but there is a nice rollover effect on the homepage images that invites you into the sections of the site.
The image archive is slow to load (but not excessively slow) on a dial-up connection, but that is a trade-off on the high image quality which is important to one of the site's main purposes: the analysis of images from the French Revolution which requires sufficiently high image quality to support analysis in some detail. This section also makes good use of rollover effects on the thumbnail images that brings up a preview of the image allowing them to be scanned quickly for the particular image the site user may be interested in - a good use of new media. But the most important use of web capabilities in this site is the archive of images itself. The site makes images available to scholars that might not otherwise be available to them for research and analysis. This is one of the best scholarly uses of the web: its archival capabilities.
The essays section of the site presents essays as they should be done on the web: scholarly essays in traditional format discussing/analyzing the archival sources presented on the site. Navigation through the essays is easy. There is a good use of images in the essays (the images discussed are shown in the essay) with the images linked to the full images for ease of analysis in detail. The hyperlink footnotes in traditional, familiar format are also easy to use.
Although the discussion forum is weakened by not being an active discussion area, it nevertheless represents a good use of taking advantage of web-based capabilities (in this case, discussion among scholars by e-mail) to add to the analysis and discussion in the essays. Again, the links to the images in this section are useful to avoid having to go off the page to the images archive.
Overall assessment: There is nothing genuinely new in the site as far as use of new media, but with me that is a good thing - no postmodernism is evident in the site. In my view this site is the way scholarship on the web should be done. It is a very well designed site that takes advantage of the web's digital imaging and archiving capabilities to present images that would not otherwise be available to scholars and offer analysis of them to a large scholarly audience. The site is an effective mix of the archival and on-line essay genres.
Thomas/Ayers - The Difference Slavery Made
This sites main attraction is that it takes advantage of web capabilities to engage a wide range of scholarly arguments and historiography regarding the causes of the Civil War and other antebellum historical issues.
The navigation on the site could be improved: the only way to return to the original page is through the browser's back button. And the navigation box doesn't match the list of hyperlinks offered in the first page's text. This mismatch leads to some confusion on exactly what is in the sections listed in the navigation box. (The "historiography" link at the top of the page is also a non-functional link).
Other than these problems the design is simple but effective. There is a good division into analysis of key issues, summary of findings by topic, and archival sources/evidence.
The evidence section takes advantage of digital web-based capabilities to put a large amount of archival material at the fingertips of scholars of this period. The analysis in the site is presented in the traditional essay style familiar to scholars and is easy to follow. The "Points of Analysis" section is a very effective use of hypertext links to demonstrate how the author's conclusions were derived and how they used the evidence. The links to the historiography provide a bibliography guiding the site user to other works written on the topics. The "Summary of Arguments" section engages the historiographic debates and its hypertext links to book synopses is a very good use of new media capabilities that historians interested in the debates can easily use.
Overall assessment: This is an excellent site that uses new media capabilities well. Despite its navigation problems the site is a good example of how scholarship on the web should be done: traditional essays and archival material. This is similar to the Censer/Hunt site in that essays and arguments are hyperlinked to supporting evidence (documents in the one, images in the other).
Both of these sites demonstrate the way scholarship should be done on the web: argument and analysis preserved (not lost in postmodern hyperlink confusion) and using traditional, easy to follow essay formats but taking advantage of the imaging, archival, and hyperlink capabilities of the web - using them as tools, not as gaudy showpieces that overpower analysis and interpretion.