Before discussing my two articles, I will make an assertion. No website that I have found has fulfilled the promise of digital scholarship. But, I remain an optimist. I know that digital scholarship will soon integrate comprehensive databases, innovative information management capabilities, and techniques to view primary and secondary sources in ways that we have not envisioned. More important, digital scholarship will connect the reader to the evidence and the author’s argument through an interactive process that also allows the reader to use the scholarship in ways the original author never intended.
With that said, I believe that the two sites I reviewed, Images of the French Revolution and The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities, allow the user to better understand the arguments than they would if reading traditional written sources.
Of the two sites I reviewed, The Difference Slavery Made had much more potential to fulfill the promises of digital scholarship that I listed, above. When I entered the site, I became very excited because I thought that I was going to interact with a GIS system. I believe that GIS offers the possibility to revolutionize knowledge management. It combines spatial, computational, and informational aspects that may enable future scholars to understand previously unidentified trends. To be more succinct, I hoped that I would be able to manipulate a GIS interface in order to explore relationships between Augusta and Franklin Counties.
Unfortunately, the site offers important GIS data in a format that is little different from an indexed book. The authors do note that they want to place an actual GIS interface on the website when technology allows. But, they could have used a more innovative way of publishing the GIS data rather than simply listing static GIS outputs by functional category (as if merely chapters in a book).
Ayers and Thomas did use hypertext to combine a wide variety of data sources and types. However, they do so almost to the extreme. A written book provides a familiar interface through which the reader may find other sources of information. The Difference Slavery Made provides so many links that it is easy for the reader to lose his place. So, the site visitor has access to more data than he can ever expect to gain in one volume. However, he may not be able to wade effectively through the vast quantities of data. The site really doesn’t provide the framework that overcomes this problem.
Ayers and Thomas demonstrate some of the capabilities of digital scholarship, but they do not fully exploit its advantages. Instead, they use digital capabilities to create their argument. However they fail to create a product that takes advantages of the digital tools they used.
Images of the French Revolution is more traditional in its scholarship, but it provides a much better example of the inherent advantages of New Media. These advantages include the ability to integrate images and narrative in a fashion superior to written text. Specifically, the site provides thumbnail control of the images, enables the user to zoom into the image for close study, and cross-links the conventional essays with the images. The site demonstrates some of the promise of new media by better connecting the evidence to the argument. Further, the site makes excellent use of hyperlinks and footnotes to explain critical arguments. It is also interactive—leading the user to explore elements of the argument that he may have ignored in a written text. I believe that the site makes very effective use of digital media for narrow, image-related sources.
The site also provides traditional essays as the central arguments that described the images. This provides a nice linkage between traditional scholarship and new media capabilities. The essays are also well-integrated into the overall website.
Finally, this site also provides a sense of digital community. While the “Essays” section is interesting, I found the “Discussion” section more compelling. Within this section, the contributors actually discuss the mechanics of putting the site and scholarship together. This is another potential strength of new media—the ability to bring together a wide community of people with substantially different interests and integrating their efforts into a scholarly product. Even better, this product is only a “Google” search away.
Though these sites take fail to take advantage of all the capabilities of new media, they both provide interesting and effective demonstrations of digital scholarship. To fulfill the promise of digital scholarship, we will need to develop techniques and technologies to allow users to interact with the data and the arguments—in ways the original authors didn’t intend.