The online component of “The Differences Slavery Made” is an extension of the digital archive The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War based on Franklin County, Pennsylvania and Augusta County, Virginia.
At first glance, in many respects, authors William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers do not do anything truly new or revolutionary. The core of the site is Thomas and Ayers “Summery of Argument” section that is presented as basically a hypertext version of a journal article. Each section is a different page and includes links to the next section.
However, this section does do something new and I believe really does fulfill “the promise of digital scholarship.” Thomas and Ayers take full advantage of the expanse of the web and relatively cheap availability of server space by using hypertext in very interesting, and rewarding ways. The most innovative way they’ve used hypertext in the “Summary of Argument” section is to turn citations into hyperlinks. Each of these citations links to a page concerning the work discussed. These separate pages include brief synopses of the works, relevant quotations, and comments by the authors on how the work relates to their scholarship presented in the “Summary of Argument” section.
Many of the other sections, especially the “Points of Analysis” and “Evidence” sections do not do anything different than the information that is presented on The Valley of the Shadow site. However, as with The Valley of the Shadow, the authors do take advantage of the expansiveness of the web as compared to an offline journal article, presenting several maps, tables and charts, in full color. Presenting such information in a journal article would be completely impractical, and costly.
Also, in a nod toward those visitors that may be uncomfortable with the, in some ways, non-linear style of their work, Thomas and Ayers have included several useful tools. The entire site is searchable and there is a “Reading Record” which shows the visitor which parts of the “article” they haven’t seen. For those visitors who may be returning and wish to find a particular piece of information, there’s also a “Citation Locator” which will help them find a particular page based on the numbering system included at the bottom of each page on the site. In this way, the site appears to have “page numbers” much like a traditional journal article.
This site using hypertext has done an admirable job of using it to take advantage of the expansiveness of the web to include things that just wouldn’t be possible in a traditional journal article.
Again, at first look, David Westbrook’s “From Hogan’s Alley to Coconino County: Four Narratives of the Early Comic Strip” seems just like the traditional journal article, split into three parts and illustrated by relevant cartoon strips. However, again, this site is much more innovative than it appears at first glance.
The most innovative thing done by this site is its use of new media technology with the comic strips it includes. With a traditional journal article, a reader would see a reprint of the cartoon strip and its caption. The reader would then depend on the article text to analyze this cartoon and reveal its importance to the narrative. However, Westbrook’s site doesn’t do that. Each cartoon comes with hypertextual “captions” that can be accessed by the reader that explains the importance of the cartoon and its relevance to the article. For example, in the “Evening Journal Sports: The Pirates Grab a Few Goats Too” cartoon, Westbrook includes hypertext “captions” that explain how the cartoon illustrated how early cartoonists were “selling participation” and how the cartoonist was expected to “narrate” real events such as a baseball game for their readers.
While this analysis is possible in a traditional journal article, I believe it is much more effective to be able to visually connect it to the cartoon being discussed rather than depend on the reader to make that link. That advantage is something that is unique to the web and an extremely exciting possibility.
Also, as with the Thomas and Ayers site, Westbrook uses many more cartoons, some in full color, than would be possible in a traditional journal article.