The examples of digital scholarship I examined for this week were “Hearsay of the Sun” by Thomas Thurston, “The Difference Slavery Made” by Will Thomas and Edward Ayers, and “From Hogan’s Alley to Coconino County: Three Narrative of the Early Comic Strip” by David Westbrook. These examples show how the web can make the use of these essays easier than in print media; however there are still some serious shortcomings with regard to the media in general.
Each of these sites uses the media in different ways, although in my opinion the best example of how the web can make reading an essay easier is “Hearsay of the Sun” . When the link is followed from the American Quarterly site to the essay the “home page” of the essay appears with an introduction to the document as well as a sidebar and header with links to the contents. The site provides the reader with the text of the essay divided into five sections each utilizing hypertext. As the reader is linked to each section, they can read the document on the left hand side of the page while simultaneously viewing the footnotes and the source documents on the right hand side.
This format for reading an essay while simultaneously viewing the source materials is a feature that helps to fulfill the “promise” of digital scholarship and uses the media to simplify and streamline the way most scholars already use print documents.
However, new media, despite such an innovation, also has its drawbacks. As Thomas Thurston mentions in “New Question for New Media, Scholarly Writing and Online Publishing” , the problem with websites is “sites disappear and change”. Some of the most common problems are: websites eventually stop being hosted on servers, new technology makes them obsolete, and there is the constant ability to change the site itself.
Another problem or some may say is strength, with the new media is that each of these documents uses the technology differently and there is no set format. Printed materials have a basic format that most literate people are familiar with, but the web allows authors to create works that contain the same content, however are in new and ever changing formats. These new formats could confuse and impede the use of the site by new users.
Each of the essays I examined made good use of the new media and each went far beyond the capabilities of print media. Although, it is difficult to say how the new media will overcome its shortcomings to communicate information via digital scholarship.