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September 21, 2005
Thoughts on Scholarship Question
As with everything with this class so far, I am slow on the uptake but I ponder things until my head hurts. I'm having a hard time writing the web review because I keep going over this analysis idea of websites. I never read or reviewed historical monographs before I started this program but now I can do it with "relative" ease, so I expect with practice I can do web reviews as well. After the class discussion and rereading Roy's guidelines and Mill's blog questions, I spents some time (OK it was hours) looking at Pearl Harbor, Brainerd, Midwife's Tale, Salem Witch Trials, and Valley with the idea of categorizing them into: scholarship, entertainment, and informative/teaching. I found it easy to put Pearl Harbor in entertainment, and the other 4 into informative/teaching because they had the criteria of some or all of: information, archival materials, and teaching tools (probably more but that will do). I tried to compare them to the monograph I'm reading simultaneously for Colonial Origins, and I can't find the argument, data to support it, and conclusion in the websites we looked at. As you know from the Scavenger Hunt, I'm no web researcher, but I don't recall finding this scholarship idea out there on the web (in my limited experience). They seemed to be geared for information gathering, teaching historical concepts or events, or entertaining while informing - not for furthering an argument or presenting new historical ground to cover. Maybe I'm just now getting your point Mills for myself, but blogging is for thinking out loud, right? Now that I've blogged this out, maybe I can just sit down and write the review.
Posted by scarson1 at September 21, 2005 12:20 PM