Web Review Essay

For generations historians have been writing review essays in which they select several books and/or articles all organized around some theme, person, event, scholarly interpretation, etc. These essays attempt to tease out common issues raised in the works of scholarship under review, to use these examples to elucidate for the reader one or more important issues in the scholarship, to synthesize central arguments, and to point toward fruitful next steps for scholars.

The purpose of your web review essay is for you to do the same thing, only with works of digital scholarship rather than print scholarship. We are going to take a very broad view of what constitutes "scholarship" for this assignment. For example, the Valley of Shadow project, which in its early incarnations was largely a database of primary sources, also represents scholarship. Many digital history websites have all the things that scholarship requires: an argument, sources, evidence of research driving the argument and producing the sources, and, because digital projects are by definition public, they have been submitted to public comment by peers and others.

Your task for the project proposal is to locate a group of digital history projects (websites, databases, etc.) that you believe have enough in common that they can be reviewed as a group. You should write a few hundred words describing the overarching theme of your choices--the thing(s) that tie them together sufficiently for it to make sense to review them together--and then include links to each website, along with a few sentences of introductory prose on the site so that your colleagues can understand what they should find if they follow your links.

Some have asked me how long the final review should be. We'll discuss this issue in class in more detail, but as befits something that is 30% of your grade for the course, this essay should be at least 10 pages in length. If you choose to produce it in a hypertext format, "length" becomes a trickier concept. In that case, think of it as being a significant piece of scholarly work on your part.