calderwood

William J. Turkel’s blog, “Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape,” introduced several research/data collecting techniques to me for the first time.  I’ve seen SIPs listed on Amazon, but I did not fully realize how SIPs could make book searches more effective.  The other techniques are totally new to me, and I’m interested to learn more about them.

Until I had read Chapter 6 of Digital History, “Collecting History Online,” I had a picture in my mind of a web site that would basically serve as an alternative presentation of my master’s thesis.  Now, of course, I realize that such a web site would not be making full use of the interactive nature of the internet.  If I were to design a web site to accompany my master’s thesis, I would no longer think of it as a relatively static presentation of research.  Instead, the research could serve as a magnet to attract personal accounts, which in turn would fuel further research and contribute to a deeper and broader understanding of the topic.

After looking at several online archives, I have to say that Business Plan Archive was my least favorite.  I don’t think it really encourages curious visitors like me, since you have to register (and state your reason for interest) to see anything.  Because the site seems so off-puting to visitors, I have no idea how they manage to attract contributors.

In terms of design, The Video Store Project was probably my favorite site.  Right at the home page, it gave clear indications of where to go, depending on whether you are a visitor or contributor.  Even further, it set up clear distinctions for the types of potential contributors (video store owner/employee/customer).  As a visitor, I liked that I could arrange the different contributions by date or by state.  (I immediately began to look at the contributions from the cities in California closest to my hometown, including Berkeley, Hayward, and Oakland.)  The amount of questions contributors had to answer surprised me, but I didn’t consider the amount too cumbersome, especially since most of the questions were so simple.

One thing I liked about the Echo site was, when you click on the link to one archive, you get a list of related archives along the left side of the page.  For example, when I looked at the Remembering Hiroshima archive, Echo led me to the Atomic Veterans History Project, which I found even more interesting than Remembering Hiroshima.

From a theoretical standpoint, I found Philip Agre’s article quite interesting.  Although I had difficulty following certain sections of the article, especially “Economic considerations,” I could definitely appreciate his notion that democracy, on a day-to-day level, manifests itself in cognitive communities.  Media, and the genres that media make possible, serve as a way to link the individual members of these communities.  Agre’s ideas, in essence, are similar to Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities”; however, the communities that Agre envisions seem to be much more fluid: indivduals can be members of multiple cognitive communities, and each of these communities can evolve in response to new thought leaders, new media, and new genres.

What impressed me most about the selection from Digital History was the discussion of the variety of genres of on-line history, as well as the variety and the range of quality within each genre.  After reading about the many forms that history takes on-line, I am left with a feeling that I have seen only one iota of what is out there on the internet.

I was also interested in comparing the list of major genres in the JAH Web Review Guidelines with the genres discussed in Digital History.  Where would Gateways and Journals/Webzines fit into the genres discussed in Digital History?  Would Gateways be considered archives, secondary sources, or teaching resources?  Or, are they actually a common form that some archives, second sources, and teaching resources take on?  Also, is it fair to consider Journals/Webzines as a kind of discussion or organization?  Or, are they a hybrid of both genres?

Finally, a few words about the sample web sites.  I liked how Valley of the Shadow and Our Favorite Things featured site maps that resembled musuem maps.  The former contained lots of records, but it was not particularly easy or enjoyable to explore them.  The latter offered little information, other than the images, but it was more enjoyable to explore the site.  I like how French Revolution seemed to represent the on-line equivalent of a symposium.  It featured primary sources, papers written on those sources, and a discussion between the authors of these papers.  Above all, I thought the National Geographic site featured the greatest amount of information, combined with the slickest production values.  It was fun to explore this site, and I actually spent more time exploring it than any of the other sites.