History 332:004/632.004: History in the Digital Age
Spring, 2002

The Assignments
 

Background Reading Assignment One Assignment Two Assignment Three Assignment Four Assignment Five Assignment Six
Assignment Seven Assignment Eight Assignment Nine Assignment Ten Prospectus (U) Essay Review (G) Final Projects

About the Assignments:  Each week you will be required to post a brief (600-750 words for undergraduates; 750-1,000 words for graduate students) written assignment on the classes Blackboard discussion forums. You will also be required to post comments on what your team mates have written.  Assignments must be posted no later than Friday evening preceding Monday's class meeting.  Comments must be posted no later than Monday noon on the day of class.  Your performance on these written assignments (including comments) will count for approximately 65% (50% for graduate students) of your grade.  For details, click on Assessment.

Assignment One: The History of the Internet. 

First, read the following: 

Patrick Reagan, History and the Internet, pp. 1-10.

Bruce Sterling, "A Short History of the Internet" at: http://www.library.yale.edu/div/instruct/internet/history.htm

Roy Rosenzweig, "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet,"   American Historical Review (December, 1998), 1530-1552. Available via University's JSTOR database.  Blackboard. 

Roy Rosenzweig, "Live Free or Die? Death, Life, Survival, And Sobriety on the Information Superhighway, American Quarterly (March 1999), 160-174.  Available via the Library's Project Muse database.

Post your essay to the class Blackboard discussion forum.   Read and comment on the essays posted by other members of the class.


 Assignment Two: Romancing the Web

Assignment Four also comes in several installments.

1.  First, read the following:

Reagan, History and the Internet, pp. 11-36, 48-57.

Roy Rosenzweig, "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web," The Journal of American History (September 2001) via WRLC's Proquest General Database. [Also available on the CHNM website at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/e1/roadtoxanadu1.html.]

2.  Second, familiarize yourself with some of the major web search engines.  Explore the Library's Guide to Search Engines, with special attention to the section on "Tips for Searching the Web."  Explore how you can use "boolean operators" to refine your search processes.  See also the Search Tools page at: http://www.infopeople.org/search/chart.html.

3.  Explore some of the  AU Library's disciplinary "gateways" to information on the web. (e.g., see Online Resources).  Focus especially on those sites listed under history, American studies, women and gender studies and the various social sciences.  Also browse the Library's "e-Reference" collection.

4.  Read carefully the criteria in the following two web sites:  Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources and  especially Thinking Critically about Discipline-Based World Wide Web.

5.  Sample the web sites collection on the George Mason University "History Matters" website at: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/wwwhistory/.  Select a single web site relating to an historical topic that interests you. Explore it carefully.   

6.  Finally, prepare an essay (c.600-750 words for undergraduates, 750-1,000 for graduate students)  describing and evaluating the web site you have selected.  Use the criteria from the two UCLA web sites above.  In addition, answer the following questions: Would you characterize the purpose of your site as a) instructional; b) scholarly; or c) archival; or d) some combination?  To what audience is it directed? What are its strengths?  Its limitations?

Post your essay to the class Blackboard discussion forum.   Read and comment on the essays posted by other members of the class.

 


Assignment Three: Exploring the Library's Real and Virtual Resources.


 Assignment Four: The Digital Archive

This assignment builds on your attendance at the Library of Congress symposium on 9/11.  Our goal is to better understand how new digital technologies facilitate our access to the "primary documents" that constitute the building blocks of historical research.  Within the past decade, enormous numbers of primary sources have been digitized and made available via the web.  It is important for us to understand how this has affected how we go about our work as historians, both as scholars and teachers of history.  It is equally important that we understand the limitations and implicit bias that such enterprises invariably involve.

Like much of the web, the task of creating the digital archive was self-organizing.  No one assigned anyone to the task.  Rather, many, many different individuals and organizations joined an open-ended process.  Unsurprisingly, libraries, print archives and museums have played a major role, but many others are also involved.  The result is amazing rich and rapidly growing body of information that is almost instantaneously available to anyone with a computer and a connection to the internet.  What has been traditionally the domain of a small number of professional researchers, is now democratically accessible to students and ordinary citizens.  Here, too, there are problems.  While much is now available,  it represents only a tiny fraction of the historical record.  There are important and unresolved technical issues.  How permanent are the storage properties of digital technologies?  What kinds of search capabilities are built into the collection?  Since digitization is almost invariably selective, what criteria have been used to determine what is and is not included?  In evaluating digital archives, it is also important to think about audience: thus, a scholar, preparing a definitive work, may find an archive less useful than a classroom teacher seeking to use primary documents in a classroom exercise.  It is important, in exploring the digital archive, to keep these and other questions in mind. 

Please read the article by Roy Rozenzweig in the June 2003 AHA. Follow the discussion thread, also.

Here is AHA editor Michael Grossberg's notice regarding the article:

In a June 2003 American Historical Review ­article "Can We Save the Present
for the Future," historian Roy Rosenzweig argues that in the future students
trying to understand our time will likely face a very troubling and indeed
ironic prospect: the archival record of our era may be too scarce or too
abundant. In either case, the basic scholarly mission of historians will
be challenged in fundamental ways. In the article, which can be found in
the print or electronic version of the AHR, Rosenzweig contends that
historians today have a professional and ethical obligation to address this
issue now. His message is clear: The problem is dire, the need for action
immediate. Rosenzweig invites responses to his plea for understanding and
action. And so does the AHR. September 1-15 the journal will host a
moderated electronic discussion of Rosenzweig's essay on the AHR web site
at  http://www.historycooperative.org  . Participants can send questions
or comments of up to 700 words. Guidelines will be posted on the
discussion sign-in page. After the discussion has concluded, the exchanges
will become a permanent part of the electronic version of the article.
Questions about the discussion can sent to the American Historical Review,
914 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405 or ahr@indiana.edu

FYI, AU students can locate recent issues of the AHA (and JAH) by going to the library's electronic journal finder and entering American Historical Review. The finder will pull up links to both JSTOR (which does not have the last five years of either journal), but also a special AU link which will take you to the History Cooperative. To follow (or participate) in the discussion, you can go directly to the History Cooperative by following the link above.
 

THEN:

1.  For today's assignment, first read the article by Roy Rosenzweig from the June 2003 American Historical Review (see above) and browse the subsequent discussion. 

2.  Review in detail, "Using Primary Documents on the Web," by the American Library Association, at: http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/RUSA/.   You may also want to browse the extensive list of "resources" on digitization from the Ohio Memory website that Elizabeth reviewed earlier at: http://www.ohiomemory.org/om/links2.html .

3.  Then visit and explore several "portals" to primary documents.

The Library of Congress's America Memory Project at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html.  The LC has thus far digitized more than seven million items from over 100 collections.

The National Security Archive's collection of documents relating to U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.

The "Many Pasts" portion of the History Matters web site at: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/manypasts/.  Use the search feature to look for collections in areas in which you are especially interested.

Or others listed on the ALA and Ohio Memory websites above (2).

4.  Then, select a particular digital archive.  It may be a portion of a larger archive -- e.g., Ansel Adams's photograph's of Japanese internment camps from the LC's American Memory Project -- or, a smaller website in its entirety (such as many of those listed on the History Matters list).  Explore the site carefully.  Then, drawing on the ALA website at: http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/RUSA/#three, prepare an essay (c.600-750 words for undergraduates, 750-1,000 for graduate students) evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the archive.   Who created it?  How confidant are you in its credibility?  What does the archive contain?  What doesn't it contain?  How effective is the material presented?  How useful are its search engines and finding guides? etc., etc. 

Post your essay to the class Blackboard discussion forum.   Read and comment on the essays posted by other members of the class.


Assignment Five: Teaching History in the Digital Age


Assignment Six: Historical Scholarship on the Web

1.  Read Roy Rosenzweig, "Crashing the System?: Hypertext and Scholarship on American Culture," American Quarterly 51.2 (1999) 237-246 (Project Muse); and the associated web site: Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies.   For a different version of this essay, see Rosenzweig, "The Riches of Hypertext for Scholarly Journals," The Chronicle of Higher Education; Washington; Mar 17, 2000 (Proquest General database). 

See also, Benjamin E. Hermalin, "Scholarly Journal Publishing in the 21st Century," Syllabus Magazine (September 2001) at: http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=4770, and Clifford Lynch, "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World" First Monday, Volume 6, Number 6(2001) at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html

2.  Browse the two recently founded journals:

Journal of Multi-Media History
Journal of the Association for the History and Computing
3.  Explore two scholarly web sites.

 Philip J. Ethington, "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Knowledge,"
at: http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/LAPUHK/index.html.  This is a multi-media essay designed to accompany a series of review essays in The American History Review (December, 2000)

Robert Darnton,  "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris," together with accompanying maps, illustrations, songs and commentary by other historians in The American Historical Review (February 2000).  To locate the online version of this article, click on The History Cooperative.

Charles Hardy III & Alessandro Portelli, "I Can Almost See the Lights of Home - A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky, " in the Journal of Multi-Media History (1999) at: http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/.
 

4.  Based on the above readings, prepare an essay (c.600-750 words for undergraduates; 750-1,000 for graduate students)  on "How New Technologies are Changing Historical Scholarship" (feel free to invent a title of your own).  Cite examples (with links wherever possible) to support the points you are making in your essay.   Post your essay to the class Blackboard discussion forum.   Read and comment on the essays posted by other members of the class.

 


Assignment Seven: How New Information Technologies are Transforming Professional Communities

Readings: 

Reagan, History and the Internet, pp. 80-85.

Peter Kollock and Marc Smith, Communities in Cyberspace (introduction) at:
 http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/communities_01.htm

Although many accounts of the internet forecast a dystopian future of social isolation in which computers replace human interaction, new information technologies are also strengthening (and extending) the bonds of professional life.  Indeed, e-mail, electronic discussion groups and dynamic web sites are increasing and deepening the quality of communication within the profession.  Professional organizations, journals, libraries, institutes, publishers and a variety of other organizations and individuals are in the process of organizing a rich and extensive electronic environment for professional discourse. Many of the web sites we have examined thus far are a part of this typically self organizing web process.  Although these efforts are recent and necessarily incomplete, one can already begin to discern the outlines of the future.  For example, a visit to the home page of the Organization of American Historians, or the American Historical Association, will reveal not only extensive information about the ongoing work of these organizations, but also links to many other resources. Academic centers and institutes are conducting more and more of their work on the web, and in the process helping to weave together new scholarly communities.   The programs of conferences, symposia and colloquia are now routinely published on the web, and some even include abstracts or the full text of talks and papers.   Some web sites offer opportunities for threaded discussions.  The most important collection of such sites are the more than 100 discussion networks maintained by  H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

For this exercise, each of you will visit (and briefly report on) four types of web sites:

1) web sites established by historical associations.  For a list of some of these associations, see the Affiliated Society's page of the American Historical Association at: http://www.theaha.org/affiliates/.  Visit the home page of one of these associations.  Prepare a brief report describing how the association uses the web to organize its professional activities and evaluating (as best you can) how well it accomplishes this purpose. (Be aware that in some cases you may not have access to all parts of the site.)  You may even want to send an e-mail to the site's web master.

2) web sites established by academic institutes and centers.  Some of these centers and institutes are listed in the links page of the Organization of American Historians at: http://www.oah.org/announce/links.html   Visit one of these sites and prepare a very brief report that includes its name & url, as well as its primary mission and audience.  Evaluate how well the web site helps to accomplish the center's mission.

3)  History Departments --Almost every history department in the country now has a web site.  The History Matters web site at George Mason University maintains a very extensive directory of these Departments at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/history/depts/.  As you will discover, these departmental home pages vary widely in quality and scope.  Explore at least one of these departmental home pages.  Prepare a brief report evaluating how the Department uses the web to serve its faculty, staff and students.  Compare the departmental home page you have studied with the AU home page at: http://www.american.edu/academic.depts/cas/hist/index.html.

4)  List servs and discussion databases.  Visit  H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences Online.  Select one of the discussion groups and explore its log to acquaint yourself with the kind of discussion that goes on among the list's participants.  Briefly summarize what you have learned.

Post your for brief reports (c.600-750 words for undergraduates; 750-1,000 for graduate students)  to your Blackboard discussion forum.  Post comments on what your teammates have posted. 


Assignment Eight: "Public" History, History's Publics

There are two broad ways of defining public history.  The first is more or less vocational, focusing on how history is practiced outside the academy and on the work of historians in such varied areas as  museums, libraries, film making, editing, business, government, the military and so on.  The second focuses on the public itself, on historical consciousness, on how people "make" or use history in their daily lives, on the relationships among "producers" of history and their audiences, and so on.  What seems clear is that new information technologies are transforming public history no matter how it is defined.  Moreover, and this may be one of the defining characteristics of our "postmodern" era, the boundaries that in the past have separated historical practice (such as the division between "academic" and "public" history) have become increasingly porous.

In this assignment, we will explore only one aspect of that transformation: e.g., how new technologies are changing the work of museums.

1.  Read Sue Ann Cody, "Historical Museums on the World Wide Web: An Exploration and Critical Analysis," The Public Historian, 19:4 (Fall, 1997), 29-53.

2.  Read David Silver, "Interfacing American Culture: The Perils and Potentials of Virtual Exhibitions," American Quarterly 49.4 (1997) 825-850, available via the Project Muse database.  [Silver is a recent Ph.D. in American Studies, now teaching at the University of Washington.  He is the founder of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies at: http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/.]

3.  Visit the Public History Resource Center at: http://www.publichistory.org/evaluation/index2.html.  Pay special attention to the essay by Deborah DeRuyver, "Evaluating Public History Web Sites."

4.  Visit the web site of the Museum Computer Network at: http://www.mcn.edu/.  The MCN maintains a directory of links to over 1700 museum related web sites.  Using this directory, locate a "virtual exhibition" created by a major library or museum.  (To avoid duplication, register your site as soon as possible on the Blackboard discussion forum.)  Examine the site carefully and prepare a brief  essay (c.600-750 words for undergraduates; 750-1,000 for graduate students) evaluating it.  Include in your essay a discussion of the differences in how one experiences a "virtual" exhibition and a "real" exhibition. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

5.  Your essays and comments should be posted on Blackboard. 


Assignment Nine: Citations and Copyright

This is an assignment in two parts:

1.  Citation:  It is very important to cite your sources in an accurate and consistent fashion.  As a general rule, historians generally prefer to use Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 5th ed. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987) as a guide to style.  Familiarize yourself with how to cite both print and electronic sources in what is sometimes called "the Chicago guide" by clicking on American University's Citation Style Guides page at: http://www.library.american.edu/e_ref/citation.html#tur   I especially like the application of the Chicago style by the Journal of American History.  The JAH style sheet is available at: http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/stylesheet.shtml.

Additional resources for citations:

2.  Copyright:  As the free-wheeling (some would say anarchic) character of the early internet has now given way to the assertion of proprietary control of intellectual property (witness the rise and fall of Napster), it has become increasingly important to understand and observe the rules governing copyright.

Take The University of Texas System's "Crash Course in Copyright" at: http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/cprtindx.htm
 

3.  Then, each of you should prepare a page of citations on which you demonstrate through examples how you intend to cite materials on your web project.  Include books, articles, primary documents and images.  Be sure to observe the rules of copyright. Post your page on Blackboard. Examine each other's submissions carefully.  Offer helpful corrections and other suggestions wherever they may seem appropriate.


Assignment Ten: What Makes for Good  Web Sites

1.  Read the online version of Lynch and Horton, Web Style Guide, at: http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html

2.  See also: Paula Petrik, "Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design," History Computer Review (May 2000), at: http://www.archiva.net/essays.html; and Michael O'Malley, "Building Effective Course Sites: Some Thoughts on Design for Academic Work," Inventio (Spring 2000) at: http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/Archives/spring00/momalley_1.html.

3.  Refer back also to the two UCLA web sites:  Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources and Thinking Critically about Discipline-Based World Wide Web.

4.  Then, make a list of what you consider to be the ten most important basic principles of good web design. Write a few sentences describing each and explaining why they are important.

5.  Post your list of principles on the class Blackboard discussion forum.   Read and comment on the principles your fellow students have posted.  As a group, try to come up with a "consensus" list of approximately ten points. 

 

Selecting a topic and creating a prospectus.

You will probably need to meet together several times (and/or to communicate by phone, e-mail or the Lotus Discussion database) to work out the details of this assignment.

1.  First you will need to select a topic that is of interest to you, that is of historical significance, and which you can complete before the end of the semester.  However, please obtain my approval before embarking on a project.

3.   Explore the topic: what issues are involved, what resources are available, who among you can do what, etc.

4.  Finally, create a Prospectus using the following as a general guideline.
 

For an example of a web site created by an earlier team of students, see:  In the Blink of an Eye: American University Student Activism, 1968-1970.

 

PROSPECTUS: Title of Project

1.  Your name or names (for those working as a team).

2.  A brief description of your proposed project and its significance.

3.  A preliminary bibliography listing books and articles that you will use in preparing your project.

4.  Web Links and other resources (photographs, sounds, video) that you will use in creating your project.

5.  Describe who will be responsible for the various parts of the project.

6.  Create a schedule or timeline indicating by when both the individual and collective parts of the project will be done.  Work backwards from the date on which the project is due.
 

 

 


Monday,  December 8:   (LAST CLASS).

Presentation of Web Projects.

December 9-17:  Evaluation of Projects

For details, click on Evaluating Your Web Project.

 

 


Page last updated October 28,  2003.
Please send comments to bgriff@american.edu.

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