Overview of History 696 and History 697 Projects
Henry Clay
The theme of my projects in History 696, An Introduction to History and New Media, and History 697, Creating History in New Media, is early nineteenth-century American political culture. This theme corresponds to my primary research interest, early nineteenth-century political and intellectual history. The specifics of each course are given below. The series of small projects in History 696 lay the groundwork for the history in new media project of History 697.
Links to all HIST 696 assignments can be found on this page but they will only be activated as they are completed. A link to my HIST 697 final project is also included. Links to my preliminary assignments in HIST 697 are not provided on this page but can be provided on request.
History 696: Clio-Wired, An Intoduction to History and New Media
In the past decade, new media (CD-ROMS, World Wide Web) and new technologies (computers, the Internet) have begun to transform even the ancient discipline of history. This course offers an introduction to the changes that these new media and technologies are bringing to how we research, write, present, and teach the past. The course will approach this topic from four different perspectives (although not necessarily in this order). As historians, we will want to place the development of new media and new technology in historical context. Second, to help us think about how these new media may or may not be different from the old, we will do some reading in the emerging theoretical literature on hypertext and new media. That may also require us to consider the impact of “postmodernism” and “poststructuralism” on historical narrative. Third and most extensively, we will want to critically assess what has been done using new media and new technology in different “genres” of historical work. We will closely examine the state of historical work – by scholars, teachers, archivists, museum curators, and popular historians – on the World Wide Web. These historical, theoretical, and critical readings will provide the basis for the fourth, hands-on, section of the course in which students will develop proposals for an online history project.1
Brief descriptions of course assignments
Assignment one: Good and Bad Web Designs
On my blog under the entry for "Good and Bad Design" I have placed links to two history websites. The first I regard as exemplifying the elements of good web design discussed in Williams and Tollett, The Non-Designer's Web Book chapter eight.3 The second site I regard as exemplifying the elements of bad web design as given in the same book. Each is accompanied by an explanation of what makes the good site good and the bad site bad.
Go directly to my HIST 696 blog to view this part of the asignment:
Williams and Tollett state that "One of the elements of good web design is a lack of the elements that make bad web design."4 So as part two of this assignment I will illustrate what makes a good website by providing an example of a bad web page that contains many elements from Williams' and Tollett's "Not-so-good Checklist." How many elements from the checklist can you identify on the page?
Example of a badly designed web page
Intended answers here, though due to my lack of expertise in web design you may be able to identify additional bad elements.
Assignment two: Web Review Essay
Topic: The War of 1812
Battle of Lake Erie
Because of its important effects of the political culture of the early 1800s, the War of 1812 is a historical topic that is befitting of the theme of my web site. The War of 1812, often called the Second War of Independence, reaffirmed America's independence from Great Britain and set the stage for the outbreak of nationalism that followed the war. This nationalism, and the reaction to it, were major components of the political culture of the early nineteenth century. Despite these important consequences the war has received little interest from historians and even less from the general public.
Numerous archival sites contain as part of their collections information or documents that pertain to events or personages of The War of 1812, but only sites specifically dedicated to the War of 1812 will be considered here. For the purposes of this essay five sites on the War of 1812 were reviewed, three of them in-depth.
War of 1812 web sites reviewed:
Summary of the major conclusions from my review essay:
- None of the sites that provide a historical overview of the War of 1812 offer a depth of scholarship on the events, issues, and people of the war that can be compared favorably with that to be found in books and scholarly journals.
- The teaching resource sites (except MultiEducator) fulfill their purpose of providing teaching resources very well but offer no scholarship that could not be found in an encyclopedia.
- The presentation of the War of 1812 on the web exhibits very little scholarship. Its main strength is archival and antiquarian (as seen in the Military Heritage site).
- I found only very minimal interpretation and no analysis. I found nothing comparable to the depth of scholarship to be found in books or journals.
- The web is a good place for history archival material and a good place to get people and students "hooked" on a historical topic, but in-depth historical analysis/argument/ interpretation must be done in books and journal articles.
My reviews of the web sites
Read my in depth review of the first three web sites
Read my short review of the last two web sites
Concluding discussion and final thoughts
I offer some final thoughts and conclusions on the presentation of the War of 1812 on the web.
Assignment three: Digital History Project Proposal
Madison
Assignment three is my proposal for a digital history project. The focus of the project is early nineteenth-century American political culture. The project is designed to promote scholarship and research in this area. The proposed project is a combination of an on-line journal, with essays and book reviews; a virtual community, with commentary and on-line discussion; an archive, with primrary source documents; and a teaching resource. It will have seven main parts: essays, book reviews, searchable archive, a commentary and on-line discussion forum, a bibliography, resources for instructors and teachers, and an image gallery. The target audience for the project is academics who study this field, researchers, college instructors and secondary school teachers.
Van Buren
Why do this project on the web? Only the web can provide the ability to post scholarsip and commentary and reach a wide audience. And the web allows primary documents and teaching resources relevant to the subject to be digitized and placed in one easily accessible and searchable location. And only the web offers the facility that allows discussion by scholars who are not co-located.
Thus the project site will be an interpretive site engaging the historiography on early nineteenth-century political culture, a location for conducting research and locating teaching resources, and a vehicle to promote scholarly discussion.
View the Project Proposal overview page
Go directly to the preliminary design for the Project Homepage
Final thoughts on HIST 696
Great course! Now I know why HIST 696 should be taken before HIST 697.
History 697
This course is designed as an intensive exploration of the adaptation of history to a digital environment. Although the central goal of the course is development of an original, digital history project of professional quality, the course will also examine best practices in digital history, the problems and possibilities inherent in digital history, and issues in information, technical, and aesthetic design. In particular, the course will tackle the problems of creating interactivity and community. Be aware that this class is both a history and media course. In other words, we will begin by thinking (and writing) about good history and then proceed to learning the tools and techniques to bring history into digital form.2
Final project
The Nationalist Moment. A project relating the political and intellectual history of the Jeffersonian Republicans in the years following the War of 1812 as they dealt with the consequences of the new spirit of nationalism that emerged after the war.
Go directly to the homepage for this project: The Nationalist Moment
1Roy Rosenzweig, "Course Description of HIST 696" in Fall 04 Course Descriptions Brochure (GMU History Dept., 1994).
2Paula Petrik, "Course Description of HIST 697" in Spring 04 Course Descriptions Brochure (GMU History Dept., 1994).
3Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designer's Web Book: An Easy Guide to Creating, Designing, and Posting Your Own Web Site (Berkeley, 2000), 145-154.
4Williams and Tollett, 154.
Elements of bad design placed into the example web page:
- Color combinations of text and background that make the text hard to read
- Distracting backgrounds that make the text hard to read
- Paragraphs of type in italic
- Text that is too small to read (footnotes)
- Blue default links
- Links that are not clear where they will take you to
- Dead links
- Missing graphic
- Graphic with no alt label
- Unclear navigation
- Lack of contrast in color and font to create hierarchy of info (titles)
US Navy Ships of the Line. Battleships USS Pennsylvania and USS North Carolina, shown here with the smaller schooner USS Hornet, were the type of line-of-battle ships that nationalists like Calhoun, Clay, and Adams sought to fund as part of the expansion of the US Navy after the War of 1812. The Old Republicans opposed such a naval expansion but the ships were built anyway despite the funding contractions after the Panic of 1819. Like the forts, they were an embodiment of the new spirit of nationalism. Go to link to 697 Final Project for a fuller understanding of how suck issues affected the politics of the early nineteenth century. Return
