History and the New Media

Rob Townsend's Clio Wired Home Page

Journal Entry 3

History Scholarship on the Web: City Sites and Harlan County

Web Sites reviewed: City Sites (http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/citysites/) authored by Maria Balshaw, Anna Notaro, Liam Kennedy and Douglas Tallack and maintained at the University of Birmingham; Charles Hardy III and Allesandro Portelli, "I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky," on the Journal of Multimedia History web site (volume 2, 1999) at http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/lights.html. Reviewed November5, 2001-November 8, 2001

These two sites provide a nice complementary view of the possibilities and the difficulties inherent in posting scholarship on the World Wide Web. City Sites demonstrates that a large-scale collaborative effort can produce exceptionally innovative uses of visual and textual material. At the same time, the Harlan County essay shows that a couple of scholars with a tape recorder can also produce valuable materials for the World Wide Web.

In many ways, City Sites is a model of what is possible on the Web. As one might expect with a larger group of collaborators—the site names 10 principal contributors, three academic sponsors, one Web design company, and a host of technical advisors and editors—the site is exceptionally rich. As a self-contained project, the site is able to create a strong thematic design and integrated interface for the entire site. Structurally it demonstrates the value of frames as a navigation device—providing a consistent point of reference to where the reader is in the site.

The opening screen provides a quick summary of the project’s book-based origins, but the links on the frame also give the reader a quick visual cue to the breadth and depth of the site. The initial splash screens for the New York and Chicago city sites are bit of a nuisance since they only seem to add some wasted download time.

But beyond that the site offers maps of the cities that situate the reader geographically and provide direct links to certain key areas. On the New York map, for instance, dots represent specific buildings and structures with additional information (City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge down south, for instance, and the Apollo Theater and Strivers Row up north). This is contrasted with boxes that float above larger areas of the city (Harlem, the Lower East Side, or more generally “The Skyline”) and provide links to more extended essays.

These visual metaphors seem to work quite well as an entrée to the information contained in the site for someone with a geographic orientation. At the same time, the site also provides additional pathways that provide a separate cross-linear guides through the essays along the themes of architecture, leisure, race, and space. The latter also demonstrates a different conceptual structure from that posited by Bob Darnton. In place of the pyramid we have a layered text that is capable of readings through multiple, but directed pathways. So both in its use of visual metaphors and in its presentation of a multi-linear text, this site provides an exceptional example of how the Web can be used to present scholarship.

In contrast, “I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky” represents a more modest approach to Web scholarship. It does not represent quite the same creative leap, but rather another interesting use of the medium. Sound is, and certainly should be, an intrinsic part of the what the electronic medium can convey to an audience. In many ways this “essay in sound” is more useful as a reminder of this aspect of the medium than an example of novel scholarship or technical innovation.

The format and shape of the essay is quite like a National Public Radio essay of the same style, format, and structure (albeit more like Pacifica Radio in terms of analytical content). And that might present a problem for its classification as scholarship per se, since the essay itself seems more akin to journalism in form and substance. Certainly, the author does not make an effort to mask his work under a veil of scholarly objectivity. And while this creates a more engaged and engaging work, it also strikes the ear of a reformed Southerner as quite patronizing—diminishing its scholarly merits.

However, the site as a whole makes a good effort to connect the sound essay to a larger scholarly apparatus. Supplementary essays by the authors about what they were attempting in the primary article provide a useful scholarly supplement that brings a more critical scholarly eye (and even a few footnotes). And certainly Charles Hardy does a creditable job of placing the material in the context of recent trends in oral history.

Perhaps more importantly, it highlights an important deficiency in the City Sites presentation, as sound is certainly an intrinsic part of the urban experience and regrettably neglected (at least as far as my reading could discern). Aside from a bit of synthesized hurdy-gurdy music at the start of the city splash screen and some annoying synthesized click sounds, City Sites is effectively silent about its subjects.