• website review instructions (american memory, who killed william robinson?)
• website review instructions (valley of the shadow)
• take-home essay exam on Social History of Media
• take-home essay exam on Sense of History
• case studies
• reflections on digital history
• final essay/research project

Due at the Final Exam Time for this class, Friday May 12 from 10:30-12:30, Dale Hall 116 (This is the same time that the final essay/research project -- instructions below -- is due.)

At different points in the course, portions of Cohen and Rosenzweig’s Digital History were part of the syllabus reading as we encountered various topics related to doing history on the web. Using this text, this assignment asks you to take one of the topics they address and reflect on their presentation.

You will take one chapter and provide some commentary to sum up your response, addressing whatever matters seem most noteworthy to you: for example, of the points they raise in the chapter you chose, which ones seem to be the most significant to you? In what ways does their analysis seem sound? In what ways do you think their suggestions may miss the mark? In other words, drawing on your own experiences with the internet in general, and with our explorations of the history web in particular, what is your assessment of their discussion? This assignment should be about 3 pp. in length (approx. 750-900 words) and is worth 5%.

Some chapters that you might find of particular interest are:

1) Chapter One – Overview of the History Web

2) Chapter Four – Designing for the History Web

3) Chapter Five – Building an Audience [Marketing]

4) Chapter Six – Collecting History Online

5) Chapter Seven – Intellectual Property and Copyright

Rather than writing a final exam, you will be choosing an individual project based at least in part on a digital history website that you select, posing a research question, and then writing up your findings and reflections in a final essay. The final essay should be about 10 pp. in length (not including any items you might have as attachments), which is approximately 2500-3000 words. Your final essay will be worth 20% of the total grade for the course.

Aside from requiring that some aspect of the final essay focus on a digital history website, the nature of your project, the kind of questions you choose to ask, and how you structure your essay is up to you. I offer you some specific options below, which you can use as is, or modify to suit your interests. You are also welcome to pick a more individualized path. If you opt for a modification of the suggestions below or for an individualized alternative, you must run it by me first for approval, but then you are set to go.

Attached are some pages with urls to where you can go for more lists of history websites: Best of History Websites; PBS; Center for History and New Media History by Topic and Time Period; and MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching).

1. In our case studies, we compared history by the book to history by the website, drawing in particular on dohistory.org, The Lost Museum, and the September 11th Digital Archive. In our prep for these case studies, we also worked with the Library of Congress’ American Memory site; Who Killed William Robinson?; and The Valley of the Shadow. You are welcome to fashion an individual project that builds on your previous work with any of these sites, either by continuing on with a line of exploration you already initiated in your assignment, or launching a new one.

2. Public history is often encountered at museums or other local sites. One option would be to study how history is presented at a public exhibit you can visit in person, and then search for a similar digital presentation as a point of comparison. For example, two local venues would be the newly opened Oklahoma Historical Center in OKC, or the McCasland Family Hall of the Peoples of Oklahoma at the Natural History Museum on campus. For a brief orientation to each, see their websites:

3. We have focused in class on analyzing the nature of history in print when compared with digital history, but you could do a comparison with history on film (or television) and history on the web – using something like Schindler’s List, for example, a movie that many of you mentioned came to mind when you thought about history and film. You could choose to compare either history done Hollywood-style, or documentary-style (as with PBS). In other words, you could follow the same strategy that we used in pairing books and websites, but instead pair a visual media item and a digital site (in the case of Schindler’s List, perhaps the website for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example).

4. Another tack to take would be to think about how certain issues impact the presentation of history on the web – censorship, for example, or copyright issues, and so forth (many of these kinds of issues are touched on in the Digital History book). For example, in terms of thinking about how the past is presented digitally, you would consider how contemporary matters can affect one’s ideas about history (think of the differences of searching on google in china, vs. google in the U.S. in terms of Tiananmen square and the sense of that history you would derive from each.) Another avenue would be to look at the issue of copyright law and how it affects what kind of history can be presented digitally (a lot more 19^th century than 20^th century history, for example).

5. A source that is increasingly being used as a first stop for history information (especially by high school and college students) are the articles in wikipedia. You could build a project around wikipedia, either by analyzing how history is presented in the articles (perhaps vs. a traditional encyclopedia), or critiquing a set of historical articles on a particular topic, or perhaps even producing or adding to certain historically-based wikipedia topic pages on history.