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What's Wrong with Online Readings? Text, Hypertext, and the History Web

Stephen Robertson
University of Sydney

I ACHIEVED SOMETHING that I had been striving to do for several semesters when, in 2002, I revised my survey course on the history of the United States up to Reconstruction by replacing most of the photocopied readings I had assigned in the past with online texts. Readings on the web now provided the basis for ten of the twelve weekly tutorial discussions in the course, as well as for six of the ten essay questions. The tutorial readings included Thomas Harriot's 1590 text, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, documents produced by the antebellum moral reform movement, and photographs of the Civil War.1 Not only did using online material allow me to assign sources that I would not otherwise have been able to provide to students, it reduced the size and cost of the course reader, and relieved the strains on the library system created by over a hundred students seeking the same texts. Students had complained about those issues in previous courses that I had taught, but had responded positively to my course web site and the handful of online readings I had used. None had reacted negatively to being required to use the Web. Other teachers had reported similar positive responses when they integrated online sources into their teaching.2 I felt confident that my students would be just as enthusiastic about a larger online component in the course. I was wrong. 1
      Twenty-one of the 101 students who filled out the course evaluation mentioned the online readings, with all but two offering negative responses. The students generally made the same criticisms. They did not like reading texts on a computer screen, particularly when they were as long as the assigned readings, complaining that doing so hurt their eyes and prevented them from underlining passages. Several also admitted that they were inclined not to complete the reading if it was online. Most reported that they printed out the texts when they could, even when they found it difficult and expensive to do so. Not surprisingly, given that practice, many also expressed a preference for paying for a larger course reader that included all the readings.3 2
      The responses of my students echoed those gathered by James Longhurst in his World History course at Carnegie Mellon University. In an article published in The History Teacher in 2003, Longhurst argued that student reactions such as those he and I experienced reflected a loss in readability, a loss in "the ease with which the meaning of text can be comprehended," produced by moving texts from the printed page to the screen. It was simply "more difficult to read text from a screen than from print." Longhurst went on to argue that the medium of the Web lends itself to a different mode of comprehension, to searching, surfing or browsing, rather than the kind of reading we generally require of students studying history. Given that the quality of "student comprehension, concentration and comfort" is impaired when they are asked to read online materials, he concluded that historians should reconsider how they use them in the classroom.4 3
      Reading texts on a screen is no doubt difficult, but I believe that there is more to students' negative reactions to online readings than their "psychophysical" unease with computer monitors. We are asking students to read the wrong kind of materials online and this contributes to their finding the material less readable. Texts are difficult to read online in part because they are not designed for that medium. Online texts are digital versions of printed texts designed for a page not a screen; one page of text is generally linked to only one other or to a table of contents in a way that reproduces the linear organization of a printed text. As such, online readings are an additive form in the same way as were the first movies, to use Janet Murray's analogy. Early filmmakers "pointed a static camera at a stagelike set," adding photography to theatre, to create a genre called photoplays. Employed in this way, the camera was merely a recording technology, dependent "on formats derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power." In the case of online readings, historians have "take[n] advantage of the novelty of computer delivery without utilizing its intrinsic properties."5 The means by which most historians create online material has encouraged such an approach. The interfaces of the html editors that we use to create web pages are broadly similar to those of the word processors that we use to create a document. The scanners we employ to create digital versions of images likewise operate much like the photocopiers on which we make paper copies. As a result, we do not directly confront the distinctive properties of the online medium. 4
      Seen in this light, students' struggles to comprehend online readings are not simply a feature of the medium; they are the product of the failure of history teachers to employ the unique properties of the medium. There is nothing to stop a student printing out material that has simply been digitized and placed on the web; no features of the material are lost when it is transferred to paper. Yet there are features of the online medium that cannot be replicated on the printed page, particularly links and the ability they provide to move among texts, which transforms text into hypertext. Student reactions to online material thus should not simply prompt teachers of history to turn away from using online material; they should prompt us to explore what can be done with the properties unique to the web. However, to date it has not been possible to provide evidence that students would respond better to hypertexts than to material that has simply been digitized because there are no adequate examples of history hypertexts that could provide the basis for such a study. In this article, I will not only draw upon my own experience and the work of my students to highlight the limited additive nature of what now passes for online history, but I will also show the untapped properties and possibilities of hypertext with the aim of encouraging teachers to look again at how online material can be used to teach history. 5
      Creating an online reading should involve, in its most basic form, three elements: digitizing a text, placing it on the web, and linking its elements together as well as linking the text to the broader web. Historians and teachers of history have generally approached the creation and use of online materials in terms of only the first two of those elements. In doing so, they have utilized what Janet Murray calls the encyclopedic properties of the web; the digital form which allows the storage and retrieval of information far beyond what is possible in other media.6 Little attention is given to other properties of the web, such as hypertext, that might transform the nature of information placed online, although doing so would provide a reason for putting readings on the web. This limited approach is evident in Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig's recently published book, Digital History. It does provide a much-needed guide to "gathering, preserving and presenting" historical material on the web, and offers invaluable discussions of topics such as, appropriate audiences, copyright issues, and technologies and techniques for digitizing texts and building web pages. It is certainly the first book that anyone considering working in the online medium should read. But Cohen and Rosenzweig devote just two paragraphs to hypertext, presenting it as a "constitutional principle" of the web, but one whose only implication is the need to include "basic navigational tools on most, if not all, of the pages" of a web site.7 6
      Only in texts and classes focused exclusively on the web itself is the medium considered on its own terms. That was certainly my experience. In 2002, the growing availability of historical material on the web led me to agree to teach two courses designed to allow honors students to develop the skills needed to analyze and to produce history designed to be read online. It was only when I taught those courses that I become aware of the properties of hypertexts and just how little use historians were making of them.8 7
      George Landow offers a particularly effective account of the possibilities provided by hypertext—which he defines straightforwardly as "text composed of blocks of text and the electronic links that join them." Links can connect material "'external' to a work—say, commentary on it by another author or parallel or contrasting texts—as well as within it, and thereby create text that is experienced as non-linear, or, more properly, as multilinear or multisequential."9 Multiple links, Landow explains, permit readers to take various paths through a given body of text blocks, and encourages associative thinking (and reading in the form of browsing or surfing). That multiplicity also fragments the linear progression of text blocks that characterizes printed texts. A hypertext has no fixed sequence, no fixed text. As such, it can break down the hierarchy of texts, placing references previously marginalized as footnotes or endnotes on a par with the connected documents, and can blur the boundaries of individual texts.10 Thus, where the printed text suggests self-containment, hypertext suggests integration, thereby correcting the artificial isolation of a text from its context. By offering multiple links, hypertext presents the reader with choices that force him or her to become active, and potentially grants to that reader some of the authority typically given the author to shape a text and its meaning.11 As Landow notes, in a hypertext the "relationship [of blocks of text] depends solely upon the reader's need and purpose."12 Or, as Jerome McGann puts it, the reader "is encouraged not so much to find as to make order—and then to make it again and again, as established orderings expose their limits."13 8
      Some historians have attempted to conceptualize a hypertextual history, but they have largely failed to incorporate the full properties of hyperlinks. For example, the writings of Robert Darnton, Edward Ayers, Carl Smith, and Randy Bass offer visions that, in Murray's terms, are essentially merely additive.14 In 1999 Robert Darnton imagined an electronic book structured in "layers arranged like a pyramid," ranging from a concise account at the top through expanded arguments, documentation, historiography and pedagogy, and resting on a layer of commentary by readers. Such a site partakes only of the encyclopedic properties of digital environments; the properties of hypertext are lost in Darnton's dismissal of links which he says amount to "little more than an elaborate form of footnoting."15 Edward Ayers, leader of the Valley of the Shadow Project, the large digital archive about two Civil-War era communities in the American South that is probably the largest and best known example of digital history, has attempted to engage more with the properties of the medium. In 1999, he briefly sketched a hypertext centered on the concept of systems. Each system—the party system, the economic system, the system of racial control—would be described in its own terms, "much as in a conventional book," and could be read in a linear fashion, from start to finish. "But perhaps," Ayers suggests, "the reader could also click on a button that reads 'time' and the various narratives would appear in a series of columns aligned by date. Where the systems touched, the reader might see connecting text telling, say, how Irish immigration, the dissolution of the Whig Party and the hard times in cities intersected in the mid-1850s. Or perhaps the reader would supply that connection herself when she saw the juxtaposition." However, as the reference to the form of the conventional book reveals, even this vision remains essentially additive. Ayers is more concerned with the problems of producing hypertext than he is with how to utilize the properties of the new medium.16 9
      Perhaps not surprisingly given the nature of historians' writings on hypertext, up to this point, online history has employed few of the properties of hypertext. When my students and I analyzed American history on the web we found that sites generally employed only the encyclopedic potential of the medium. Some electronic scholarship, however, did make some use of hypertext in ways that provide some models of how teachers might use hypertext to develop effective online readings.17 10
      It is archive sites that make the most striking use of the potential for scale offered by the web. While the Library of Congress's American Memory with several million items, and The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the Civil War with several hundred thousand records, dwarf other American history sites, there are many others that each present several thousand pages of material.18 But they also contain little else other than their documents. Information on context or methodology to help the user make sense of the sources is extremely limited, and often, as in the case of the Learning Pages in the Library of Congress site, these are off to one side. Archive sites also deploy links to allow movement only one way, from search results to specific documents. In so doing, they replicate the organization of a conventional archive. Hypertext is employed simply as a path to a text, which is then presented on the screen to be read.19 11
      For example, one of my students, Sam L., analyzed a site devoted to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. He showed how the site continued to employ an "archive reason" that directed the user from the general to the specific. "From the browse site map, one selects a category," he noted. "From the category 'homepage' (and the rhetoric of 'the homepage' reveals how discrete each section is) one can choose from any number of categories. This process of picking from lists that become ever more specific continues until one has reached the lowest level of the archive and is presented with a solitary source." Despite the site's claim to allow users to "browse" its contents, the student concluded that the structure and design leaves the user to read the individual texts just as they would on a printed page. What is missing are links across different levels that exploit the potential of hypertext to allow associative thinking. At none of the stages in this process does the user have "the opportunity to move across the archive to a section of equivalent specificity."20 Links between documents could have helped students to use the range of material in the site to develop an understanding of a text's meaning—to pursue meaning through the "intertextual weave," the "active process of connecting things in a pattern," that Sam Wineburg has pinpointed as lying at the heart of the contextual thinking that we seek to cultivate in our students.21 Instead, when readers identify a text of interest to them, there is no indication of where else in the site they might go to make sense of that text, and no reason for them not to simply print it out. 12
      If we look at exhibition sites, we find that while they lack the scale of archive sites, by their nature they provide users with a means in the form of interpretive narrative of making sense of the material they contain.22 But like the archive sites, they make little use of hypertext, instead reproducing the format of a museum exhibition. The links again are largely one way, supporting a conventional linear narrative. Of the three exhibitions my students and I examined -- "The Lost Museum," "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory," and "The Dramas of Haymarket"—the latter is the most elaborate example of the genre.23 As the title suggests, that exhibition is presented in the form of a drama, "a tragedy in five Acts with a Prologue and an Epilogue." Each of those seven acts consists of an interpretive essay and what the curator labels "topical sections," annotated sets of visual images, texts, and artefacts. Carl Smith, who was involved in producing the site, claims that it "fully employs the multimedia and hyperlinking capabilities of the Web to present an enormous array of primary sources on dynamic display."24 While the wealth of material is extraordinary, the use of hyperlinks is, in fact, quite rudimentary. Each act can only be accessed from the main contents; each essay stands alone, the related topical sections are accessible only from a separate menu; and the primary sources that make up the topical sections, while linked together in a series, are not linked in any way to the essay. As a result, the primary sources supplement the essays rather than being integrated into them, leaving the user to decide when and how often to delve into them, and to establish their connection to the essay.25 This online exhibition thus incorporates, but does not combine, two conventional forms, the essay and the document collection. As such, although there are even more associations that could be tapped through the use of hyperlinks than in an archive site, the exhibition simply leads students to individual texts, which it gives them no reason to read on their computer screens. 13
      The possibility of using links to create the more dynamic relationship between historical interpretations and the evidence on which they are based that is latent in the exhibition sites has been made somewhat more explicit in some electronic scholarship.26 The range of the genre is displayed in the online articles published by American Quarterly in 1999.27 One of those articles, Thomas Thurston's "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts," uses hypertext essentially to enhance a conventional article, dividing the screen into three frames that contained the text, the notes and the sources referred to in the text.28 James Castonguay's "The Spanish-American War in US Media Culture" and David Westbrook's "From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip," both use hypertext to depart somewhat further from the conventional by dividing their articles into discrete sections, each with links to sources and to additional text. But whereas Castonguay conceived his sections as independent and able to be read in an order, Westbrook saw each of his "threads" as depending "on concepts and observations built up in other threads." Westbrook also used links to annotate the cartoons, turning the sources themselves into an additional thread. Despite those innovations, the hypertexts of Castonguay and Westbrook still look much like, and are read in a similar way to, conventional academic articles.29 14
      Edward Ayers, in collaboration with William Thomas, recently undertook to produce a piece of hypertextual scholarship, "The Differences Slavery Made," that moved further from the conventional forms of scholarship, and "use[d] the medium as effectively as possible," but saw the project "tamed by peer review."30 Reviewers were uncomfortable with initial drafts that departed from the familiar format of articles and "asked the reader to participate more in the process of investigation." The potential non-linearity of the article's argument also concerned early readers and audiences. Ayers and Thomas eventually compromised their original approach and utilized a traditional structure that placed the argument in front of the reader immediately. The properties of hypertext were then employed to offer the reader "a series of choices of ways to test, elaborate or challenge that argument." Ayers and Thomas characterize their approach as a "prismatic" model, "one that allows readers to explore angles of interpretation on the same evidentiary and historiographical background." As such, they saw the article as an "extension" of normal disciplinary practice.31 15
      There is much to admire in how hypertext is deployed in "The Differences Slavery Made," but the compromises its authors made mean that it has to be read in essentially the same way as a print article. Its text is broken into relatively small sections containing hyperlinks, facilitating the browsing that marks online reading, but I found that possibility truncated by the need to follow a linear path through the sections of text in order to make sense of the argument. Moreover, it was only by first attending to the summary of the argument that I was able to make sense of the material in the other layers of the article, and my attempts to approach the article through the other pathways provided left me confused about the significance of the material and the fragments of argument that I encountered. The direct paths to the evidence and the historiography are linked only to the points of analysis that make up the second layer of argument, not the summary necessary to fully grasp their significance. Each entry in the evidence and historiography sections is certainly far more than a footnote, featuring a synopsis or description, excerpts, a discussion of how they relate to the argument, and links to the points of analysis to which they relate. Nonetheless, they occupy the same structural position in the article as a footnote, substantiating the argument rather than providing an alternative path through the material. Despite my efforts to find ways to browse the site and to follow the associations that interested me, it proved easiest to make sense of the article by reading it as I would a printed text, then following the authors' linear argument and discussion of method, and finally dipping into the evidence that supported that account. In fact, had I been preparing for a discussion, I would have probably simply hit the print button. 16
      While assigning any of these electronic essays as general readings to a class would likely produce the same complaints and reactions as other online readings do, their form does make them particularly useful when the goal is to explore the relationship between argument and evidence. It is that connection that hypertext has been used to transform, enabling readers to move between authors' argument and their evidence in a way that is not possible with printed texts that provide only citations. Links make that relationship dynamic; printing out the article and accompanying evidence would render it static. Although the creation of the electronic articles discussed here required considerable technical expertise, creating hypertext that simply links an interpretation to the evidence on which it is based would not require a teacher to gain that level of knowledge. All the technical skill that is required to achieve a similar result in a more modest form is the ability to insert a link into a text. 17
      Examples of web sites that are less elaborate than those electronic essays, but which use links to significantly transform texts can be found in the hypertexts produced by students in my course, American History on the World Wide Web. The students undertook the projects in circumstances similar to those that history teachers are likely to face if they seek to create online readings: they were not constrained by peer review, but did have sufficient if limited time, access to technology, and the needed technical skill.32 Sam L.'s site on the Motion Picture Code uses a grid as its "structuring principle." Each of the five horizontal rows require material on it to relate to a decade from 1920 to 1960, and the five columns headings, respectively, dealing with the history of censorship, the film Industry, documents relating to the regulation of movies, films, and the events of the decade. Once a user has chosen a section as their point of entry into the grid, they are given the option of moving to any of the four adjacent sections, of moving back or forward in time, or exploring other dimensions of the same period. The student intended the structure to lead "the user to adopt a historical mode of thinking, to think both comparatively and contextually about the information" the site provided.33 Each section of the grid included not interpretative material written by Sam, but excerpts from a variety of critical works and links to other sites. He intended this variety to promote interpretive work by the user, to whom he left the task of making sense of the different points of view. 18
      In using this site in order to assess it, I found my initial scepticism about his approach falling away. The grid did offer me only a limited number of pathways through the site, and thus restricted my ability to shape my own approach to the material. But the more that I moved around the site, the more was I struck by how effectively the grid encouraged the kind of historical thinking that generally does not come naturally to my undergraduate students, and which they struggle to distill from conventional scholarship. Moreover, that effect derived from the online medium. The grid set up each element so that its meaning is dependent in part on its relationship to other elements, associations that are not spelt out, and that the reader has to think through. As such, each section is much more a piece of the puzzle than could be printed out and assembled off screen. The reader has to move among them to construct meaning. 19
      In contrast to this site, another student, Sam I., opted to write contextual material for his site on the political career of Richard Nixon, and to rely on extensive inter-linking, rather than an overall structure, as the means by which users would navigate the site.34 His site presented nine obituaries of Nixon together with two sets of contexts, a page on each author, and nine pages on different periods in Nixon's career. Having entered the site on one of those three levels, the user then encounters text that includes significant numbers of links. Most of the links were to other parts of the site; only the pages on Nixon's career link to sources outside the site. In his explanatory notes, this second student described how he included no links from his sources directly to other sources, or from one obituary to another, in order to ensure than users engaged with the contextual material. But within those bounds, he intended the extensive links to create "multiple-pathways-of-context," to allow each user to shape their own encounter with the sources. The greatest challenge for him was developing a writing style that was suitable to the hypertext. He observed that, "because users would be linking extensively within the text, each of my analytical discussions had to be written as concise self-contained paragraphs that made sense by themselves, as well as as parts of the broader argument on that page."35 20
      Sam I.'s site is not entirely successful, but it nonetheless highlights how hypertext can produce a more engaged reader. I found that the site worked best when I read the obituaries first; they contain the detailed information that a reader needs to make sense of the pages on the commentators and Nixon's career. The pages that surround the obituaries are comments or annotations rather than contexts, offering readings on the obituaries rather than surrounding them with additional information.36 The heavy linking of the text does offer the user more pathways and choices than the former student's grid. But ultimately, my experience in using Sam I.'s site was not one of participating in constructing a reading of the sources, or gaining insight into how the reading presented on the site was constructed, but of being offered different ways of reading the sources and his interpretation. Such a design might not have modelled historical thinking, as Sam L.'s site did, but, in allowing me to follow my interests, it did make me a more engaged reader, enhancing the readability of the online texts. 21
      While quite different in form from the online texts typically assigned to history students, the sites created by the two students are the same in substance, that is, they are centered on primary source documents. As such, those sites could serve similar pedagogical purposes requiring the reading of digital reproductions of texts but without the loss of readability generally associated with those online materials. That the sites were created by students with no previous experience with web design and html, using Netscape Composer (the barebones html editor included as part of the free browser Netscape Communicator), makes it clear that working with hypertext does not require prohibitive investments of time or money. What is required to create effective online readings is consideration of how the properties of hypertext can be related to the goals of history teachers. We need to take the texts that we assign as readings and think about where it would be useful to put links, what we would want our students to read in association with a particular text, and what information might enhance their reading of a document. Examples of such useful links would be ones that simply annotate anachronistic language, that provide information on a text's author, or that identify passages that reveal a point of view and genre—all common features of editions of literary texts, but not historical documents. These would help students learn what Sam Wineburg has identified as one of the most elusive historical skills, that of identifying a document's subtext.37 22
      Student reactions to online materials should certainly introduce a note of caution into the rush to use computers and the web to deliver course readings. However, historians should respond not by turning their back on that medium, but by looking more closely at its properties, and the expressive, rather than additive, possibilities that they offer. It took such reflection for producers of stories to be seen, not read, to give birth to the movie. Only when filmmakers explored the unique physical properties of film—the way the camera could be moved; the way the lens could open, close and change focus; the way the celluloid processed light; the way the strips of film could be cut up and reassembled—were they truly successful. They learned to create suspense by cutting between two separate actions, and to create character and mood by visual means such as backlighting and shooting from a low angle. These and other techniques transformed films from the additive form of the photoplay to expressive forms that captured the world with a new power and immediacy. It is time for historians to pursue a similar transformation in the medium of the web. 23


Notes

1. See "HSTY2034 A History of the United States to 1865," <http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/2034_2002/> 10 December 2004.

2. See, for example, John I. Brooks III, "Implementing an Internet-Enhanced History Teaching Environment," Journal of the Association for History and Computing 4, 3 (2001) <http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCiv3/Reports/brooks/text.htm> 31 October 2003.

3. Unit of Study Evaluations for HSTY 2034, Semester 1, 2002, in possession of the author.

4. James Longhurst, "World History on the World Wide Web: A Student Satisfaction Survey and a Blinding Flash of the Obvious," The History Teacher 36, 3 (May 2003) <http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/journals/ht/36.3/longhurst.html> 28 August 2004 (quotes from pars 5, 29, 32). In the case of difficult to access documents, the access provided by a digitized manuscript still often seems to counterbalance the issue of readability. See, for example, "Andrea Winkler, "Digitized Medieval Manuscripts in the Classroom: A Project in Progress," The History Teacher 35, 2 (2002) <http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/journals/ht/35.2/winkler.html> 28 August 2004.

5. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 65–67.

6. Ibid, 71–94.

7. Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia, 2005), 8, 130.

8. The design and teaching of those courses is discussed in "Teaching Students to Read Online Sources," Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, 1 (July 2005): 112–124; and "Doing History in Hypertext," Journal of the Association for History and Computing 7, 2 (August 2004) <http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/JAHCVII2/ARTICLES/robertson/robertson.html>. Few historians teach similar courses, or ask students to do assignments in hypertext, but those who do have offered accounts of their experience that report similar increased awareness of the properties and possibilities of hypertext. See Adrienne Hood and Jacqueline Spafford, "Student-Constructed Web Sites for Research Projects: Is It Worth It?" Journal for Multimedia History 1,1 (1998), <http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol1no1/websites.html> 13 December 2004; Arne Solli, "Hypertext 'Papers' on the Web: Students Confront the Linear Tradition," in History.edu: Essays on Teaching with Technology, eds. Dennis Trinkle and Scott Merriman (Armonk, NY, 2001), 38–51; Daniel Pfeifer, "Linking History with Hypertext: Rethinking the Process," in History.edu, 52–59; Daniel Ringrose, "Beyond Amusement: Reflections on Multimedia, Pedagogy, and Digital Literacy in the History Seminar," The History Teacher 34, 2 (2001) <http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/journals/ht/34.2/ringrose.html> 28 August 2004.

9. George Landow, Hypertext 2.0 (Baltimore, 1997), 3–4.

10. Ibid, 5–6, 64–65, 70, 76–77, 79–80, 85–88.

11. Ibid, 24–25, 83

12. Ibid, 71.

13. Jerome McGann, "The Rationale of Hypertext," at <http://www.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html> 30 August 2004. For another useful introduction to hypertext, see Jay David Boulter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ, 2001).

14. Robert Darnton, "The New Age of the Book," The New York Review of Books (18 March 1999) <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/546> 30 August 2004; Edward Ayers, "History in Hypertext," <http://vcdh.virginia.edu/Ayers.OAH.html> 30 August 2004; Edward Ayers, "The Pasts and Futures of Digital History,' <http://vcdh.Virginia.edu/Pasts- Futures.html> 30 August 2004; Randy Bass, "Can American Studies find a Whole in the Net?" <http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/guide/asins96.html> 30 August 2004; Carl Smith, "Can You Do Serious History on the Web?" AHA Perspectives Online (February 1998), <http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1998/9802/9802COM.CFM> 30 August 2004.

15. Darnton. A similar criticism could be made of Smith.

16. Ayers, "History in Hypertext."

17. For genres, see Roy Rosenzweig, "Guidelines on Reviewing Web Sites for the Journal of American History," at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/jah/> 29 November 2004. For additional analyses of the use of hypertext in history web sites, see the student site analyses completed as part of "American History on the World Wide Web," "Student Projects" <http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/~sterobrt/3079/projects.html> 29 November 2004.

18. "The Library of Congress; American Memory," <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/> 29 November 2004; "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," <http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/> 29 November 2004. The other archives examined in the course I taught were: "The New Deal Network," <http://newdeal.feri.org/> 29 November 2004; "The Plymouth Colony Archive Project," <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/users/deetz/> 29 November 2004; "Salem Witch Trials," <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~bcr/website/> 29 November 2004; "Virtual Jamestown," <http://www.virtualjamestown.org/> 29 November 2004; Race and Place: An African-American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA ," <http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/> 29 November 2004; and "Documenting the American South," <http://docsouth.unc.edu/> 29 November 2004.

19. While most archive sites examined have received only limited critical attention from historians, the "Valley of the Shadow" has been the subject of extensive analysis. The most perceptive of those studies, one which elaborates the points made here, is Gary Kornblith, "Venturing into the Civil War, Virtually: A Review," The Journal of American History 88, 1 (June 2001): 145–51.

20. "Web Review: Section 2," <http://www-personal.arts.usyd.edu.au/sterobrt/3079/3079SiteAnalyses/LeBovic/Section2> 29 November 2004. The concept of "archive reason" is drawn from Mike Featherstone, "Archiving Cultures," British Journal of Sociology (Jan./March 2000): 161–84.

21. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia, 2001), 21.

22. For a discussion of the importance of providing a context for online sources, see Steven Boyd-Smith, "Telling Stories Out of School: Primary Sources and the Internet," Common-Place 4, 3 (April 2004) <http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-03/school/> 6 October 2004.

23. "The Lost Museum," <http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/> 29 November 2004; "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory," <http://www.chicagohistory.org/fire/index.html> 29 November 2004; "The Dramas of Haymarket," <http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/index.htm> 29 November 2004.

24. "Introduction to 'The Dramas of Haymarket'," <http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/overview/over.htm> 29 November 2004.

25. Robert Townsend makes a similar point about one category of electronic scholarship; see Townsend, "Digital Technology and Historical Scholarship: A Publishing Experiment," Perspectives 40, 5 (May 2002): 38–39.

26. Robert Townsend has identified three categories of electronic scholarship—textual, supplemental, and foundational. The first consists of reproductions of printed articles, the second of articles that contain hyperlinks to sources and other sites referred to in the article. The final category, foundational scholarship, uses the medium to transcend the form of printed articles, and weaves together narrative and sources. See Townsend, 37–40.

27. "Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies," <http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/> 30 August 2004.

28. Thomas Thurston, "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts," at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/photos/index.htm> 30 August 2004.

29. James Castonguay, "The Spanish-American War in US Media Culture," at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/war/index.html> 30 August 2004; David Westbrook, "From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip," at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/comics/index.html> 30 August 2004. For another example of what Townsend categorizes as supplemental scholarship, see Robert Darnton, "An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris," American Historical Review 105 (February 2000), <http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000001.html> 30 August 2004.

30. See William G. Thomas III and Edward Ayers, "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," at <http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/> 30 August 2004.

31. William G. Thomas III and Edward Ayers, "An Overview: The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," American Historical Review 108, 5 (December 2003): 1299, 1303–6.

32. For further analysis of the student projects, see Robertson, "Doing History in Hypertext."

33. "How to Use This Site," at <http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/hsty3080/3rdYr3080/3080site/how%20to> 30 August 2004.

34. "The Nine Lives of Richard Nixon," at <http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/hsty3080/StudentWebSites/Nixon%20Obits/Homepage> 30 August 2004.

35. "Explanatory Notes," at <http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/hsty3080/StudentWebSites/Nixon%20Obits/Comments.html> 30 August 2004.

36. The accounts of Nixon's career, for example, discuss how each period is treated in the obituaries, and in historical writing generally, and offer only a few details of the actual events or their broader context.

37. Wineburg, 63–88.

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