This week’s readings got me thinking about genre again.  I told you I see it everywhere! So, I thought I would do a little comparison of the breakdown of these four sites.

Hypercities seems like more of a tool than an argument in itself.  Pulling together all the maps provides a unique research opportunity that would take a great deal of effort to do on its own.  I loved the fact that there were solid tutorials about how to get started using the site, and once I entered the maps area, I didn’t have a problem looking around.  However, their History subheader under the About menu is under construction, so it was hard to fully understand their mission because the site opened to the blog/news feed for the site.

The Euclid Corridor Project was extremely minimalist in its interface.  I really liked the graphics and site layout from an aesthetic point of view, but from the position of a reader, I was a little lost about the overall goal.  I am not sure if this is the link for the core page for the project, but if so, there is some drastic work that needs to be done to orient the viewer.  When I went back and tried to search about the name of the project, there were a ton of things that came up, including the actual bus line (I think that’s what this was).  As I said above, I really liked the actual interface of the site, and I thought the history was really well presented.

I just needed the fluff around the content that told me what I was looking at.  It actually seemed like it was a site only for the people in-the-know, like some kind of inside joke reference that everyone else is missing.  [Granted, I may have missed something, but since I looked, I would still argue that it was too hard to find if it was out there!] That all said, the functionality of the site wasn’t difficult to figure out.  And, they did provide a how-to page to explain their interface.

PhilaPlace seems to be aiming to gather the history of Philadelphia.  The described goal is to provide an interactive place to blend traditional historical records with the snippets of history offered by its users.  The site is easy to use from first glance, which is definitely something I look for with a site I regularly visit.  I also really liked that their purpose was clearly outlined on their About page.

The Difference Slavery Made was where I spent most of my time because it was the site that was the most intriguing.  And, what I have determined is that unlike the other sites, this one is trying to use the technology as part of the argument.  Here we see a shift from tool to evidence.  There is the choose-your-own-adventure model going on here, but there are also a couple of different arguments going on: 1) the authors take a stance on slavery and what this information is telling us about slavery, and 2) there is a call for the types of digital scholarship that should be going on.  The historians in the class can better speak to the efficacy of the first argument, so I think I would like to say a few things about the second half.

I work as an assistant editor for a section of an online journal about digital scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition called Kairos. And, because the nature of my field is writing and I am working with the section about teaching specifically, we see a lot of articles talk about how to create digital scholarship/documents.  And, most of those arguments are using technology, like Thomas and Ayers do, to provide evidence for their arguments.  But, the argument is still in a roughly linear format.  Thomas and Ayers seem to start off that way with their overview, but once the reader reaches the end of that section, there isn’t much in the way of direction beyond the general navigation provided.  And, I, like everyone else, had a little trouble being sure that I caught everything, but I am wondering if that’s the point.

This week I am trying to turn the hating over to someone else, so I thought I would share just a little of what I think about digital scholarship from my limited personal experience.  I think that scholars on all sides of the fence, digital and analog, are moving forward very tentatively with regards to what they define as digital scholarship and how that scholarship works within the larger realm of academia.  Tenure committees are leading the way towards defining what counts and what doesn’t.  And, this is a hard area to navigate when we want to ensure the credibility of the work created and still allow for innovation. [This has always been hard, but technology messes it all up even more.]

And, Thomas and Ayers seem to be right in that in-between spot.  They are providing the format for the goals of the site, but they are letting the user search out the rest.  For me, I needed more explanation about where to find what I was supposed to be looking at.  Because it wasn’t a tool, like most of the projects above, I am not sure the technology was as necessary to “demonstrate,” but more explanation about the GIS used and how it was done might have helped.  But where as last week, the shortcomings bothered me, this week I am willing to let it slide.

Digital scholarship is going to take some serious and minor missteps before we can come to an agreement about what counts and what doesn’t.  And then, the genre will shift because someone will figure out something else to push the envelope and reshape our definitions.  I think it is the scholars like Thomas and Ayers that are willing to take the chance that offer the most the field.  So, maybe I should have been nicer to Moretti after all!

Advertisement