Web Review Guidelines

Guidelines on reviewing websites for the Journal of American History and History Matters

These scholarly reviews of websites follow on the long tradition of reviewing books in the JAH, as well as the more recent practice of reviewing museum exhibitions, films, and textbooks. The guidelines below, however, provide specific suggestions for dealing with online resources. Please feel free to write me with any questions you might have, as well as suggested revisions and clarifications in the guidelines. Probably the most useful guidelines, however, are those that can be inferred from reading the excellent reviews we have already published.

History websites share a common medium (the World Wide Web), but they are quite diverse in their character. Reviewers need to keep in mind that diversity and to evaluate them on their own terms. Generally, most history websites reviewed in the Journal of American History fall into one of the following categories, although many sites combine different genres:

Archive: a site that provides a body of primary documents.

Electronic Essay/Exhibit: something created/written specifically for the Web—that is, a secondary source that interprets the past in some fashion. This would include "hypertexts" that offer a historical narrative or argument.

Teaching Resource: a site that provides online assignments, syllabi, and other resources specifically geared toward using the Web for teaching.

The reviewing criteria will vary depending on the category. An archival site, for example, should be evaluated based on: the quality of the materials presented; the care with which they have been prepared and perhaps edited and introduced; the ease of navigation; and the usefulness to teachers, students, and scholars. How comprehensive is the archive? Are there biases in what has been included or excluded? Does the archive, in effect, offer a point of view or interpretation? As with other types of reviews, you are providing guidance to readers on the usefulness of the site in their teaching or scholarship. At the same time, you are participating in a community of critical discourse and trying to improve the level of work in the field. As you would do in a scholarly book review, then, you are speaking both to potential readers and to producers of similar work.

Even within a single category, the purposes of the websites can vary significantly. An online exhibition can be directed at a largely scholarly audience or a more broadly public audience. It would be unfair to fault a popularly oriented website for failing to trace the latest nuances in scholarship, but it would certainly be fair to note that the creators had not taken current scholarship into account. In general, then, online exhibitions and essays should be judged by the quality of their interpretation: What version of the past is presented? Is it grounded in historical scholarship? Is it original in its interpretation or mode of presentation? Again, the goal of the review is to provide guidance to potential readers (who might be reading in their roles as teachers, scholars, or citizens) and to raise the level of Web-based historical work.

Classroom-oriented sites would be judged by the quality of the scholarship underlying them, but naturally you would also want to evaluate the originality and usefulness of the pedagogical approach.  Will this site be useful to teachers and students? At what level?

Reviews of websites must necessarily address questions of navigation and presentation. Reviewers should consider what, if anything, the electronic medium adds to the historical work being presented. Does the digital format allow the creators of the site to do something different or better than what has been done in pre-digital formats (e.g., books or films)? Have the creators of the site made effective use of the medium? How easy is it to find specific materials and to find your way around the site?

In summary, most reviews will address the following four areas:

• Content (is the scholarship sound and current? What is the interpretation or point of view?)

• Form (Is it clear? Easy to navigate? Is it accessible to all users? Does it have a clear, effective, and original design? Does it have a coherent structure?)

• Audience/Use (Is it directed at a clear audience? Will it serve the needs of that audience)

• New Media (Does it make effective use of new media and new technology? Does it do something that could not be done in other media—print, exhibition, film?)

Because some history websites (largely archives) are vast, it is not possible to read every document or visit every link. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1940, at the Library of Congress’s American Memory site (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html), includes 2,900 documents that range from 2,000 to 15,000 words in length. The reviewer could hardly be expected to read what probably amounts to the equivalent of 300 books. In such circumstances, some systematic sampling of the contents can substitute for a review of every single Web page. At the same time, the reviewer of a website should devote the same kind of close attention to the work as does a reviewer of a book, exhibition, or film.  Because there is no easy way to indicate the size of a website (as you can note the number of pages in a book or the number of minutes in a film), you should try (ideally early in your review) to give readers some sense of the kinds of material found and the quantity of each.

One final way that websites differ from books, exhibits, and films is that they are often works in progress. Thus, we ask that the headnote for the review indicate when you visited the site (this could be a range of dates). Where the site plans some significant further changes, you should say that in the review. If you think that it would make more sense to wait for further changes before reviewing the site, then please let us know and we will put the review off to a later date. If you feel that you need additional information about a site in order to complete a review, we would be happy to contact the author or Web master on your behalf.

Unless otherwise specified, reviews should be 500 words in length—the standard length of book reviews. The JAH strictly enforces these word limits.

Reviews will appear both in the printed journal and at the History Matters website. As soon as the review has gone through copy editing, it will be posted on History Matters, which is co-sponsored by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project at the City University of New York.

For the web version of the review, we would like to include illustrations—most often screen shots of interesting pages. Please feel free to propose a screenshot and a brief, one sentence caption.

 

HEADINGS:

Name of site/title (Italics). (Address/URL). Who created the website?  Who maintains it (if different)? When reviewer consulted it.

Examples:

Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929 (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pmhtml/panhome.html) Created and maintained by the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Reviewed December 25, 2000-January 2, 2001.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: March 25, 1911 (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/) Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University in cooperation with UNITE! (Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees); ed. by Hope Nisly and Patricia Sione. Last site update April 21, 2000. Reviewed Dec. 20, 2000-Jan. 5, 2001.

Kelly Schrum
Editor, Web Reviews, Journal of American History
Director of Educational Projects, Center for History and New Media,
George Mason University
Phone: 703-993-4521
kschrum@gmu.edu

updated July 30, 2006