For our third blog assignment we were asked to evaluate how the internet affects our historical research. The best way for me to approach this assignment is to discuss how my love for soccer and the internet combined to teach me a great deal about the UK and Europe. 

Living in the South, information about soccer was not widespread. Neither was info on Europe for that matter. After the 2006 World Cup, I fell in love with the beautiful game. I started to Google my favorite players; Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo. I soon found, to my delight, that they both played for the same team; Manchester United of England’s Premier League. I quickly Google the Premier League and then the city of Manchester as so on and so forth. Suddenly, I was awash in a sea of information that honestly I am still swimming in today. One of my favorite hobbies is to read Wikipedia pages about a club’s history. I can accurately identify a club by simply seeing a flash of their crest or uniform. I am now very good at British and European geography simply because of this research into my favorite pastime. I am fluent in the obscure phrases and hard to pronounce names of the game because I can watch games online or listen to interviews on YouTube.

I fully understand that I cannot compare my story with what it must be like for a lifelong citizen of Manchester to attend a game at Old Trafford. I have seen it on TV, I know the address, and I have viewed panoramic pictures of it. However, I don’t know what it feels like to be in a pack stadium filled with excited fans. In much the same way, I feel that internet research cannot take the place of archival work. I study house museums and in particular the Rosenbaum House. I have been to the house and had read about it online and in books. I did not truly understand the home and its importance until I read the letters of the occupants and held their possessions in my hands. Understanding history is much more than simply knowing the facts. We have to meet the people, visit the sites, and touch the artifacts in order to truly comprehend.

The internet opens the world up to all people. I can visit sites that I never would have dreamed of in the past. While there are limitations on its reach, we cannot dispute its utility in our research. Internet research will always be a supplement to archival work, but it is a particularly useful and fruitful supplement. 

Blog Post #2

For our second blog assignment, we were asked to locate online databases and to evaluate them on several criteria. We are to look at what types of sources were available on these sites as well as how easy they are to use.

I decided to look at two sites because the first site I will be discussing is not a traditional database with links to primary sources. As a public historian, I often find myself needing information that does not fall under primary or secondary resources. Sometimes I need a contact number of a museum curator or an address to a site. With that in mind, I found the site of the Victorian Preservation Association of Santa Clara Valley. (http://www.vpa.org/index.html) This site provides a great deal of information about their members’ homes as well as providing a community forum for people involved in preservation. The portion of their site that drew me in was their House Museum list. It is a state by state list of several house museums, complete with contact info, dates, and times, and addresses. The viewer can then click a link to go to that house museum’s own website. The list is not complete but it is helpful. I would love to find a complete list just like this. I know that a government site probably has one, but I am impressed that some amateur preservationists complied this much information. The site also contains a contact list for contractors and suppliers for historic preservation construction. Having a database with a more complete list of this sort of information would be invaluable for me. While it may not be a traditional database, this site is helpful and provides a template for something that I would love to one day create.

As for the more traditional primary source database, I found the Medieval and Renaissance Material Culture links page. (http://larsdatter.com/sitemap.htm) I chose this site because, as I mentioned before, I am always impressed to see someone with a passion for a subject create a useful webpage. To think that someone’s hobby could be so useful to scholars is very encouraging. This site provides links to articles, photo’s, diagrams, and recreations of almost every aspect of Medieval and Renaissance material culture. For example, if you are researching sailors of this era, simply click that link. Next you will find a list of available resources. There is contemporary artwork, manuscripts discussing sailors, and links to sites discussing life on a ship at the time. This site is easy to navigate and very user friendly. The site is not very attractive and is text heavy, but it fits into the utility of the site. The fact that it is a links page can cause a problem with dead links but I never found any. I personally do not study this topic but I can see it being useful for those who do.