Evaluating web sources for historical research

¶ … Web Sources for History

The Nature of History

A lot of times, Web sites are expended as the sole source of historical information on specific topics, particularly by K-12 and undergraduate students. Therefore, critical analysis of these sites is very important. I believe we as academics have a responsibility to review and appraise these online resources, both to help grow the individual sites under review and to endorse the bar for the complete field of public history. With that said the following two websites were chosen regarding the Great Depression.

The first website chosen was called farming in the 1930s. The website was last visited on November 14, 2011. There are no author names on the website but the website is sponsored by Living History Farms. Basically, the sire does have satisfactory information available concerning The Great Depression. For example, the website is very narrow, specifically taking you to farming during the 1930s which was clearly the time of the Great Depression. There are other avenues to click on but none of them represent anything on the topic. This page actually gives limited information on the subject.

The site does have more of an informational appeal to it instead of an academic allure. Since there is no author listed on this site, it is clear that it has more of an encyclopedia feel to it. The skill of the site is that it has a lot of material on farming in general. It basically gives us a historical account of farming over the past 100-year. It does a good job with categorizing everything by the date. The site gives an online museum impression to it. The site appears to be very professional and illustrative in appearance. There are plenty of detailed pictures that display everything a researcher would need to know about farming. However, as far as The Great Depression is concerned, there is not a single picture on the site. On the page, there is a box on the right hand side that is supposed to give a video tour of the subject but unfortunately it does not work. I think that is very unfortunate because the video could have explained what the written information could. It is very unsuccessful is giving a written presentation that is informational because there are not enough words to explain the site. However, there are no grammatical errors. It is worded perfectly but there is not enough information on this site to give a researcher a thorough picture of farming during the Great Depression.

The second website chosen was just named The Great Depression and it is a huge difference from the previous website on The Great Depression. It is clearly a website that is completely for academic use. There is no author name anywhere on the website due to the fact that it is a Spark note site that gives tons of information on subjects. However, compared to the previous website it lacked the illustrative appeal to give it that show and tell feel. As far as the date goes, there is none and since there is no direct author, it is obvious that this website is from a company that is in the business of making cliff notes and putting them online.

Also, unlike the other website, this location had some distractions on the page. There were a lot of pop up ads that were annoying and had nothing to do with the subject of depression. The advertisement on this site was too excessive and I think that it got in the way of my searching. As I mentioned earlier, since this is a cliff note sight, it has tons of information unlike the previous website that I went to earlier. The information on the depression was broken down into sections unlike the other web page. For example, on this site there was The Politics of Conservatism: 1920 -- 1928 that the researcher could click on if they wanted to go in depth and find out the political setting during the time of The Great Depression. The Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age: 1920 -- 1929 was another section that a person could click on which would have been extremely helpful because then we could find out what was the entertainment culture like on the eve of The Great Depression. This sort of gives the researcher the pre-quel glimpse of life before the stock market crash. It also had the Conservative Backlash: 1919 -- 1929 and the Onset of the Depression: 1928 -- 1932. These are helpful areas to click on and a big help for anyone that is doing research because the information gives a very thorough sight of what started The Great Depression and why it was so devastating.