Summer Class: What's on the Web for History? Is It Accurate?
July 18, 2018
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For historians, using the internet for research comes with its own "pitfalls and possibilities," as University of Baltimore Prof. Nicole Hudgins puts it. The web's potential for enlightenment is the central topic of her summer course, "History on the Web."
Somewhere between an information literacy course and an independent study, the undergraduate class allowed students to pursue a topic of their own interest—but rather than focusing solely on the history of that topic, students analyzed, compared, and mapped the sources they were able to find online.
The topics chosen by students enrolled in the class ranged from the coverage of broad periods, e.g., the incidents surrounding the Korean War or the life of Robert F. Kennedy, to a close emphasis on one specific incident, such as the Rosenstrasse Demonstration in World War II Germany. While these choices led to unique experiences for each student in the course, it also led to unique challenges.
Claudia Ryan, who studied the Rosenstrasse Demonstration—a protest organized in 1943 Germany by Aryan women against the seizure of their Jewish husbands—noted a language barrier she faced in her search for information.
"If I spoke German, or if I was able to use something from the library's database written by someone who spoke German, I might have been able to collect more information about [the demonstration]," she says, noting the other unique challenge participants in this course faced: scholarly articles were discouraged.
Websites like the History Channel, the blogs of amateur historians, or documents posted online by government agencies—websites that might exclude information purposefully, or that don't come with the guarantee of accuracy—were given preferential treatment instead. This ensured that students could learn to assess the information readily available to anyone curious enough to look.
"I tried to emphasize the difference between scholarly and corporate internet," said Hudgins, who teaches in UB's Division of Legal, Ethical and Historical Studies in the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences. "Scholarly websites have to worry about durability, funding, and maintenance, whereas corporate websites might have backers interested in what is or isn't published. When looking at information online, you need to ask who and what is behind it."
In addition to honing skills used in assessment of information, students were encouraged to think about the differences in how we interact with information on the internet and information stored in books, documents, or objects in museums, and the differences in how that information presents itself.
"When it comes to history on the web, there is a change from a hierarchical structure of information to a diffused, or shared, authority," says Prof. Hudgins.
The class also took a trip to the nearby Walters Museum of Art, where they compared what is available online to the physical objects on display.
"I wanted to ask when it is important to hold the actual thing, or see the actual thing," says Prof. Hudgins, "as well as how museums continue to engage audiences."
Besides offering an increasingly important set of skills for modern historians, the small class size allowed for the students, as well as Hudgins, to learn a lot about each other.
"It's so true around UB that it’s a cliché, but we really are having a great time learning from each other this summer, both in terms of the historical topics, and in terms of life stories," she says. "Unlike many other campuses, everyone is so welcome in the classroom here. I've taught at UMBC, Morgan, George Mason, and UVA, and never experienced this until getting to UB nine years ago."
Learn more about Prof. Hudgins and the Division of Legal, Ethical and Historical Studies.