Proposed Course Schedule:

Week 1: Introduction: What is New Media?

Whats so "new" about Digital, Interactive and Multi-Media Technologies?

[Practicum: Introduction to the World Wide Web]

Week 2: Clio in Cyberspace: What does 'Digital Technology' mean for the Historian?

[Practicum: HTML and Making a Web Page]

Week 3: Looking for the Past in Cyberspace: History on the World Wide Web

[Praciticum: Evaluating Web Sites for Content Quality, Navigation, Architecture]

Week 4: When Old Media Was New: The Technology of Print and Social Change

(Historical Background to the Coming of Electronic Media)

[Practicum: Text scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)]

Week 5: The Visual Display of Information

[Practicum: Image Scanning, Editing and Publishing]

Week 6: Multi-Media History

[Practicum: Digital Sound and Video for the Historian]

Week 7: History on The Web: Reports from Cyberspace

Student Review Essays due: Choose a historical topic that interests you; write a review essay that discusses the presentation of that topic on at least five web sites or cd-roms and talks about at least two of these in depth. You should also use this essay to comment more broadly on what it means to do history in electronic spaces. Your on-line essay should contain links to relevant portions of the web sites. As a rough guideline, your essay should be around 1,500 words.

Week 8: Hypertext and History: Theoretical Perspectives

[Practicum: Reading in Hypertext]

Week 9: Hypertext and History: Practical Perspectives

[Practicum: Writing in Hypertext]

Week 10: Virtual Communities of Historical Discourse

[Practicum: On-line discussions, chats, and list-servs in the discipline of History]

Week 11: The Computer and The Internet for Historical Research

[Practicum: Building Bibliographies and Note-taking on the Internet]

Week 12: Databases in Historical Research

[Practicum: Building and Managing Databases]

Week 13: Digitization, Archiving and Retrieval

[Practicum: Ethical and Practical Aspects of Digitizing sources]

Week 14: Media and Museums, or the Web in Public History

[Practicum: Visit to Public History site and discussion of potential uses of media]

Proposed Class Discussion topics:

1. Introduction and Overview

2. When Old Media was New: The Print Revolution and the Advent of Historiography

3. The "First" Computer Revolution in History

4. Whither the Historian?: Electronic Text and Hypertext

5. "Enhanced History": Digital Images and Visual History

6. Digital Sound & Video

7. Databases for Statistical and Quantitative History

8. Databases for Qualitative History; Database-driven websites

9. Information Design and the Visual Display of Information

10. Scholarly Electronic Publishing in the discipline of History

11. The Future of the Past

Proposed Practicum Topics

1. Basics: FTP, Telnet, HTTP, listservs, portals, search engines

2. Note-taking and word processing

3. History on the Web: researching and authoring

4. New Media in History Teaching

5 . Electronic Resources: Bibliographic Research Tools and Digital Archives

6. Text: OCR and encoding

7. Metadata

8. Images: photographs, graphics

9. Sound, video

10. Databases: conceiving, building, managing

11. Statistics and qualitative analysis