Memo For My Final Project

When I first proposed my project for Doing Digital Humanities, I did not have a purpose beyond creating an interactive website that other lovers of Russian classical music—such as myself—could use as a resource. I wanted to focus on six different composers, their symphonies, and how these symphonies were affected by Joseph Stalin’s strict expectations for Soviet music. As I researched and began constructing my site, I decided to focus on only three composers rather than six due to time constraints. The three composers I chose—Aram Khachaturian, Gavriil Popov, and Dmitri Shostakovich—nicely balance each other because all three had different reactions to Stalin’s oppression, which you can read about on my site.

It was not until the day of my class presentation at the beginning of December that I discovered the true purpose of my site. Someone asked me why freedom of creativity is important, and I realized that my site had to be an exhibition exploring oppression and inviting my audience to participate in a creative way. I already knew that I wanted to include poetry in my site, so it was a natural step to invite my audience to write poetry about oppression of the arts. As for the biographical and summarizing articles I had already written for my three composers and their symphonies, I did not have to change them to fit with my re-defined purpose; instead, I wrote an article for the “About” page that plants my purpose in the mind of my audience so that they can look for it while they explore the rest of my website.

One of the strengths of my site is the interactivity. Audiences can flex their creative muscles and contribute a poem to my site. My hope is that this activity will help my readers process the terrible oppression my composers faced in the best way possible: expressing themselves creatively and freely.

Another strength is the visuals I used in my project. On the home page of my website, I have embedded a timeline of all the major events that my website talks about. I used Timeline JS to make the timeline, and then I had to embed the code into the HTML of my site in order for it to show up where I wanted it to. Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to make the timeline wider to fit the entire page of the website, so it is narrower than I would have liked. I tried altering the code to make it wider, but it did not work. Additional visuals include pictures on all of the articles in the “Background” and “Composers” exhibits and embedded Youtube videos in all of the “Symphonies” articles. To make sure I was within copyright, I tried to find Youtube videos where the uploader was the one who played and, therefore, owned the content. My two favorite visuals are the ones that I made myself: my site banner, made with a copyright free picture of the Soviet flag, Microsoft Paint, and a downloadable font; and the word cloud on “The Piano Bench” page. I could not get Wordle to work, so I used Wordcloud.com instead. The word cloud contains key words from throughout my site that my audience can use as inspiration to write poetry about oppression and freedom of the arts.

The third strength of my site is the design. I organized my site in six easy-to-navigate sections. The first section is the “About” page, which serves as a jumping off point for the rest of my site. The next four sections are arranged like the four movements in a symphony. Originally, I was going to name the exhibits after the names of the movements in Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, but after feedback from my classmates, I decided that was not user-friendly enough, so I named each movement after what was inside of it: background information, composer biography, summaries of each symphony, and what happened to music in Russia after Stalin died. The Sixth section of my site is called “The Piano Bench,” for that is where all of the miscellany is put, such as the poetry gallery and the further reading section.

One potential weakness of my project is that I did not take the time to cite all of my sources within the actual site. I had two reasons for this. 1) I read and re-read much of the same information over many of the sources that I looked at, and I did not want to clutter the articles that I wrote—in which I put all of the information that I had gleaned over many resources into my own words—with citations at the bottom of the page. 2) A bibliography page is not user-friendly to my audience of general readers. I decided, instead, to have a “Further Reading” page because it is less academic-sounding. On this page, I made available the most interesting and useful pieces of my research. I decided not to cite in Chicago style for the same reason that I did not use the word “bibliography.” I was afraid that the academic language would scare away my audience, so I used the title of the work and author’s name instead.

In the future, I would like to continue working on my site. Maybe I’ll add pages for the three composers that I had to cut out of my project. The biggest thing that I would like to do to make my site better is to hyperlink my articles together so that my audience can click easily from one article to another. Additionally, I would like to write a poem to put in the poetry gallery. I had intended to write one as an example, but since it is the end of the semester, all of my creative and emotional energy is gone. I knew that if I tried to write a poem now, I would not be happy with it, so I decided to wait. I would like to write a poem for the gallery over Christmas break, after I rest and regain some energy.

I spent about forty hours on my website, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface of my topic. I also feel like I have only begun to dip my toes in digital humanities. I would like to continue doing digital humanities in the future, and I very much enjoyed learning new skills and learning about the digital world from our class sessions. I do not know what my future will be like yet, but I am confident that Russian composers and the digital world will be a part of it.

Word count: 1,111

Link to finished site: https://symphoniesofsovietrussia.omeka.net/

Am I Creating a Website, or is the Website Creating Me?

In our readings for Digital Humanities this week, we read two thought-provoking articles. In “History in Hypertext,” Edward Ayers speaks with hope about the types of narratives historians can tell with the advent of the digital age. He uses as an example Bush’s “memex” and also Darnton’s layered, electronic book that might contain words, pictures, notes, et cetera. We have read other articles this semester alluding to new types of historical narratives, but we have not necessarily learned exactly what that means, other than creating mixed media presentations of history, which one can do without digital technology. Supposedly, there are many unexplored possibilities for doing history in the digital age… or are there?

This brings us to our second reading, which included selections from Ted Friedman’s book Electric Dreams (the title of which reminds me of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I wonder if that is an allusion?). Friedman explores the possibility of technological determinism; rather than biological or environmental factors making a person into who he or she is, technology is the determiner. Part of this is that humans learn the logic of computers and react accordingly, which begs the question who is really in charge, the computer or the human?

I may have an answer, but to get to that answer, let’s explore it in correlation to my project for this class. Is my project for this class a new way of looking at history or is it merely a product of the technology that has shaped—or, shall we say, determined—my life? In a way, I think it is both.

As the creator of my own website, I have the choice to develop it into a new way of presenting the information to my audience. I can organize and design it the way that I want to and, in that way, have the option to do history in new and exciting narrative ways. Because I am designing my site to follow the organization of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, my audience will follow that organization as they explore my site. My site will have a logic that my audience will be able to follow, which will determine what they click on. In this way, they are affected by technological determinism.

I, too, however, am affected by the internal logic of computers, and technology determines how I interact with Omeka. As far as website-building goes, all programs work relatively similarly so that if one makes a blog with one hosting service and a website on another, there will be familiar options on both: options to create pages, to add text, to add images. Some hosting services will offer more complicated add-ons, but the basic concept is the same from site to site. This is the internal logic of website making that I am responding to when I work on my project. My previous experiences with technology has determined how I interact with Omeka.

Within Omeka, I can only do as much as the site will allow me. I do not have total and complete creative freedom. To create a history website that was totally and completely unique—a new way of doing historical scholarship—I would have to build a website from the ground up without the help of a hosting site or previously-made templates. Those who made Omeka have the advantage of creating something new with digital technology, but the logic that they programmed into their site-building software stops me from creating something totally new, yet when I launch my own website, the logic that I created the site with will lead my audience to interact with my site in a similar way to how I interact with the Omeka software.

This post has gotten far more meta than I intended it to. Are we creating our own websites? Yes, but only because we have internalized the logic of the software needed to build our sites. The technology is determining what we can and can't—what we do and don't—do.

Can our audiences experience history in new ways through our sites? Perhaps not because technology that they previously encountered has determined how they will interact with our websites. 

In order to be completely free from technological determinism, and in order to truly tell historical narratives in new ways, we must be the first to come up with a new medium. We must be the Vannevar Bush of our age. 

Or, perhaps, as the Bible says, there is nothing new under the sun.

Word Count: 746

Archive or Record?

The website Documenting Ferguson is a record, but is it an archive? I do not believe so because anyone can easily contribute to the site and also because it has not been given to archivists to maintain, store, and keep as long as possible for the sake of posterity. The website is hosted by Omeka, so if the creators of the site decided to stop paying Omeka to host Documenting Ferguson, the website would disappear. Additionally, if Omeka went bankrupt and stopped hosting website all together, Documenting Ferguson would disappear, too. A real archive would be hosted on a more stable site that is in no danger of going out of business. Since archivists would be looking after it, the site would stay in business longer, too, and as the years progress, the archivists would change it to adapt to new technologies.

Documenting Ferguson is not an archive, but it is a record because it documents information that consists of opinions, facts, and ideas—namely, that of the Ferguson shooting in 2014. As a record, Documenting Ferguson’s site is well done in terms of content, structure, and context. The website’s content is provided by contributions from people who have pictures, audio clips, video clips, or other media connected with the Ferguson case. When you click on an entry in the collection, it brings you to a page with metadata surrounding that item, such as a title, a description, creator, and date added. The collection is extensive; it spans seventy-nine pages. It may not be scholarly, however, because anyone can add anything to the site. While Documenting Ferguson is a website intended for members of the Ferguson community to remember what happened in their own words, it is not as credible, say, as an official report because anyone could post anything on the site. As far as I could tell, there was not a lot of moderation on the items that could be added to the collection. If I were to use this site in a project on the Ferguson shooting case, I would use it to add a personal element to the story, but I may not use it as evidence to back up a claim.

The structure of the site is fairly straightforward. It has only four pages. The “View the Collection” page is the most important aspect of the website, as that is where the information is actually stored. You have to view the collection by date that the specific picture or story was added. There is also a way to view it by tag. Neither of these ways to use the site are very user-friendly, as it is hard to find specific things on the site, yet it does inspire scholarship because a historian has to come to his or her own conclusions based on the things that he or she finds in the website.

Documenting Ferguson could use a little more context. I have never been extremely familiar with the case, so it would have been nice for me if there had been a page summarizing the events of the case to give the items in the record more meaning.

While Documenting Ferguson does not, in my opinion, fit the criteria of an archive, it is an important record. It may not be the most academic source in the world, but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to allow the people of Ferguson to share their perspectives on the shooting. As such, this website is an important cultural record, especially for continued discussions of racism and police brutality in the United States. I hope that its creators continue maintaining it because this could be an important historical artifact one day.

Word Count: 616

Zhdanovism

When I searched the term “Zhdanov Doctrine” on Google Chrome, 27,000 results showed up. The first result was the Wikipedia page, and the third result was Encyclopedia Britannica. I scrolled through the first five pages of Google results and, scattered amongst various wiki articles, pronunciation guides, and articles, were a few links to sources that I may find useful for my digital project. One resource is a scanned version of the Encyclopedia of Censorship, which Google Books so kindly added to the Internet. Google is helpful because it searches the web for relevant information about key word searches and puts all the results in one place. Unfortunately, it does little to put the most pertinent articles on the first page; instead, it puts popular and recent results on the first page. I found some primary source essays by Zhdanov, the creator of the Soviet doctrine, that will be interesting to read for background information on my topic, but they were on the third or fourth page of the Google search. Usually, I do not go beyond the first page when searching for things on Google. The strength of a Google search is that so many results can be found, but this is also the weakness; the proverbial gold panner must wade into the waters of Google prepared to sift through a lot of rocks and silt in order to find nuggets of gold.

Both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica have very similar articles referring to the Zhdanov Doctrine. Both of their articles are titled something different, which threw me off at first. Wikipedia’s article is called “Zhdanov Doctrine,” whereas Encyclopedia Britannica’s is called “Zhdanovschina.” When I searched “Zhdanov Doctrine” in Encyclopedia Britannica’s search engine on their website, Andrey Zhdanov, the man, popped up, as did the term “Doctrine,” but I had to follow a link from the article on Zhdanov to get to “Zhdanovschina.”

Wikipedia and Encylopedia Britannica’s articles are only two and three paragraphs long, respectively. The information on both is the same, and they even share a few of the same sentences, such as “Earlier critics and literary historians were denounced for suggesting that Russian classics had been influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Molière, Lord Byron, or Charles Dickens.” I looked at the history of the Wikipedia page and that sentence was added in 2006 (the page has not changed much since then). I was going to look at a physical copy of Encyclopedia Britannica to see whether Wikipedia stole the line from the Encyclopedia or vice versa, but the library no longer has a physical copy of the Encyclopedia. The lady at the reference desk said that the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica came from the physical copy, so I am assuming that Wikipedia copy/pasted some parts of their article from Encyclopedia Britannica, even though they did not cite them at the bottom of the page.

One of the strengths of using Wikipedia for research is that it is accessible and easy to use. There is a Wikipedia article for nearly everything and, as I mentioned above, these articles are easy to find, usually showing up as the first search result. Additionally, Wikipedia’s structure and design is easy to use and easy on the eyes. Most long articles are broken up into sections and a table of contents provides hyperlinks to the different sections. Wikipedia’s gray, blue, black, and white aesthetic gives it a professional look and makes it easy to read. Wikipedia, however, can be edited by whomever, wherever, whenever, which makes it a less reliable source than Encyclopedia Britannica, which is maintained by a team of editors.

Encyclopedia Britannica articles were written “by external advisers and experts,” as their website says, and is now watched over by editors. Because the articles have been written by experts in their various fields, they are more reliable and can be used for scholarly research. While this is true, Encyclopedia Britannica lacks the clean-cut format of Wikipedia. I think their website is not as visually pleasing as Wikipedia or as well lain out.

While both websites have general strengths and weaknesses for research, I found them equally helpful for gaining an overview of Zhdanovism because both articles were so short and contained the same information. It would have been more helpful to have longer articles, but long articles are not the purpose of encyclopedias. 

Word Count: 723 words. 

The Smithsonian X 3D Project (with special guest: Abe Lincoln)

The Smithsonian X 3D program scans exhibits and artifacts from the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. into 3D computer models. They upload them to the web so that users can look at the models from different angles and scroll closer to get an in-depth look at the minute details of the exhibits.

Face mold of Abraham Lincoln

This tool would be very helpful in classrooms for many reasons; indeed, part of the reason the Smithsonian decided to start digitizing their exhibits was for the benefit of students.

One reason this tool would be helpful in classroom situations is because it is expensive to take a classroom of students on a trip to Washington D.C. Many schools across the United States do have class trips to the Smithsonian, but not all students are able to go because of the cost. Plane tickets or gas must be bought to get to the museum, and lodging must be found. Additionally, there must be money for food, souvenirs, and museums fees or tips. When I was in high school, my mom, grandma, and I road tripped from Seattle to the East Coast to visit American historical sites, and even though there were only three of us, it was still an expensive trip. By having Smithsonian exhibits online, students from both high income and low income students can visit the exhibits online without having to spend the money to see it in real life. Of course, a downside to viewing things only online is that students do not get the experience of visiting these things in real life. As we talked about in class, it is a different experience viewing things in person versus online. When viewing things online, there is a layer of removal that one does not get when one views something in person. Also, students would not get the experience of taking a trip with their classmates and making lifelong memories. I will always remember the trip that my mom, grandma, and I took not only because of all of the American history we were able to see but also because we were able to deepen our relationships with one another along the way.

My mom and grandma join the Lincoln family

Sixteen-year-old Abbey and her mom become Washingtons

A second reason the Smithsonian X 3D website is helpful for students is because of the feature that allows the user to view the artifact or exhibit from different angles and zoom in on specific details. Often, in museums, glass separates the onlooker from the exhibit in order to preserve the artifacts, which are often fragile. Sometimes, exhibits can only be seen from the front, so it is impossible to see what the back or underside of an artifact looks like. With the Smithsonian’s 3D technology, students can explore all angles of an artifact and get as close as they want. Perhaps it is not as accurate and handling the artifact in real life, for these exhibits have been digitized, but students are not usually allowed to handle artifacts anyway. This is the best way for students to get a full idea of what these artifacts look like.

A third reason that this 3D tool is useful in the classroom is because of the “tours” provided. Most of the artifacts come with a tour comprising of several slides with information about the artifact. Every time a user advances a slide, the computer zooms in to the particular part of the artifact that the slide is talking about. There are additional reference pictures in the slides, too. This is helpful because it provides information and visual aids that a teacher does not have to search for him or herself. On the other hand, if all the information is on the screen, it may discourage teachers from doing their own research.

Overall, the Smithsonian X 3D program is very well-developed and useful in classroom situations. The team working on this project has only digitized a very, very small percentage of the historical and cultural material that the Smithsonian owns. If they are able to continue creating a 3D database, there will be a vast amount of resources available for everyone everywhere for very little cost.  

Word Count: 680 words.

Two Useful Websites

     In my project on Russian, classical composers under the reign of Stalin, the website TimelineJS would enhance my work because my audience would be able to see a visual of when the composers lived, wrote, and premiered their work. I am planning to focus on the last fifteen or twenty years of Stalin’s life in order to see specifically how he interacted with composers through World War II and to his death. He denounced several composers during this time and also awarded some of them the Stalin Prize for their compositions. A timeline would help my audience visualize when these things happened in correlation with other events; for example, did one composer receive a denunciation the same year that another composer received the Stalin Prize? This may lead my audience to question why, and I could include a link to a more in-depth article to explain the limited information presented in the timeline.

     A timeline would also help my audience deduce patterns of censure. Many Russian composers had to wait until after Stalin’s death for some of their pieces to be performed because they knew that their melodies could get them in trouble with, or killed by, Stalin’s secret police. A timeline would help my audience to see when pieces were composed as opposed to when they were premiered for the first time. Having this information on a timeline could show whether Stalin was prone to officiate worse censorship in some years as opposed to others.

     I plan on writing longer articles to exhibit certain composers, their compositions, and what was going on in the world that may have impacted the composers to write their pieces in a certain way. TimelineJS lets creators include hyperlinks in their timelines. This would be helpful for me because I could link to my longer articles. The timeline could, in a way, act like a site map or a database. It would be a way to entice my audience to explore people, places, and events in more depth by giving them visual context with dates.

     Another helpful website for my project would be a site like Many Eyes, though Many Eyes is no longer up and running. When it was in commission, however, it allowed common folk, like me, with limited graphic design skill, to create visual representation of data in the form of graphs, spreadsheets, infographics, or more. As I understand it, users were able to upload their data and it would be transferred to Many Eyes’ many data templates.

     This would be helpful for my project because I could present data about my topic in an appealing and easy-to-understand way. For example, many Soviet composers had to change their composing style and genre to avoid accusations of “formalism.” It would be interesting to see an infographic showing which genres of music were most popular for composers to compose in during different years of Stalin’s reign. As with the TimelineJS, this could reveal patterns in censorship. Additionally, it could show other data, such as volume of compositions per year and whether or not that changed during World War II. Data is often boring to read and hard to understand if it is simply written out. Infographics are a good way to present data in a visually appealing and understandable way.

Word Count: 547 words.

Investigating Wikipedia History

The first entry on Dmitri Shostakovich’s Wikipedia page is from September 26, 2006. The tone is very informal and uses the word “cheeky” several times, which makes me think that this article was written by someone without a scholarly background. The author briefly summarizes Shostakovich’s life, lists his fifteen symphonies, and provides a brief synopsis and analysis of each. Some of these synopses include sentence fragments, which does not lend credibility to the article. A link to a list of all of Shostakovich’s compositions does not appear until much later.

The first edit happens a month later on October 29, 2001. The editor changed the formatting and adds a few small details, such as Shostakovich’s birthday and where he lived. After this, edits are few and far between until, a year later, someone adds more content. The added content, however, contains more analysis of his music rather than an unbiased account of his life.

Minor revisions on formatting and spelling continues until July 2003 when the first graphic is added. This image breaks one of the ten rules about web design: it is bloated. When I accessed this page, the image was huge and the text wrapped around it oddly.

 In March 2004, an editor named Henry Flower (I looked at his Wikipedia page and he is a teacher and lawyer from Scotland) spent several days updated and expanding the biographical information about Shostakovich. He adds a table of contents at the top of the page so that it is easier to navigate the webpage. In May, he adds even more content and makes the bloated image smaller, too. He changed Shostakovich’s Wikipedia page from a conglomeration of non-scholarly facts and opinions about the composer to a more reliable resource.

Over the next fourteen years, people added, deleted, and edited the content, but Henry Flower’s extensive work in 2004 set the stage for the main organization and content of the website.

In 2015, a minor controversy arose over whether or not the word “Communist” should be included in the phrase “Joining the Party.” Eventually, one person gave up and “Communist” was left out.

The latest addition to the page was September 14, 2018, and it contained only minor revisions.

On Joseph Stalin’s Wikipedia page, the first article was created in October 2001. It was more advanced than Shostakovich’s page in that it started with sections. There was even a “to be added” section for future contributors. Stalin’s page was written in more formal and academic language than Shostakovich’s, but it was still very vague. From the beginning, however, the editors of Stalin’s page seemed more inclined toward accuracy and objectivity than those who edited Shostakovich’s Wikipedia page.

Until January 2002, the changes on Stalin’s page were minute facts, like childhood nicknames, or formatting changes, like the addition of more white space. In 2002, someone added a significant chunk to the information connecting Stalin and World War II. Later in January, someone noticed that a claim on the page was not from a neutral perspective and changed. By looking through the years, keeping a neutral tone of voice is important to the editors of Stalin’s Wikipedia page, though the editors certainly do not keep a neutral tone in their comments. They use personal attacks such as, “Leave that sentence alone,” and “[We’ve] replaced one hack with another…”

For a while in 2004, the page dealt with spammers who deleted the entire page. Right away, members of the Wiki-Police reverted Stalin’s webpage to its previous state.

The most recent changes are from today, the 20^th of September, 2018. The last person changed passive voice to active voice and clunky diction to more easily understandable words. Now, there are many sub-headings with hyperlinks to easily navigate the page. Over the last seventeen years, there has been much expansion on the original, skimpy biography.  

The page for Music in the Soviet Union began in October 2004. There was never much content on it, and it remained the same, minus some spelling errors, and focused on national music and folk music until 2008 when someone radically altered the page. They deleted all of the previous content and updated it to be about Russian classical, jazz, and movie music during Soviet reign. Still, the page did not have a lot of information on it until May 2013, when someone updated many of the sections to make them more complete. Now, there is much more information on the page than ever before, but it is not as professionally kept and updated as Stalin’s page.

This past April, someone vandalized the site. It was quickly removed, but the vandal was persistent and re-added his or her comment to the page two more times before giving up.

The last time this page was updated was in August 2018.

In the three articles that I looked at, editors were very active in 2004. It was during this time that most of the changes, especially in the first two articles, were made. It was in 2004, too, when most of the scholarly, “heavy lifting” research and work was put into the sites. Most of the major content changes for Shostakovich and Stalin’s pages were made in 2004 and the articles have only been tweaked since then. I looked at several of the major contributors to these articles, and, from their profiles, they seemed like scholarly people who have a passion for research and sharing their interests with the world. It is important to remember, however, that Wikipedia is accessible to be edited by anyone from anywhere; therefore, it should still be used with caution when writing academic articles.

Word Count: 937 words.

Historic Saint Paul

Saint Paul, Minnesota may not be the oldest city in the United States, but its colorful past and stunning architecture have sparked the imagination of both historians and writers. In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, was born in Saint Paul and wrote a collection of stories based on his home town. Over the years, historic homes and buildings have fallen into disrepair. Some have even been destroyed without a care for their historical significance. Historic Saint Paul is an organization that has dedicated itself to restoring, caring for, and fostering interest in historic neighborhoods in Saint Paul. 

Their website exhibits their preservation of Saint Paul neighborhoods and also provides some archival information about historic buildings, although they do not do this in a standard way. Rather than compile and keep the archives on their website, Historic Saint Paul invites their audience—those either living in Saint Paul or those interested in preserving or learning about the history of Saint Paul's neighborhoods—to participate in researching houses and updating a Wiki with information about specific properties. Historic Saint Paul provides resources via hypertextuality so that their audience is able to do this in a scholarly way.

While they provide other resources such as context studies, maps, walking tours, and historical information, Historic Saint Paul's main purpose is to raise awareness about the restoration projects and community building activities that they host. They have a secondary website called Saint Paul Historical that focuses on the history of the area. 

In this way, the Historic Saint Paul website is more of a hub that collects primary resources on Saint Paul neighborhoods than a digital project that interacts with the history itself. Their focus is on preserving the physical history so that others can interpret it. What little scholarship they do have on their main site, however, is up to date and reliable. 

Historic Saint Paul's website is well-organized and easy to use, though the historical information is somewhat difficult to find. On their main page, the website has six tabs and a search bar that allows the reader to discover for him or herself what the organization does and what services they offer. In order to get to the historical information, readers must click on the tab "Our Work" and scroll down and click on "Cultural Heritage" before finding the link to the Saint Paul Historical website and individual pages about the history of specific neighborhoods. Someone looking for this information has to go on a scavenger hunt through the website to find the history. On the other hand, it is very easy to find information about Historic Saint Paul's preservation and restoration work. 

Without their website, Historic Saint Paul would not be able to reach as wide an audience as it does, for only a niche audience reads books or watches movies about the preservation of historic houses. By maintaining a website, Historic Saint Paul ensures that those who are interested in Saint Paul's neighborhoods and buildings will stay up to date with their activities. They also provide access to resources that may not be readily available elsewhere for historians or curious homeowners. Additionally, they invite their audience to participate in scholarship with them by providing them with the tools to research Saint Paul houses themselves.

Overall, Historic Saint Paul is an effective website that serves its purpose well. Its historical information could be easier to find, but the overall design of their site is simple and not overcrowded with graphics, advertisements, or irrelevant information. Through exploring this website, one is sure to find man hidden treasures to capture the imagination.

Historic Saint Paul, https://www.historicsaintpaul.org/about-us. Created and maintained by Historic Saint Paul, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Reviewed September 13, 2018.

Word Count: 604 words