Resources for Technical Aspects of ASH 3002y
This course makes use of resources available to us through the web, both locally and in the vast world out there. Below are some basic tips and resources that may be useful to you as you proceed.
As you already know if you're reading this, this course has a homepage/site published on the World Wide Web and accessible from all computers with access to the Internet. It contains a variety of materials relevant to the purposes of the course, including electronic versions of the provisional calendar, list of readings, other relevant websites and a schedule of assignments. These materials will be updated as the semester proceeds, so you'll need to check this site regularly.
This web site will also provide links to the course homepages/sites of all students in the course. You will be publishing your assignments electronically, making them available to your instructor, your classmates, and the rest of the wired world. More on this below.
This course also has an electronic bulletin board, called a CUBBoard. You can reach it by browsing to https://www1.columbia.edu/sec/bboard/991/amhs3002-001/ or by sending e-mail to amhs3002-001-991@columbia.edu. The bulletin board is quite easy to use, but users have found it tricky at first, so I've provided you with some detailed instructions.
Your Own Home Page
All formal student presentations [heretofore "papers"] will be published on your own seminar home page, which makes them readable by me, the other students in the course and pretty much the rest of the world. This means you will need to become familiar with the format language of the Web -- HTML. This will permit you to include images in your presentations, to make hyperlinks from one part of your presentation to another and/or to distant web sites.
We'll go over the basics of web page construction in class on January 27. I'm always happy to answer questions, though you may find that you very quickly pass me by in webmastery. There are many other resources that you may want to use. I've listed some particularly useful resources below.
Mike Smith's guide to HTML and CGI Scripts is very useful, and has a very clear explanation of frames, as well as extensive information on Java. I've found that it loads a bit slowly.
Microsoft has an on-line web workshop, including a reference guide to HTML elements.
Here's a color chart that you may find useful.
Publishing on the Web also means that you need to take into account not only your
immediate audience in this course and its specific purposes but your much larger potential
audience and its heterogeneous needs. All such published presentations will be linked to
the course home page during the semester and especially effective ones will be made a
permanent part of the course's homepage. (See the work of current and former
students of this course at Student Members and their
Home Pages.)
Students in this course will be expected to utilize electronic as well as hard-copy bibliographic resources, which means developing skills in the searching the World Wide Web. This includes learning to characterize your research needs in searchable terms, which give you fair assurance of discovering the web sites relevant to your research purposes. Several different search engines are accessible from either the Barnard Library home page or the Columbia Library list of reference tools.
Note that the web is a wild and diversity-filled place. There are some terrific materials out there for the study of early American culture, but you'll also find quite a lot of junk. Read critically, just as you would if you were browsing materials in the library. And don't make the mistake of replacing all your old-fashioned library work with web-based research. Though you'll be mounting your assignments on the web, you'll still need to do some old-fashioned reading this term.
Revised 15 April 1999