African-American Women: On-line Archival Collections
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html
A project of the Special Collections Library, Duke University

This website is actually a "sub-site" of the Special Collections Library and its Digital Scriptorium, a massive effort by Duke faculty, students, and staff, to create "digitized versions of historical materials" held by the Special Collections Library. The African-American Women website is the work of Lydia Boyd, Ginny Daley, and Paul Mangiafico. While the site identifies its creators by name and duty, it does not give their credentials. By searching Duke's online directory, I was able to identify Daley as a technical services archivist and Mangiafico as the director of The Digital Scriptorium. I did not locate Boyd, whom the website lists as its editor. Knowing if she is an academic or a librarian would be useful in evaluating the site as a critical edition.

Containing the texts of only four women, this website is somewhat narrow in its scope, considering its extremely broad title: African American Women. But the rarity of the few texts it beautifully displays certainly compensates for the deficiency. What is exciting about this site is that it offers page-by-page color scans and complete transcripts of the letters of three women who lived as slaves and the 85-page memoir of a woman born four years after Emancipation. The site does not indicate whether it is a work in progress or complete. I came across at least one other 19th century manuscript by an African-American woman and a number of 20th century writings while scanning the library's incomplete on-line guides to its holdings. These texts certainly could be added to this site.

Electronic modifications of two of the texts, the memoir and a letter, raise issues about the integrity of digitized editions. The 85-page memoir has been divided into 18 titled chapters; the original contains only two sections. A conspicuous note preceding the memoir states that this change was made for "easier viewing and direct access to particular topics." While the alteration certainly makes the text more manageable, the effect this change may have on the interpretation of the narrative and the representation of 19th century experience must be considered. More problematic is the inclusion of a photo of two fieldworkers and a child on the page devoted to an 1857 letter by Vilet Lester. A caption does not accompany the photo, so it is easy to assume that this photo is related to the letter. Only by clicking on the unlabeled photo does a visitor find out that "this is not a photograph of Vilet Lester nor is it related to the Joseph Allred collection containing the Lester letter. Although this original photograph is held in Duke's Special Collections Library, we know virtually nothing about its origins. The type of photography used indicates that this photograph could have been taken ca. 1880s - 1900. The people depicted are most likely tenant farmers or sharecroppers and not slaves." Though the photo is stunning, I challenge its inclusion, especially without an easy-to-find disclaimer. Many questions are raised: Is it ethical to fuse these two unrelated representations of 19th-century experience, and by doing so, is the result merely a 21st-century representation of that experience? Does the photographic image take away from the portrait created by the letter writer? Is this site an artistic project or a scholarly presentation of manuscripts? At its core slavery involved the dispossession of one's physical body-is the imposition of this photo a replication or continuation of that loss of ownership?

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"The Archive: Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature"
http://www.colorado.edu/English/amlit/e19c.html

This site, "The Archive: Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature" published through the University of Colorado, attempts to accomplish some noteworthy tasks: comprehensive coverage of early nineteenth-century American literature and some aspects of national culture; inclusion of diverse information forms such as electronic texts, photographs, historical background, and research bibliographies; and access through linking to important materials held both physically and electronically at other universities. These tasks, however, are superficially and incompletely carried out. The website lacks the scholarly integrity, usability, and organization which distinguish leading literary archival sites like The Dickinson Archive (www.emilydickinson.org), The Rossetti Archive (jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti), and The Blake Archive (jefferson.village. virginia.edu/blake). A key problem is that the agency behind this site is not addressed; only the names of its author and its maintainer are listed at the bottom of the directory page, without any further information about profession (student, professor, scholar, website designer) or institutional affiliation (University of Colorado or otherwise). Furthermore, the site fails to give a mission, rationale, and intended audience. In fact, after exploring a few links it becomes clear that the project is less an integral scholarly effort and more a conglomeration of texts and resources from other projects. This compromise of scholarly credibility also occurs on a smaller scale. First, many of the bibliographical listings and links to electronic primary texts or other sites are not properly sourced. Second, links to primary and secondary materials are mixed together across the site, not distinguished in separate sections as suggested by the archives two major areas -- General Resources and Authors and Works. Third, the materials offered for the different authors are inconsistent: no one kind of material -- text, biographical detail, historical information, and bibliography -- is provided for every author, major canonical authors are covered much more thoroughly, and no explanation is given for this unevenness. Such problems of disorganization and incomplete information force the user, wandering without much guidance through diverse materials, to perform a lot of guesswork. All of these shortcomings, however, have instructive value: they raise important questions about the standards of scholarly credibility appropriate for a site calling itself an archive and bearing the domain name edu. The failure of this project to match its ambitious breadth with consistently deep intellectual content suggests that a university-based archival site must maintain high standards to provide effective web scholarship for the students, teachers, and scholars who most often compose its audience.

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@sleONLINE
http://www.asle.umn.edu

@sleONLINE is the home page of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. The society was founded in 1992 in order to exchange ideas and information about "literature that considers the relationship between human beings and the natural world." The site does not include archival materials for the nineteenth century, but would be of use to graduate students and scholars interested in viewing nineteenth century literature through the critical lens of ecocriticism. Since ecocriticism is a relatively new critical approach, the designers of the site have made a commendable effort to include a wide variety of resources and links. For graduate students, the on-line "Handbook for Graduate Students" is quite useful and includes links to sites about applying to and succeeding in graduate school. For teachers, there is an archive of over one hundred and fifty syllabi, including several that cover nineteenth century American literature. While the site has an impressive amount of links to other scholary web sites, the Library of Environmental Writing is rather scant. It contains links to about fifteen e-texts. The link to Leaves of Grass, 1900 connects to the commercial Bartleby.com site. Obviously, there are more useful scholarly e-texts the Library could link to. The list of texts in the Library raises the question of canon formation. For a critical approach that seeks to gather knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, there has been an intense drive to construct what seems to be an "environmental canon." The Library is reflective of this, listing the texts that most often appear as worthy of environmental study. Hopefully, as ecocriticism matures, there will be more breadth to the "ecocanon." Overall, the site is a useful introduction to ecocriticism and links to a wide range of sources for those interested in examining literature and hte environment.

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Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/
Maintained by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/New York Public Library

The Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century project arose out of a growing need to make works by 19th century black women writers more accessible to scholars and to the general public. In response, the New York Public Library in conjunction with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, created a digital collection of over fifty published, full-text works by black women writers. Howard Dodson, Chief of the Schomburg Center, presents a thorough introduction to the site, providing a general background on 19th century writing and explains how the Schomburg Center became involved with this particular project.

The site is easy to navigate and has minimal loading times. It has thorough search capabilities, allowing the user to perform a search for documents by title, author, genre, and even subject keyword. The works are all available in their entirety and the user is able to jump to a particular section or chapter. Included are texts by more recognized 19th century black women writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Phyllis Wheatley, Francis Harper, and Alice Dunbar Nelson, as well as works by lesser known authors such as Effie Walker Smith, Mary E. Tucker, Maggie Pogue Johnson, and Mary Weston Fordham. By exposing users to authors and works that they may never have previously encountered, this allows them to broaden their knowledge of 19th century writing. This will in turn promote a better understanding of current literary efforts. Links to the sponsoring organizations, the New York Public Library and the Schomburg Center, are provided as well as an e-mail address for comments or suggestions.

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Domestic Goddesses A Moderated E-Journal
http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/

Although the title is clever and the aim of this site is commendable, this web page, created by Kim Wells, falls short of usefulness and accessibility at many levels. The site claims to be an e-journal dedicated to publishing papers, presenting biographies, and consolidating links about "domestic goddesses," confined to Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Susan Warner at the moment. A class at Southwest Texas State University was the inspiration for the site and the papers produced in that class are the basis of its holdings. The site begins to disappoint textually with its basic definition of domestic goddesses. These are American women who wrote about "specifically 'domestic' types of things" from about 1830-1920. Although Wells goes on to expand on this definition, the initial encounter with it is dissatisfying because it is so vague and casual. The page falls apart from there concerning the issues of navigability, authorship, and purpose.

My first impression of the site was immediately tarnished by the colors used on the page: a black background with words in green, blue, purple, yellow, pink, and a box of text highlighted in a particularly harsh hot pink. These choices simply are not aesthetically pleasing and are distracting. The page is designed to be scrolled down and offers links to particular authors, a call for papers, a site index, a description of the site, as well as numerous other pages. These choices are not presented in a clear way and even the site index offers confusing help with links almost running into each other and bunched together on the page. Most of the links work (some are highlighted but do not take the viewer to a page, some are not installed yet), but occasionally there is not a link to return to the home page or the site index from the page you travel to. There are also too many yellow "click heres" that catch your eye and distract from the text of the page. The pictures included are interesting, but, beyond a very brief descriptive tag, are not directly connected to the page's purpose and are only cited as coming from the Internet. There are also some missing graphics. This site would be much improved by a design overhaul for ease on the viewer and navigability.

Kim Wells is identified as the editor of the page, but the viewer can only presume that she is the author of the text that appears on the site, including biographies of the seven women. Though it is clear that Wells was a member of the class, we do not know what she is doing now. Has she completed her degree? To what extent can we trust the information she is presenting? Is the information on the web site, the biographies and additional texts, her own creation? Although it claims to be a peer reviewed journal and features a call for papers, there is no listing of this board. No one else is featured speaking on the site, including the moderator of the page, Dr. Priscilla Leder. My expectations for an e-journal are that there would be editions and there is no mention of those. Is this a resource? A magazine? What is the definition of an e-journal?

I found the concept of the site and its purpose interesting and admirable. As a student interested in women's writing and the nineteenth century, this page provides a glimpse into the variety of topics that could be discussed and explored via the web. However, the purpose of the site is quite murky. Many papers are displayed and although the page has numerous warnings not to plagiarize and links for ways to properly cite the material on the page, the papers remain easily accessible to searches. One of the problems is that I was not able to find out if this is a page in progress. Many of the pages had been updated very recently, but without an explanation or warning, I cannot tell if this means it is still under construction. Lofty goals are stated, such as plans for a listserv and a discussion group, but as of February 8, 2000, this page is simply access to numerous papers about the seven authors. As a teacher of freshman English I know how tempting this can be to students and while I find the papers interesting to read I know that some students would find them interesting to copy.

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The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
http://www.eapoe.org/index.htm

While more about the Poe Society of Baltimore than a scholarly page about Poe's writings, this web site has some valuable resources for students of Poe. The site is dominated with information about joining the society, announcements for the society, a sparse collection (a dozen or so) of past speeches given at the 77-year old Poe Society Lecture series (other speeches, which the society has in print but not on-line, can be ordered from the society), and links to Baltimore-area Poe resources. There's a very brief biography and chronology of Poe, especially as he relates to Baltimore, the city where he lived a good deal of his life and where he eventually died, but it's not more than what you could get in print resources. There's an even briefer Poe bibliography, some of the books are related to Baltimore, some are general Poe scholarship, but it's not clear why the books that are included were included. More than anything else, the biographical information serves to bolster Baltimore-area tourism more than Poe scholarship, as evidenced by links to Poe tourist sites in Baltimore such as the Baltimore Poe House and Museum, the Poe Grave, the Church Hospital, the Sir Moses Ezekiel Statue of Poe, and the John H. B. Latrobe House.

The site cashes in on a bit of the "Poe is spooky" mythology that has surrounded him. It has links to the "Festival of Darkness," what looks to be a localized Lollapaloza for Baltimore-area Goths, and the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Prague, which had a Java-script icon for the 1999 convention in which a swirling "666" image turned into 1999. Spooky.

The site is hosted by Loose Foot Computing, a private firm for setting up web sites for small businesses and personal interest groups like the Poe Society of Baltimore. There were a few broken links and a good deal of pages still under construction. This is a good site, but it's not 100% professional. Even though it's not an academic site, a Rutgers site dedicated to Poe has given the page an award (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/poesites.html). Temper that, however, with a link to www.poedecoder.com, which, while purporting to have essays written by "qualified people," doesn't llist any qualifications for the writers other than that they are Poe enthusiasts. Under the "Staff" page, they are identified by their handles, such as Qrisse, Una, Precisely Poe, and Poedoll. You can catch them and all their friends at the Festival of Darkness.

The best thing about this site—in fact, the only reason a scholar would want to use this site—are the e-texts, which are not only plentiful, but well documented. They list the variant editions and trace the texts' publication histories in great detail. While most e-texts on the web are relatively silent about what they've chosen as a copy text, these Poe texts are carefully documented as to first appearance in print and changes made in subsequent editions. Most e-texts don't give a suitable transmission history, but this site really focuses on where and when the individual texts appeared. They have a comprehensive listing of tales and poems, which gives you a chance to read a lot of the stuff that doesn't get reprinted very much, like the 1844 gem, "Mesmeric Revelation."

It has an interesting "Canon" section in which it discusses the authenticity of the tales and poems (if they really were written by him) and whether or not they are considered his best work, etc. With regards to establishing an author function, the "Canon" section of this site does that in spades. There are some interesting "miscellaneous" papers and letters, but the real value of the site is the transmission history of the tales and poems as represented in the e-text section.

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"How the Other Half Lives: The Hypertext Edition,"
by David Phillips
http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html

This site is a "hypertext" publication of Jacob Riis's work, How the Other Half Lives--Studies Among the Tenements of New York, originally published in book form in 1890. Upon first entering the site, the user sees a "title page" with the words "The Hypertext Edition" inserted as a link below the title of the book. Clicking on the link on the title page takes the user to an "about this edition" page, where Phillips discusses his philosophy and his methodology. In Phillips's words, his goal is "to preserve the typographic spirit of the original document." The initial title page is demonstrative of this; it is a complete reproduction of the original book form title page (except for the one link added in). Phillips also mentions the one place where he took liberty to alter the orginal work, reformatting the statistical data in Riis's appendix into a "more comprehensible set of statistical tables."

This "about" page also contains an aspect that is vital to any hypertext edition--information as to how to cite this work. Rather than have one html file for each page, thus preserving the pagination of the original but forcing an inordinate amount of files, Phillips chose to create one file per chapter, and numbered each paragraph. Therefore, to cite from this edition, one uses the phrase "chapter x, paragraph y." This organization works well for Phillips, and he has placed named anchors as targets in each paragraph so that chapter 5, paragraph 6, would have the address:

http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/chap5.html#para6,

As the user clicks on the "contents" link and begins to proceed through the site, he/she can see Phillips's attention to preserving the feel of book form. Each chapter ends with a link to the next chapter, so a user can proceed sequentially if so desired. The notes are printed at the bottom of each page, with a link from the reference point to the note, creating the feel of flipping to the end of each chapter to read a note and then having to flip back to where one was. While this does help showcase Riis's work as a whole text, it can constrain the reader who wishes for a more hypertextual experience and would want to jump back and forth between sections. If, for example someone were reading chapter 3, and then wished to go to chapter 9, he/she would have to either utilize the "back" button on the browser or click on the "return to contents" link and then choose a new location. Perhaps if Phillips did not place so much emphasis on the format of the original, and instead used a frameset in which one narrow frame had links to the various chapters as well as a text box for notes to appear in when clicked (to prevent the user from having to leave the text to read a note), this edition would be more of an hypertext and less of an e-book.

Phillips handles the images in an interesting an effective way. The "contents" page contains a link to an "illustrations page" which allows the user to view each scanned in graphic (this time, without the constraints of a book feel). Throughout the text Phillips has also taken measures to insure that each illustration is placed in relation to the same words and page orientation as in the original edition. However, other than the photographs of the original work, there are no links to any other resources that may be of interest to an active, hypertext reader. Again, it was not Phillips's intent to create an archive of tenement life in the late 1800s. However, one of the advantages of hypertext editions is the ease in which links can be created, and it would seem natural to take full advantage of this ability by adding in outside links to other online sites, documents, etc. that relate either directly or indirectly.

In conclusion, as an "online text" Phillips's site does a good job in providing the text, the notes, and the photographs of Riis's book, and it certainly was a large task to mark up the text with HTML tags and formatting. The design of the site is clean, attractive, and easy to read. But an online edition could (and should) be more than this. The only advantage of Phillips's edition over a print edition is that this one will never be checked out of the library. As a true "hypertext edition," which this claims to be, there is much more which could be done that would enhance it, especially in terms of creating an academic resource for those users reading it with a critical mind set.

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Legacy 19th Century American Women Writers Web, or 19CWWW
http://www.unl.edu/legacy/19cwww/home.htm

Let me start with the positives:

First of all, it is credible, in the scholarly sense. It is created and supported by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), which lists its officers on a page within the site. The 13 members of the advisory board and the four officers, led by president Sharon M. Harris from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, are each affiliated with a well-respected college or university in the United States. Additionally, this site is part of the Legacy web site, a well-respected academic source. Links from the SSAWW site are all to academically credible sites as well (including, for example, the Dickinson Electronic Archives).

The site contains an incredible amount of information, including a great link to an efficient tutorial on how to use the web (including an introduction to HTML programming), links to books, journals, and teaching resources, a link to join the Legacy/19CWWW listserv, and an Etext library on 19th century women's writing. The amount of information available is impressive; for example, the 19th Century Women's Poetry link has short biographies and sample poems from 36 poets (enough to print out 49 pages worth).

However, when you work within this site, it becomes obvious that it is still under construction; unfortunately, no warning is given to the browser and this leads to a lot of frustration. Anytime you click on a link from the table of contents, a barely-intelligible index of legacy document titles comes up. Consequently, not only is it difficult to find your way to the desired information, it is equally unapparent which link gets you back to the original table of contents.

What we are left with is a rich mine of information, temptingly located behind a beautifully decorated door, which, unfortunately, opens into a bit of a maze. Once the searcher finds a through-path, the final destination is quite rewarding. On the off-chance that the searcher is in a rush, it would be most courteous to post a warning sign on the door to the effect that the work inside is under progress.

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The Life and Works of Herman Melville
http://www.melville.org
Maintained by jmadden@melville.org

While this site's URL suggests that it is run by some sort of Melville organization, it appears to be instead the work of a private individual and Melville enthusiast identified on the website only by his or her e-mail address.

The site brings together a variety of biographical writings about Melville, reviews of Melville by his contemporaries, a critical bibliography, links to electronic texts, and links related to Melville's literary and geographical context. Its chief strength is that it puts excerpts from numerous print sources on the Web, and provides the beginning researcher with a context in which to assess Melville's work. For example, users who read about Melville's friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne in the site's Publishing History section on _Moby-Dick_ (a history of first publication, rather than a textual scholar's look at publication over time) can then look at some of Melville's letters to Hawthorne (though the site does not link these directly, requiring the user to notice and click on the "Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne" link on the home page). Even more useful for placing Melville in a context is the section "Contemporary Estimates of Melville and His Works," which provides several nineteenth-century assessments of Melville's works.

Though the site boasts proudly of several awards it received in 1996, it has failed to keep up with trends in web design. (Indeed, the site's content and the number of broken links strongly suggest that much of the site has not been updated since its inception in the mid-nineties.) Requiring eleven scroll-downs, the home page is unwieldy; it is easy for the user to become lost while scrolling. As noted above, there need to be more cross-links within the site; the current design requires users to make connections between related topics, rather than making the connections for them.

This tendency is especially troubling with regard to the site's attribution for its sources. The credits for the information the site presents are listed only on a separate sources page, rather than on each page that draws from a source, giving rise to an illusion that the site's creator spent hours transcribing primary sources from rare books or from microfilm, when in fact he or she is merely reproducing what already appears in a late twentieth-century publication. The user who does not go to the site's "Credits" section and then to the "Sources and Illustrations" section is likely to credit jmadden@melville.org with work done by someone else, a misunderstanding the website encourages by putting "A page from _The Life and Works of Herman Melville_" at the top of each page.

The bibliographies the site provides are useful for the beginning researcher but are dated, with no information beyond the early 1990s. The site's failure to recognize itself as a fundamentally non-scholarly Melville site carries over to its perception of other resources; an advertisement for a guide to _Moby-Dick_ appears in the same "Melville Criticism and Research Online" category as a published scholarly article, and there are no annotations to distinguish the Melville-related websites of academics from those of Melville fans. _The Life and Works of Herman Melville_ appears at first to be a scholarly site, but in the end it is really a fan site for the serious Melville fan who wants some scholarly information. It does bring together a wide assortment of Melville-related information, and its achievement in this area is not to be discounted. While the site does not qualify as a scholarly one, it would be useful to high school students doing research on Melville, and could provide a jumping-off point for undergraduates.

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"The United States Sanitary Commission"
http://www.netwalk.com/~jpr
created by Jan P. Romanovich.

This site provides brief information about and numerous e-texts (25) and images from the Civil War Sanitary Commission. This is the only detailed U.S. Sanitary Commission site that I could find posted (2/6/00) although many Civil War sites do include minimal discussion of the Sanitary Commission. The design of the site is simplistic but effective. The first page acts as a table of contents. The table itself, which includes plenty of white space, is divided into three columns and four rows and demands the reader do only a minimum of scrolling to find all the categories. Each link in the table leads generally to only one more page, usually of a manageable length. At the bottom of each page is a link back to the table of contents. Hence, while the reader cannot access numerous parts of the site without returning to the table of contents, the reader also does not have trouble finding information. The one blatant flaw in the design of the site is its failure to give alternate text tags for the images.

As a whole, the site begs the question of who has the power to disseminate authorized, academically citable information since Jan Romanovich, the creator of this site, certainly does not hold this power. Romanovich, a Civil War reenactment fan, is not himself an academic; the site does not associate itself with an academic institution or society; and, the url lacks the prestigious .edu extension. While the site does list the awards it has won, such as 'The 1861~1865 Outstanding Site Award,' these awards are of questionable academic worth. Further, the site features links to join Romanovich's reenactment society, links to access a list of all those who have joined and the dates on which they joined and links to view pictures of reenactments and patterns useful in making garb for these reenactments. These features coupled with the bulletin board, which includes communications about reenactments between members of this group, suggests that the primary audience for this site is reenactment fans. Thus, taken together, this site is not one from which an academic may cite since it appears to be more a 'fan' site than an academic one.

However, that said, the site has good ethos and does not lead me to question the basic integrity of the information about the Sanitary Commission or of the posted versions of texts and images. Romanovich openly discusses the mission of the site and his stake in this site. Further, he provides his e-mail address, a list of 'web rings' with which his site is linked and a 'what's new' page that logs --- in addition to a list of member activities---what changes were made to the site on what dates. While the information on the site is not openly reviewed by academics, it does appear to go through a type of peer review process. The bulletin board includes messages suggesting factual changes to the site and the log of changes to the site attests that Romanovich alters his information in response to comments such as these. Moreover, Romanovich includes a bibliography of his sources as well as bibliographic information about his e-texts, which allows his versions of the texts to be checked against the originals. What is lacking in terms of citation is information about where Romanovich finds the originals of his images. However, even with this flaw, the quantity of verifiable e-texts coupled with the brief, well-organized overview of the Sanitary Commission make this site a useful first stop for academics --both teachers of all levels and students-- interested in learning about the Sanitary Commission.

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The William Dean Howells Society
(http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/howells/index.html),
maintained by Donna Campbell, Ph.D., Secretary and Treasurer of The William Dean Howells Society (campbell@gonzaga.edu)

As purported on its homepage, this extensive scholarly website, like the society for which it was created, "disseminates information on the life and works of the American author William Dean Howells and facilitates the exchange of facts, ideas, and texts concerning Howells and those authors significantly associated with him." Though extremely informative for the William Dean Howells Society member and Howells lover, the site is useful to the novice researcher of Nineteenth-century American literature and the meticulous scholar as well, for it is not only quite user friendly and navigable, including both frames and non-frames versions of all pages, manageable subdivisions of information, an internal search engine, a listserve, a query list, and contact information for those who have questions or comments about site content, but it is also maintained very responsibly, incorporating annotated hyperlinks, detailed source citations, updated conference information and calls for papers, and links to much of the most respected material on Howells and his contemporaries available on the Web. Within these pages, links to a number of e-text versions of "Howells's Works" are included, and all are first rate, though only a few are searchable. Particularly noteworthy on the site, however, are the "Contemporaries" and "Links to Sites" features included on the homepage. The former leads the user to such resources as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's electronic edition of Charles W. Chestnutt's works (and other African-American authors' as well), the Bancroft Library's searchable database of Mark Twain's letters, Columbia University's Stephen Crane Collection, and a number of author society websites. The latter guides the user to an array of Howells-related sites, including Cornell University's Making of America site, which contains scanned originals of The Atlantic Monthly (November 1857 - December 1901), Harper's New Monthly (December 1889 - November 1896), and Howells's column, "The Editor's Study" ( currently vols. 80-82, 84), necessities for the scholar attempting to understand Howells' political, social, and literary viewpoints, as well as the New England literary circle of the late nineteenth century.

Despite this website's depth of coverage and academic integrity, a few glitches, a couple of aesthetic observations, and a point of inquiry must be noted. There may, on occasion, be some dragging as individual pages load, particularly those with abundant photos. Though the user can employ the browser's "back" button to return to the previous page while using many links, several, including the link to The Atlantic Monthly at Cornell University's MOA website, do not allow a return to the previous page (in this case the links index); instead, The William Dean Howells Society homepage reappears. As for design, the site is minimalist, but that style seems to lend itself to the material being perused, which is hardly ornamental. In addition, the white space used on those pages listing works and authors is inconsistent, and despite the use of separate colors for links and descriptions, the pages tend to become somewhat hard on the eyes after long periods of use. Yet, these flaws do not lessen the site's usefulness to such a degree that scholars would find the site a bother to visit. In fact, they are minor at best, and those who have visited the site often can attest to its improvement over the last two years.

What may be bothersome, instead, is one of the most well-developed aspects of the site (one noted above, in fact)--the nearly canonical listing of "Contemporaries." While the authors featured are those who Howells either knew personally and enjoyed, or those for whom he reviewed works (as stated in the purpose, those authors "significantly associated with him"), the literary climate of the latter half of the nineteenth century was such that an editor like Howells would have read and been aware of other authors as well; a reading of his personal letters attests to this fact. Yes, a link to the Perspectives in American Literature (PAL) site is given for those who desire more general information on the period and its authors, but is that enough? The power that the New England periodical set, particularly Howells in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and his "Editor's Study," wielded in establishing literary tastes is well-known. Thus, issues of literary exclusion and validated authorship are raised just as much by an examination of this site as by an examination of the insular literary world of the late nineteenth century. Why were only these authors the chosen ones--those "significantly associated with [Howells]?" Undoubtedly, this is a question that transcends Howells and his time period, for it is at the heart of canon formation itself. Yet, this manner of exclusion, however "Realistically" it represents Howells and the time in which he lived, should be addressed. Perhaps what is key here is that The William Dean Howells Society website is not only a credible scholarly resource for the scholar of Realism and Naturalism, and Howells and his circle, but also for the scholar of the late Nineteenth-century American literary climate and the fin-de-siecle society and culture that gave birth to it.

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"Worlds Visible and Invisible: Whitman, New York City, and the World/Whorled of Print in the 1850s"
http://www.cla.sc.edu/engl/faculty/ezrag/walt.htm
site maintained by Ezra Greenspan

This brief, one-page web site is designed to be used by high school and undergraduate students working with the Whitman and Dickinson electronic classroom (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fwd/volume1/contents1.htm). As such, the page is designed as an introduction to print and New York city culture of the 1850s in order to provide a context for Whitman's poetry. Maintained by Ezra Greenspan, a respected Whitman scholar and author of _Walt Whitman and the American Reader_, students and teachers alike can be confident that the material contained here is reputable and accurate. While scholars with knowledge in the area will be familiar with most of what Greenspan presents here, it's still a valuable resource for students who don't understand the material conditions surrounding the production of "Leaves of Grass." Following a brief introduction to these issues, the site posts numerous photographs and print images from the 1850s to create a context for how "Leaves of Grass" would have been received and concludes with a brief secondary bibiography and links to the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive and the home page for the Society for the History of Authors, Reading, and Publishing (two reputable sites which boost the credibility of the page). While many of the images show how Whitman was a marginal figure in the 1850s and not the towering "American Poet" we have come to view him as today, the overall effect of the page is to enhance Whitman's standing as a canonical author. By this I mean that even though some of the newspaper advertisements for new books which the site reproduces show that there were other texts which held the public's attention more than an obscure book of poetry by a Brooklynite, the focus of the page is still "How to Understand a Great American Poet." Indeed, the inclusion of print and New York City culture is a means to the end of understanding Whitman. While this site will be useful for challenging a lot of students' ideas about literature (i.e., that it has a life outside of textbooks and anthologies), it won't challenge the canonicity of one of the most canonized of American authors. After the images is a long section of discussion questions, possible research topics, and other teaching aids designed to help students get the most out of the information on the site. As the site is one single page with no links, navagability is its biggest weakness. There is no way to quickly move back and forth from one section to the next other than scrolling up and down. But since the page is relatively small, poor navagability is a minor obstacle.

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http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/dunbarn.html

As I shared last week, the skimpy web page from Gloria Hull is the only scholarly source for Alice Dunbar-Nelson on the internet. It is part of the on-line teaching companion to American literature from the editors of the Heath anthology. Its purpose is to give professors a context from which to begin their exploration of various authors. Each section answers questions to help the teacher think about how she will approach the author in the classroom. Prompts include: "Classroom Issues and Strategies," "Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues," "Original Audience," and "Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections."

For a professor or student unfamiliar with a particular author, this site serves as a contexualizing tool. It gives guidance on the major themes associated with the author and the pedagogical issues a professor can expect to encounter when introducing the author’s work. Each page is written by a scholar known for his/her work on that author. The site is no more than a starting point, but visitors are comforted by the fact that the guidance comes from a scholar. In short, professors find teacherly "Cliffs Notes" written by virtual colleagues.

Like all pages within the Heath site, the Dunbar-Nelson page links to information about related authors. The links are all within the Heath site. It seems to me that this is a limitation but perhaps an appropriate one, because it assures the user that all of the information they encounter comes from a scholar. Though Hull is certainly a major Dunbar-Nelson critic, her page is one of the least helpful. In fact, her first sentence is, "the state of African-American literature when these two stories were published was...", but she never names the stories. It is a sad page, but may be helpful for its links to other authors/pages within the site.

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