The Journal of the Association for History and Computing, Vol. I, No. 1., June 1998 Home Articles Works E-Resources P-Resources Notices

(Please Note: This piece has been updated: to the update)

"Project Épée" is an ongoing effort on the part of the Association For History and Computing to define exemplary practices for electronic evidence. As an electronic journal we have had to confront many issues in this emerging field of history. We do not believe that we have understood all of them nor solved many, but we hope to help practitioners evolve standards comparable to those which have guided historians in print media.

Many issues, of course, are the same in electronic sources as in paper ones. Others, however, seem to us to be quite different. Among issues which clearly pertain to electronic evidence in the field of history are these:

• How should electronic materials be cited?
• How should electronic materials be retrieved?
• How should electronic materials be archived or preserved?
• How do we indicate the probable reliability of electronic materials as opposed to conventional published ones?

 

As a result of our experience with this first edition, and after consideration of related issues, we have faced the following questions:

1. Should an exemplary piece have an equivalent of pagination for on-line documents so that they can be cited properly? In this edition we have sometimes numbered headings and subheadings and used them to create a table of contents, but some pieces do not lend themselves to this strategy. Should paragraphs be numbered? Should lines be numbered?
2. Should a good site have a statement on how the material was assembled and edited, and a statement of the purpose of the page or the central arguments of its contents?
3. Should an exemplary site have at least one identifiable author who can be contacted with regard to content? Might there be exceptions to this practice?
4. Should any one form of citation be regarded as exemplary? We have selected "Chicago" style after a flirtation with MLA in-line citations because whereas they are increasingly standard in printed works, an in-line citation may not be able to conveniently carry the amount of information needed to cite an unpaginated on-line document. For example, we hope that those using our documents will, if possible, cite the heading number in their notes, if a heading number is present.
5. Should an exemplary article contain a preformatted version of a correct footnote and bibliographic reference to that work which could easily be copied and pasted into works which reference it?
6. We assume that there should be bibliographic references which are consonant with the citation style.
7. Should there be clear statements as to when a document was last updated and references to when and how often it was updated? Should standards be worked out to create a sort of "edition" number?
8. Should an exemplary site be graphically good in lay-out? By what standards?
9. Should an exemplary site balance content and design or is content overwhelmingly more important?
10. Should an exemplary site be intuitively navigable or is it reasonable to expect the reader to take a few moments to understand the organization?
11. Is it reasonable for this journal, and the Association for History and Computing, to attempt to set standards on these and other issues and advocate their widespread adoption, perhaps by some form of certification of "exemplary sites?" Should we create a "ring" of approved sites?
12. What other important issues should be discussed in attempting to define such standards?

We welcome discussion on these and related issues. For the present we will use our LISTSERV for this process. (Please subscribe to H-AHC.) In the future we will have a dedicated bulletin board available which should facilitate additional discussions.