ASSIGNMENT
Choose one website from the list and the second one you can choose on your own,write a report highlighting each one’s strengths and weaknesses and summarize your findings about which website you feel is most useful and most reliable.
Take some time to explore one of the websites from the list below.
http://ww2history.com/blog/
Links to an external site.
https://www.leg.bc.ca/dyl/Pages/1939-to-1945-World-War-II-and-the-Japanese-Internment.aspx
Links to an external site.
http://www.westpoint.edu/history/SitePages/WWII%20Asian%20Pacific%20Theater.aspx
Links to an external site.
http://www.junobeach.info/index.htm
Links to an external site.
http://www.auschwitz.dk/
Links to an external site.
http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/adolf-hitler
Links to an external site.
Find a second website on your own that investigates a topic related to World War II – preferably the website will have some connection to your final paper topic, but it doesn’t have to. Do not use online databases for this assignment (i.e. JSTOR, ProjectMuse, etc.). You may use websites for museums, archives, and libraries.
After familiarizing yourself with the content of each website, write a report highlighting each one’s strengths and weaknesses and summarize your findings about which website you feel is most useful and most reliable for gathering information as a researcher about the war. Be as specific as possible when you explain your reasoning.
Ensure that the following pieces of information are included in your report:
Each website’s author(s) and, when possible, date of inception (i.e. when was the website first created) and when it was last updated;
Background on author(s), including any professional or institutional affiliations;
Rough overview of each website’s content, including organization/structure, themes, references, visuals, primary documents (links or actual docs, if relevant);
Any other important information specific to each site;
Ease of use (how easy is the site to navigate? to find what you’re looking for?);
Any detectable perspective or bias* expressed by each site’s author(s).
If you cannot find any author information, comment on why this could be problematic for a reader and whether/how you might use this kind of website for research for a formal History paper.
When evaluating the reliability of an author or a page/site, ask yourself some of these questions: how important is the author’s level of education? Should there be an institutional affiliation? What if there are no clearly identified sources?
Does it matter where a website’s funding comes from? If there are ads on the page/site, what are the ads for and what does this suggest about who runs the page/site (this may help to shape your comments about bias)? If there are photos, are the photos captioned and cited? If they aren’t, is this problematic?
The report should be take the form of a critical or analytical review, should conform to standard formatting and include a title (no separate title page necessary), page numbers, double spacing, standard font and font size. Length is 1,000 – 1,500 words.
